Sexuality and the Historian: Detailed Notes

Sexuality and the Historian

Introduction

A history of sexuality must consider:
- Desire: A powerful psychic energy.
- Sexual practices: Normative and transgressive behaviors.
- Emotions: Love, hate, fear, joy, guilt, etc.
- Sexual categories: Homosexuality, heterosexuality, and their historical contexts.
- Reproduction: Shifting needs and diverse practices.
- Gender: Experiences of women and men, gender hierarchies, and meanings of masculinity, femininity, and nonconformity.
- Socioeconomic factors: Economic, social, generational, geographical, religious, political, ethnic, racial, ability, and disability factors that shape sexual beliefs, practices, and cultures.
A history of sexuality inherently lacks a single, fixed subject, encompassing various elements with different weights across time and place.
It requires studying social factors that shape sexual meanings, power relations, and erotic life, including:
- Family structures
- Marriage codes
- Legal systems
- Social institutions
- Sexual cultures
- Subjectivities and identities
- Rituals, beliefs, discourses, and ideologies
Sexuality involves the body, mind, emotions, and society, gaining historical significance through its social shaping.
Sexuality should be understood as a complex set of social practices and behaviors filtered through ideas and values that evolve over time.
Historical study of sexuality and sexual change offers insights into social relations and ways of life during specific periods.
A historical approach views sexuality as a product of changing historical circumstances rather than biology or nature, which is central to the new critical sexual history developed since the 1970s.
Vern L. Bullough noted the reluctance of historians to address sexuality in the early 1970s.
Critical sexual history has challenged ignorance and lifted veils of discretion, extending the range of investigated sexual activities, including marginalized and transgressive sexualities.
Sexuality is now seen as crucial for understanding British history and its imperial expansion.
Extensive scholarship exists, challenging previous ignorance about sexual life.
This book aims to reflect and build on this scholarship, remaining a comprehensive academic study of British sexual history over the past two centuries.

Histories of Sexuality

Before the 1970s, historical explorations of sexuality were marginal and often stigmatized.
Historical overviews have been appearing since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, influencing the areas to be discussed.
Two broad approaches emerged, often overlapping:
- The 'naturalist' approach: Descriptive classification of sexual behaviors and beliefs in various cultures, chronicling sexual behaviors and beliefs, classifying sexual forms that exist ‘in nature’ and documenting their history in various cultures and periods. While successful in gathering sexual knowledge, it lacked coherent explanations for variations and changes in consciousness.
- The meta-theoretical approach: Derived from psychodynamic or neo-Freudian theory, but often prioritizing theoretical constructs over empirical evidence, with theoretical constructs taking precedence over empirical evidence.
Gordon Rattray Taylor's neo-Freudian interpretation exemplifies the dangers, using unexplained swings between 'matrist' and 'patrist' cultures for a grand but unsubstantiated cyclical theory of social change, viewing the civilization's history as a warfare between drives and taboos.
Lawrence Stone hinted at a cyclical explanation in The Family, Sex and Marriage, suggesting huge, mysterious, secular swings from repression to permissiveness and back again.
Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians relied on a simplistic Freudian explanation, distorting rather than clarifying, where the irreconcilable claims of sexual instincts and cultural demands became a weak explanation of contingent historical shifts. He quoted Freud: 'perhaps we must make up our minds to the idea that altogether it is not possible for the claims of the sexual instincts to be reconciled with the demands of culture.'
Both approaches reflect an 'essentialist' view:
- The erotic seen as an overpowering force in the individual.
- Shaping personal and social life.
- An instinctual force built into human biology, expressed directly or through perversion/neuroses.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing described sex as a 'natural instinct' demanding fulfillment, a view aligned with male, heterosexual drives.
William McDougall spoke representatively of the ‘innate direction of the sex impulse towards the opposite sex’.
John H. Gagnon and William Simon critiqued this, arguing sexuality is culturally molded.
Gagnon and Simon argued against the ‘basic biological mandate’ being controlled by culture and the social matrix.
- They proposed that sexuality was subject to ‘socio-cultural moulding to a degree surpassed by few other forms of human behaviour’.
This challenged the notion of 'natural man,' aligning with structuralist anthropology, psychoanalysis, and Marxist theory aiming to deconstruct the 'unitary subject'.
The new sociology of sexuality, associated with American theorists such as Gagnon and Simon, contributed to the rise of ‘social constructionism’.
Sexuality is a historically specific configuration understood within its cultural context.

Social Constructionism and Foucault

Social constructionist approaches are associated with Michel Foucault, who viewed sexuality not as a biological given, but as a historical apparatus.
In Foucault's view, ‘sex’ is a ‘complex idea that was formed within the deployment of sexuality’.
Foucault stated: 'Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge gradually tries to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct.'
Meanings about the body and erotic possibilities are acquired in human interaction, a view pioneered by Gagnon, Simon, and Plummer.
This framework derives from social psychology and labeling theories of deviance.
'Scripts' emerge, shaping what is seen as sexual/non-sexual, normal/abnormal, pleasurable/painful.
Foucault saw 'discourses' organizing our relation to reality within power relations.
'Sexuality' acts upon bodies, organs, sensations, and pleasures lacking intrinsic unity or 'laws'; they are unified through discourses via institutional forms, legal practices, religious rituals, state interventions, educational patterns, and identity work.
Both interactionists and Foucault emphasized the historical specificity of Western concepts of sexuality.
Gagnon and Simon suggested societies may have had to 'invent an importance for sexuality', emphasizing the historicity of the idea.
Foucault linked the rise of the 'sexuality apparatus' to the eighteenth century and identifiable historical processes.
Both rejected 'repression' as an understanding of sexual history, particularly in the nineteenth century.
Foucault argued the 'repressive hypothesis' regarding Victorian sexuality was misleading, was based on a negative rather than a positive concept of power, and power is productive.
They emphasized the importance of categorization and social practices in sustaining categories, which establish sexual hierarchies and notions of normality.
Categories like 'heterosexual', 'homosexual', 'sadist', etc., emerged in the West as regulation mechanisms.
Foucault emphasized the emergence of discourses and practices which produce and regulate knowledge, and investigated institutions such as medical, psychiatric, social welfare, charity and legal institutions in shaping sexualities.
The emergence of categorizations, formal controls, and localized interventions produce opposition and contestation.

Sexuality and Power

Foucault's insights overlapped with those of feminists and radical sexual movements.
His intervention galvanized the new sexual history.
Foucault asked, how has sexuality come to be seen as central to our being since the eighteenth century?
Sexuality has become central to the modern operation of power.
Power is omnipresent and relational, not unitary or state-based.
Foucault focused on 'power-knowledge', where power operates through constructing knowledge.
The history of sexuality becomes a history of our discourses about sexuality.
Western experience isn't the inhibition of discourse but its deployment, part of controlling individuals through sexuality.
The nineteenth century saw growing discretion alongside an explosion of discourses.
Foucault suggested four strategic unities that linked practices and techniques of power:
- Hysterization of women’s bodies
- Pedagogization of children’s sex
- Socialization of procreative behavior
- Psychiatrization of perverse pleasures.
Four figures emerged: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult.
The goal was to impose definitions on the body and to control populations, where the deployment of sexuality's reasons for being, not in reproducing itself, but in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way.
Sexuality became key in 'bio-power', governing the population via managing life rather than threatening death.
Critics pointed to issues with Foucault's view of power:
- Power remains a process without instances.
- If power is everywhere, resistance is hard to define.
- His techniques of discipline and surveillance can leave us trapped.
- His emphasis on the ‘norm’ diminishes the role of the state.
Regulation occurs through both 'the norm' and political power.
Foucault's challenge to the 'repressive hypothesis' has been invaluable.
Power over sexuality takes the forms of regulation and organization.
Political and social regimes can be more oppressive.
Foucault is often accused of indifference to gender, gender requires further exploration and discussion.
His essay on sexual history was a limited theoretical sketch, full of generalizations.
Post-colonial theorists have critiqued his work's ethnocentrism.

Sexuality and the Politics of History

Foucault's work appealed to historians in the 1970s/80s due to its emphasis on history as 'a history of the present'.
History was seen as political, illuminating current dilemmas.
Reorientation towards grassroots experience impacted feminist and LGBTQ+ researchers.
As sexual history becomes mainstream, its radical intent has become less explicit.
Three narratives of sexual change shape scholarship:
- Progressive story: Rooted in sexologists' optimism that change would come through goodwill and thought. This is the belief that sexual change would come about as a result of good will and rational thought. Its major problem is the assumption of inevitable progress.
- Declinist story: Laments the present's state and compares it negatively with a golden age. Declinist stories focus on current issues such as broken families, high divorce rates, violence among young people, mindless sexual promiscuity, the commercialization of love, the prevalence of homosexuality, explicit sex education and media, declining values, the collapse of social capital, and the rise of sexual diseases, contrasting, and to compare that with some golden age of faith, stability and family values.
- Continuity story: Suggests nothing fundamental has changed, and underlying power structures remain intact. Continuity in terms of underlying structures of power, despite apparently striking epiphenomenal changes. Foucauldian analysis: we imagine we are free, but that sense of freedom is itself a ruse of power. Feminist subset: some changes in the position of women, with continuaities in terms of the continuing imbalanced relations of power between men and women. ‘Queer’ subset: there have been great changes in attitudes towards homosexuality and sexual and gender diversity. Cultural revolution, affirmative LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-gender, queer/querying) identities everywhere, carrying massive cultural weight, but is a gay identity little more than a pseudo-ethnic identity that is easily accommodated by late capitalist societies? Political economy argument: the massive social changes of recent years in western countries that have relaxed laws and attitudes, but ultimately sees them as accommodating to the necessities of the latest phase of capitalist expansion and subsequent crisis, producing the forms of subjectivity appropriate to neoliberalism.
None of these are fully convincing.
The progressive story forgets contingencies, the declinist story idealizes the past, and the continuists are deterministic.
Significant changes have broken through power to enhance autonomy.
We must balance structural changes with agency, and collective and individual action with industrialization, urbanization, the rise of welfare, agency of millions of individuals who, in their everyday lives, made decisions about their sexual behaviour, not least in relation to fertility patterns, which in aggregate profoundly reshaped British life.
Sexual patterns are culturally specific and enduring, yet can change.
We need perspective and conjunctural analysis to understand change.

The Making of ‘Modern’ Sexuality

Sexuality assumed new symbolic importance as a target of intervention.
Debates about sexuality became debates about society.
The period has seen transformations in the role of sexuality.
Kinship and family systems are critical in shaping sexual activities.
The incest taboo is a universal law, though its forms vary. Forms of this ostensibly universal taboo have varied enormously.
Blood relationships must be interpreted through culture.
Anthropologists stress the importance of shifting patterns of relatedness rather than formal structures.
The past two centuries have seen various relations, from aristocratic families to local ties among working-class people.
Historians accept the continuity of the nuclear family in English history.
Kin and family relationships have been critical in assigning social, gender, and sexual positions, where life outside the family was virtually inconceivable, especially for women and children.
Marriage provided access to adult sexuality.
Changes in inheritance, primogeniture, exogamy, marriage rules, domestic life, and concepts of childhood are critical to re-ordering sexual life.

Economic and Social Changes

Family and kinship patterns must be seen in the context of social transformations.
Industrialization reshaped British society, including new class alignments, population growth, urbanization, settlement and racial and ethnic change.
Labour migration impacted courtship and illegitimacy rates.
Economic changes affected gender relations.
Explosive population growth brought new challenges, but posed questions about regulation and control.
The city became a symbol of pleasure and danger.
Imperial expansion spurred migration, colonial expansion encouraged mass migration to the colonies and former colonies – over 20 million in the years between the battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The experience of empire generated new knowledges of cultural difference which profoundly shaped sexual imagery and fed into emerging sexual ideologies, including sexology and eugenics.
From the 1940s, mass migration reshaped the population.
These changes impacted emotions and subjectivities.
Foucault emphasized disciplining populations, while Norbert Elias described 'formalization', a tendency towards order based on impulse control. This is a tendency in western societies since the sixteenth century at least towards a more orderly and rule driven way of life, based on increasing control over impulses and the development of a culture of self control and restraint heavily based on an internalised authoritarian conscience and values – a ‘second nature’ notion not dissimilar to Freud’s concept of the super-ego.
Norbert Elias saw increased discretion around sexual activity, taboos against same-sex sharing beds, growing segregation of the genders and the separation off or sequestering of areas of life regarded as disagreeable or threatening.
Elias recognized periods of relaxation, but saw them as temporary.
Carl Wouters saw informalization as a decisive shift.
There has been a growing interest in affect and emotion related to conformity and resistance.
Historians grapple with psychoanalysis, as Heather Love argues the ‘analysis of uncodified subjective experience is an important supplement to the study of the history of formal laws, practices and ideologies’.

Intersecting Identities

The new sexual history focuses on the development of sexual identities.
Homosexual subjectivities were a testing ground for social constructionist theories.
Heterosexual patterns have been neglected.
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are shaped through specific sexual structures.
The divide between homosexuality and heterosexuality became critical in organizing sexual identities.
Individual identities, social positions, and sexuality are shaped by class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, geography, age/generation, and sexuality itself.
Historians must show how these forces reinforce each other.

Sexual Cultures

Each continent, nation, region, area, culture, city, nationality, ethnicity, religious group, class, status group, and political movement have different moralities, ethics, rituals, norms, values, and diverse forms of behavior.
Sexualities are culturally specific.
The erotic is practiced within distinctive sexual cultures.
Sexual cultures are deeply embedded, even when coexisting with others.
Religious divides shape different sexual cultures, like the divides in Europe.
Four distinct religious-moral patterns have been described, with England and Lowlands Scotland as part of a pattern characterized by strong individualism, an emphasis on the nuclear family, a taboo on extra- marital sex, an execration of homosexuality, while condemning but tacitly accepting prostitution as an inevitable accompaniment of male lust. Even within the confines of Great Britain, however, there have been sharp differences. Wales has historically had a distinctive sexual culture, closer to that of France than to northern European patterns.
These differences shape fertility patterns and household organization.

Changing Forms of Social Regulation

Social regulation produces and shapes sexual patterns.
Regulation involves the church and the state in defining right and wrong, embracing social policies, passing legislation, and punishing crimes.
The growth of social intervention and welfare has affected sexual behavior.
The British state had little consistent strategy.
Religion shaped sexual norms well into the twentieth century.
Science and medicine became rivals to religious faith from the mid-nineteenth century.
Policy makers sought scientific help to shape regulation in the 1940s/50s.
Questions of who can speak about sexuality and what constitutes legitimate sexual knowledge have been constant.
Recent history is a battle of credibility.
Change happened behind the scenes.
Fertility control adoption owed little to state, religious, or medical efforts.
Informal methods regulate everyday life.
Community and peer-group regulation of adolescent courtship affected fertility.
Public shaming regulated behavior.
Economic constraints, child-raising costs, and opportunities for women dictated marriage timing and restraint.
Community knowledges shaped attitudes toward family size, abortion, birth control, and abstention.
Fears of prejudice shaped attitudes toward homosexuality.

The Political Moment

Political decision-making and moral change are connected.
The political context is important in promoting shifts.
The law of unintended consequences can be decisive.
The 'moral panic' is an important mechanism.
- A threat to societal values is defined.
- The mass media presents a stylized view.
- Experts offer diagnoses and solutions.
- Ways of coping emerge.
Moral panics crystallize fears and anxieties, displacing them onto 'Folk Devils'.
Sexuality has a centrality in such panics.
Sexually unorthodox individuals are scapegoats.
Combatting on the political terrain are the conservative and authoritarian forces often expressed in the actions of social morality campaigns.
Over the long term three tendencies emerge: Conservative/authoritarian, Liberal/individualistic, and Radical/libertarian.
The degree of their influence and role in shaping consensus must be considered.
The political moment transforms moral attitudes into political action.

Cultures of Resistance

The history of sexuality includes resistance to the moral code.
Cultures of resistance stretch from folk knowledges to subcultures of stigmatized minorities, as sex-reform organizations or sexual liberation movements.
These are part of a history of sexuality.
The book will explore phases in sexual history, bringing into play the schema suggested above.
There are three overlapping phases:
- A culture of sexual restraint, with its highest point in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that lasted until the 1950s, but endured until the 1950s.
- Struggles against and modest changes to the first phase.
- Reorientation towards a liberal form of regulation.
Chapters 2–5 chart 'Victorian' sexuality.
Chapter 6 explores the construction of homosexuality.
Chapters 7–10 look at the field of sexuality.
Chapters 11–14 examine the political and social reorganisation of sexuality in the second part of twentieth century and early twenty-first century
The final two chapters survey the sexual and gender landscape in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.