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Forum: Reconsidering Early American Sexuality
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Sexuality: An Early American Mystery
Stephen Shapiro
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SEXUALITY in the American colonies and early republic seems like
a lost world. Does the dearth of print comments and court prosecutions
mean Americans found their sexual relations unremarkable, for whatever
political, denominational, and personal reasons, or have we only
begun to discover ways to discern the period's complex attitudes?
Most recent sexuality studies build on Michel Foucault's writing,
but two key absences, one historiographic, the other methodological,
problematize its usefulness for early American sexuality studies. |
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In his account of modern subjectivity's emergence in Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes three phases of penalty: the ancien régime's spectacles of torture and regal terror, the revolutionary era's semiotic punishment of sentimental mimesis, and nineteenth-century modernity's disciplinary surveillance of the soul.1 When Foucault turned from penalty to The History of Sexuality, these three periods collapsed into two: the early modern regime of illicit acts, when a person's deeds, sexual or not, were obscene only if they challenged the church-state's material and symbolic hierarchy, and the modern sense of intrinsic personhood, strongly defined by one's immanent sexual desires, whether enacted or not.2 The early modern period emphasized the subject's subordination to traditional chains of vertical command; the modern one uses standards of normality, often typified as the lack of erotic perversion, for its control mechanism. |
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What Foucault left out was his operative schema's implied middle, the eighteenth-century term. The resulting truncated binary, between early modern acts and industrial modern identities, has long since bedeviled eighteenth-century studies, which has been left with a container with too few compartments. We can, however, mind the gap ourselves. |
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Because industries and nation-states in the nineteenth century needed constantly replenishing supplies of labor power to fuel their industrial and imperial engines, the period's dominant economic, political, and cultural interests valorized the reproductive body. To protect the holy family of biological genesis, the period indicted those bad subjects—boyish masturbators, women having abortions, couples using contraceptives, female hysterics, male homosexuals—who did not dutifully submit their sex organs to the task of producing more human fodder. In the eighteenth century, the pressing concern was to develop a system of associated trade, more than automated industry, since the limits of early modern social geographies, like artisan resistance to mass-scale workshops, had first to be overcome. Consequently, the nascent bourgeoisie constructed ideologies around the reflexive body, which sensibly responds to environmental stimuli, ranging from harmony with the divinity and the surrounding human commonwealth to the new commodities of taste, like coffee, sugar, and sympathetic print narratives. To sanctify this ideal consumer, eighteenth-century factors created their own taxonomy of deviants, misfits whose vice was to be either unresponsive (un-sentimental, un-sociable) or excessive in ways that deadened the body's "natural" reactions: "luxurious" women, over-stylized fops, poetic "dunces," and the distempered mob. |
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