Historiography and theory

Sexual desire is not a natural, biological drive, unchanging through history; rather, the diverse emotions which constitute sexual desire are stimulated, created and constructed by social formations. Sociologists writing about ‘sexual scripts’ bolstered this insight by suggesting that people learn how to be heterosexual through the social messages of education and popular culture. Feminist psychoanalytic theory, adopting the insights of Freud while rejecting his misogynist and biologistic elements, promised to explore fantasy, desire and the unconscious. However, psychoanalytic theory is very difficult to apply historically because the formation of sexual attachments, and adult desires and fantasies, varied so much in different time periods.

It was feminists who pioneered the idea of the social construction of sexuality as the women’s liberation movement tried to deconstruct the conventions of female desire. Feminists began to stress women’s vulnerability to sexual exploitation, writing about rape and seduction. Activists against pornography such as Sheila Jeffreys sought precedents among the social-purity campaigners of the late nineteenth century, who warned of the dangers of untrammelled male desire.1 By the early 1980s, other feminist historians such as Judith Walkowitz began to fear that the stress on sexual danger drowned out the voices of nineteenth-century women who asserted women’s right to sexual pleasure.2 In her survey of English feminist debates about sex in the late nineteenth century, Lucy Bland pointed out that both pleasure and danger must be considered.3

Historians have also debated the chronology of changes in attitudes towards female sexuality. For instance, in the pre-modern period, it was popularly thought that female genitals were just like those of males, but turned inside out. This was the central argument of one of the most influential books on sexuality in the past fifteen years, Making Sex. In this book, Thomas W. Laqueur argues that this idea derived from the ancient Greek scientist Galen. In diagrams, Galenic tracts compared the testicles to the ovaries, and the vagina to the penis, as if it were inverted. As a result, the masculine and feminine sex drives were seen as comparable in strength. Furthermore, the female orgasm was seen as necessary for conception.4 However, several historians have argued that Laqueur ignores the long existence of competing ideas of female sexual organs as different from those of men. Aristotle’s idea that female orgasm was not necessary for conception remained influential in many circles. He believed that the sperm contained a homunculus, or germ of the human being, so that the mother merely incubated the foetus.5 Nonetheless, it is clear that the transition between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century represented a turning point in attitudes towards female sexuality. If women’s sexual pleasure was not necessary for conception, female desire would be downplayed. Nancy Cott suggested that ‘passionlessness’ could be quite useful to women, enabling them to assert moral superiority and rationality; by claiming sexlessness, they also had an excuse to say ‘no’ to their husbands and avoid unwanted pregnancies.6

Victorians had long been thought of as embodying sexual repression. However, some historians believed this was a myth that they needed to refute. Peter Gay, for instance, argued that behind her prudish exterior the Victorian woman really enjoyed sex, but he concentrated on a few middle-class women and men.7 On a more sophisticated theoretical note, Michel Foucault pointed out that the myth of Victorian sexual repression depended on an understanding of sexuality as a force of nature, which could be repressed or bottled up but which would bubble up under this pressure into prostitution or be sublimated into neurosis. In contrast, he insisted that the Victorian era did not witness a repression of sex but a proliferation of discourses about sexuality.8

Foucault focused on medical and psychiatric discourses that constructed sexuality as a form of knowledge and as an identity. Foucault’s argument that sexual discourses must be understood as a form of socially constructed knowledge has been very fruitful. Historians of the body found that during the scientific revolution, anatomists did not simply ‘discover’ facts about sexual organs and reproduction; rather, even their empirical investigations and depictions of the body were utterly shaped by their culturally specific understandings of gender difference. Psychoanalytic theory, for instance, could be seen as just another discourse shaped by the cultural maelstrom of late nineteenth-century Vienna. However, when analysing discourses, historians must ask who read them and what impact they had. The writings of doctors and sexologists that constituted the Foucauldian discourse were not available to the general public, especially women and working-class people, and popular sexual writings in England tended to advocate sexual restraint rather than pleasure. Feminists have also criticised Foucault for ignoring gender in his theories.

Hera Cook has recently asserted that, in England at least, late Victorian people were sexually repressed. In mid-Victorian England, middle-class men could indulge their sexual desires with prostitutes, but middle-class women were warned to constrain their desires. By the end of the century, however, this repression spread to men: as she writes, ‘there appears to have been considerable female and some male ignorance of physical sexual activity along with diminishing mutual sexual pleasure.’9 If the idea of the social construction of sexuality is to be taken seriously, sexual repression is a possibility. Cook’s idea of sexual repression differs from the old Freudian notion that if sex desire is not expressed, it will be sublimated and will ooze out in a more neurotic form. Instead, she demonstrates how social constraints, family upbringing, the censorship of sexual information, the lack of good birth-control methods and the advocacy of sexual self-control all constructed a negative attitude towards sexuality.

But Foucault was also interested in ‘governmentality’: how institutional discourses studied, managed and regulated populations by creating identities such as the prostitute. Although Foucault briefly mentioned the ‘hysterical woman’ and the Malthusian couple as two of the four key figures in discourses of sexuality, he did not explore the way in which gender relations shaped these discourses. In part, this was because he rejected the idea of any overarching structure of domination, such as male power; instead, he regarded discourses of sexuality as dispersed among multiple nodes of power - not only the state, but also institutions of civil society, such as philanthropy. Judith Walkowitz more successfully applied a gender analysis to this theory in her study of the regulation of prostitution in nineteenth-century England. Only the female prostitute became the subject of discourses and regulation; male soldiers, their customers, escaped the disciplinary apparatus. Foucault’s theory of multiple nodes of power, therefore, needs to account for the persistence of the double standard and modes of regulating sexuality that affected women much more harshly than men.

Foucault was also interested in the way discourses constructed modern identities. Before the late nineteenth century, he claimed, authorities punished sinful or criminal sexual acts, but they did not regard the people who committed them as distinct personality types. Ehe new sexological discourses invented the modern sexual identities of heterosexual or homosexual, regarding sexual desires as revealing the innermost truth about our beings. Foucault therefore made a great conceptual leap forwards by differentiating between sexual acts and sexual identities. He profoundly changed the history of homosexuality. Rather than searching for gay or lesbian people in the past, historians began to insist that gay or lesbian identities did not exist before the modern period; instead, acts and desires were much more fluid. Working independently, lesbian historians such as Lillian Faderman came to similar conclusions, arguing that in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, women engaged in passionate romantic friendships without suspicion, only coming under attack when sexologists promulgated the lesbian stereotype.10

Other historians have suggested that the distinction between acts and identities cannot be mapped onto a pre-modern-modern divide. Sexual identities did exist before the modern period, such as the effeminate sodomite or the prostitute; these people were not just seen as committing certain sexual acts, rather, their sexual behaviour created a social identity. However, identity in the pre-modern period was not the same as our modern notion of an innermost essence, but more likely to be defined by social relationships. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity also enabled theorists and historians to undercut the stability of heterosexual identity. The gender identity of ‘woman’ is not natural, she argued, but a performance that must be repeated over and over and that can never be perfected. Furthermore, normative identities incorporate the deviant. Butler suggests that while heterosexual women renounce their attraction to other women, they identify with them: ‘the ‘straight woman becomes the woman she “never” loved.’11

Yet we still need concepts to understand those sexual practices and desires which did not constitute identities, but which could not be reduced to acts, which were not seen as normative yet were not utterly deviant. For instance, many women sold sex parttime without defining themselves as prostitutes; for them, commercial sex was a ‘twilight moment’ which may have been shameful but which did not change their work identities as needlewomen or milliners. Similarly, we need to understand discourses that were not openly articulated, that may have been only half-understood or euphemistic. For instance, abortionists advertised in nineteenth-century newspapers that they could bring on blocked menstrual periods; women whispered to neighbours what this meant. These could be termed ‘twilight discourses’, shadowy and secret.12