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Clio in Search of Eros: Redefining Sexualities in Early America
Sharon Block and Kathleen M. Brown
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THE William and Mary Quarterly
used to boast a Trivia section devoted to humorous archival
anecdotes sent in by its readers. Tidbits about a wide range of
human foibles were printed under headings that connected them to
modern concerns. Sexual tales constituted a small but noteworthy
portion of Trivia, joining anecdotes about excessive alcohol
consumption, political corruption, and the curse of lawyers. "NEVER
LET A WOMAN IN YOUR LIFE" included archival material on a
"lady of delicate dress" who encouraged a drunken "young coxcomb"
admiring her from behind to "kiss the part you like best," a "bachanalian"
festival of "white and red men and women without distinction" who
danced and made "sacrifices to Venus," and information about a cross-dressing
"LADY in Man's breeches." Two decades later,
an entry on "CAPITAL PUNISHMENT" told of
a raped woman who selected "the SEVEREST punishment"
for the man who had raped her: marriage.
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In the era of postmodern and feminist
scholarship, we might deride these submissions as undertheorized
and misogynist. But they had a clear theoretical foundation, grounded
in the premise that there is humor to be found in human beings'
eternal efforts to scratch the sexual itch. That itch was never
the subject of historical inquiry; rather, it was presumed to be
unchanging and collectively understood, today as well as
300
years ago. This is precisely why the sexual material—indeed,
nearly all material—in Trivia was supposed to be funny:
modern readers would be titillated by evidence of a familiar itch
being scratched in frank, publicly visible, or deviant ways by the
otherwise foreign people of the past. Contributions to Trivia
rarely included scholarly treatment—the anecdotes were believed
to speak for themselves. "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink" seemed to be
the desired conclusion, and more often than not, the laughs were
garnered at women's expense. |
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The Quarterly's sanction of public laughter about sex ended in the wake of the feminist movement, the rise of cultural history, and the emergence of the history of sexuality as a dynamic field of inquiry. By historicizing matters once understood as universal and eternal, scholars of sexuality have connected sexual behaviors and desires to specific political, social, and economic contexts. Many have discovered links between this seemingly private realm of human experience and broader structures of power. Still others doubt the coherence of the category of sexuality itself, raising new questions about how scholars in the modern era can even begin to understand the complex relationships that contributed to the meanings and expressions of sexuality in the early American past. |
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This topical issue grows out of
this new interest in the history of sexuality. It also reflects
our interest in having early American scholars participate in
defining this new field. When we decided on a conference and circulated
the call for papers, we encouraged studies that investigated the
historically contingent meanings of desire, pleasure, and physical
intimacy; the impact of colonial ambitions, racial hierarchies,
and gender relations; the erotic and the romantic; popular mores,
etiquette, and legal regulations; and folk and scientific theories
of reproduction. It is gratifying to see how this collection touches
on so many of the themes that we initially hoped the conference
would explore.
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