Anne G. Myles

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Anne G. Myles | Queering the Study of Early American Sexuality | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.1 | The History Cooperative

Forum: Reconsidering Early American Sexuality

Queering the Study of Early American Sexuality

THE study of sexuality in history is predicated on the implicit assumption that sexuality comprises a set of acts, desires, and codes that can be distinguished from other dimensions of experience. While this division produces at least the aura of a stable object of study, it also leads toward the difficulty repeatedly cited by speakers at the MCEAS/Omohundro conference "Sexuality in Early America," that of finding evidentiary material on which to found a richer history of sexuality in early America. Yet a comment made by Kathy Peiss in her closing remarks at the conference encourages us to question this division. A scholar whose research focuses on twentieth-century sexuality, Peiss commented on the difference made by the historical presence or absence of a specific domain of "sexuality"—her point being that early Americans did not recognize the sexual as a discrete category the way people in the present do. If the realm of the "sexual" not only failed to signify semantically for early Americans what it does for us, as Bruce Burgett reminds us, but did not even exist recognizably, the study of the area, while certainly not simplified, may in fact be liberated. We are free to consider not only documented acts and institutions but also how discourses and desires that we can make a reasonable case for considering in relation to the realm of the sexual or erotic are deployed in society. Such a study becomes as much a matter of reading as of documentation. And while I have said "we" thus far, I cannot proceed without revealing my own academic perspective: I come to early American studies not as a historian but as a literary scholar, and gatherings such as the conference remind me to what extent our habits and assumptions sometimes render us very different creatures indeed.

In literary criticism, as well as other disciplines, one of the most active current methodologies for thinking about the ways literal and symbolic sexuality circulates through the realms of power, knowledge, and discourse is queer theory. For anyone coming from a background in literary studies, the minimal references to queer theory at the conference and in this journal issue are striking—for younger scholars in a number of areas, its near absence in a new collection of work on sexuality will likely seem as perplexing as the absence of feminist theory in a gender collection. At the very least, queer theory is an approach that early American historians need to be willing to entertain and acknowledge if they want to engage in dialogue with current discussions of early modern sexuality in other disciplines.

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