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Forum: Reconsidering Early American Sexuality
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In the Name of Sex
Bruce Burgett
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AT the risk of being accused of a nominalism to which I have no
desire to be wed, I want to begin with a couple of definitions.
In the
1828
edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English
Language, the noun "sex" is defined as "the distinction between
male and female," and the adjective "sexual" is defined as "pertaining
to sex . . . as sexual characteristics; sexual intercourse,
connection or commerce." Notable in each case is the absence of
our early twenty-first century understanding of the terms "sex"
and "sexual" as referring to that cluster of ideas that Webster
grouped under the rubric of the "sensual." Here, for example, is
Webster's definition of the verb, "to sensualize": "to make sensual,
to subject to the love of sensual pleasure; to debase by carnal
gratifications; as sensualized by pleasure."
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Intellectually oriented by this distinction between "sexuality"
and "sensuality," Webster would be a bit confused were he to do
a quick course in recent work on the history of sexuality. As he
picked up a special issue of a journal like this one, he would anticipate
a discussion of those topics that we tend to locate under the heading
of "Gender in Early America." As he read through the essays, he
might make sense of them by thinking something along these lines:
"This special issue is mis-advertised. It is not about 'Sexuality
in Early America.' It is about 'sensuality.'" Present-day sex radicals
like Gayle Rubin might agree. |
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My reasons for beginning with this admittedly bizarre observation are probably obvious. For a long time now, historians of sexuality have been haunted by a pair of Foucauldian questions concerning the epistemological assumptions that underlie their historiography. As Louis Crompton explained in Byron and Greek Love, these questions can be thought of as generating two problems. The first is what he referred to as the "friendship problem." "If a novel, poem, or essay describes or expresses ardent feelings for a member of the same sex, when are we to interpret these as homosexual and when are we to regard them merely as reflections of what is usually called romantic friendship?" When and why, in other words, does the modern category of the sexual get isolated from (or in) the early modern category of the sensual? The second is the "language problem." When can our modern terms like homosexual and heterosexual be used to describe historical agents who may not have understood their sensual practices in those identity terms?2 When, in other words, do those forms of speech and writing that we think of today as evasions, reticences, and circumlocutions do more than simply talk around topics that we now believe they could have addressed more directly? These questions have not been answered in the nearly two decades since Crompton posed them, but they have allowed the history of sexuality to move from a field based primarily in the project of textual recovery and organized largely around identity categories to one grounded in an analytics of power. Sexuality, in this latter context, serves not as a stable object of historical inquiry, but as a concept with a history of its own. |
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