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Different-sex relationships stretch back through human history, but we began to call them “heterosexual” relatively recently. The German sexologist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in the 1860s, and they did not appear in print in English until 1892, when “heterosexual” was an entry in an American medical journal. American psychiatrists and physicians took note, writing professional articles about the “heterosexual instinct” and the “homosexual invert.”29 New terminology for sexual desires proliferated. During these same years, the German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs coined the term “bisexual,” one that the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud began to use in his theories of sexuality in the 1890s. Indeed, Freud dissected “sexological notion[s] of bisexuality as the combination of male and female characteristics within a single body” as he “developed the argument that all human beings are born with a bisexual predisposition” that would, in time, morph into either a heterosexual or homosexual orientation. The British sexologist Havelock Ellis, for his part, initially explored bisexuality as “psychosexual hermaphroditism” during the late 1890s; by 1915, Ellis was coming to analyze bisexuality instead as “comparable to ambidexterity.”30

German, French, British, and American sexologists and sex-law reformers experimented with new categories—medical and legal labels, really—to distinguish among people according to their sexual-object choices.31 The invention of heterosexuality as a salient category was simultaneous with and coconstitutive of processes of racial differentiation that became entrenched during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Biologists, critics, and politicians propounded pseudoscientific theories to justify ideas about racial hierarchy (principally, of white supremacy deeply informed by nativism).32 Heterosexuality emerged as a named and valued quality of “normal” sexuality amid these wide-ranging efforts to label and organize populations according to medical and psychological categories.

Between 1870 and 1930, a new system of describing the ostensible differences between men and women took hold in Europe and North America. As the historian Angus McLaren notes, “older notions of masculinity and femininity” no longer seemed adequate to explain “the changing nature of men’s work, the rise of the white collar service sector, the reduction of the birth rate, and women’s entry into higher education and the professions.”33 The solution was heterosexuality, which was never simply a descriptive term for sexual desire of men for women or of women for men. Jonathan Ned Katz has coined the phrase “different-sex erotic ideal” to refer to the new systems of meaning that surrounded relationships between people understood to be men and women by the late nineteenth century. As he explains in The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995), “An official, dominant, different-sex erotic ideal—a heterosexual ethic—is not ancient at all, but a modern invention.”34

Historians of heterosexuality illuminate the risks of asserting heteronormativity as a universal constant within human history. The scholar Hanne Blank describes the “surprisingly short history of heterosexuality” since the late nineteenth century in her engaging study of the science of different-sex desires and their cultural reverberations.35 She highlights what scholars such as Anne Fausto-Sterling have long demonstrated: that the idea of the sexual binary is itself a cultural production rooted in historical circumstances.36 Although much of this scholarship has attended to the ways in which sexology and psychiatry produced modern categories of homosexuality and lesbianism,37 it has also taught us a great deal about how sexology shaped emergent ideas of “the heterosexual.”38 The profusion of published advice columns that continued to include definitions of these terms into the 1940s suggests that it took many more decades for these terms to circulate widely in the vernacular. Popular print culture of the 1920s through 1940s often included minilessons about the meaning and importance of heterosexuality, a fact that demonstrates both that health professionals thought this knowledge was crucial for Americans’ overall well-being and that some readers presumably learned something they did not already know.

The science of sexuality unquestionably shaped the history of heterosexuality, but we join other historians in seeking a history of heterosexuality that incorporates nonexperts, researches the grassroots, and considers multiple sources of power and authority. We, along with other historians, acknowledge that critical demographic shifts during the early twentieth century—including both urbanization and higher college attendance rates—resulted in increased mixed-sex socializing, not to mention a sexual revolution.39 We additionally share a conviction stressed by the historian John D’Emilio: that “capitalism has led to the separation of sexuality from procreation.” Indeed, if capitalism “created the material conditions for homosexual desire to express itself as a central component of some individuals’ lives,” we contend that material conditions and relations inform sexual desires as well as identities.40 Sexology alone cannot explain the history of heterosexuality or its importance.

In many respects, the category of the heterosexual emerged in the early twentieth century as a necessary complement to “the homosexual,” a figure of more immediate interest to queer men and, problematically, to law enforcement. As George Chauncey has argued, during the 1920s and 1930s both middle-class “queer” men and “normal” middle-class men in New York City began to reject the performative effeminacy of working-class “fairies.” Queer men embraced the label of homosexuality, a name that centered “sexual desire, not gender inversion,” as the name “that distinguished them from other men.” “Normal” middle-class men likewise began to identify as heterosexuals and put their sexual-object choice, not simply their gender performance, at the center of their masculine identity.41 This association between heterosexuality and the “normal” found support from the federal government and its bureaucracies. Significantly, in The Straight State, Margot Canaday demonstrates that the expanding federal bureaucracy “produce[d] the category of homosexuality through regulation,” such that “a homosexual-heterosexual binary . . . was being inscribed in federal citizenship policy.”42 As a result of this epistemological privilege, “heterosexuality” emerged as a category of sexual identity associated with citizenship, often through programs and discourses that validated heterosexual marriage as a fundamental unit of governance, rights, and benefits.

What historians increasingly find is that heterosexuality emerged as a category and identity not simply through top-down impositions of the state but rather from multiple sources and with sometimes ambivalent results. Definitions of race and racialized class relations, not to mention notions about gendered hierarchies, shaped the meaning that people gave to their different-sex desires and the values they associated with their sexual intimacies; those intimacies might occur between two people of the same sex but be infused with opposite-sex meaning based on so-called racial difference. Certainly, a burgeoning administrative state and growing penal system in the United States played a powerful role in producing raced and classed ideas of (hetero)sexual respectability. To take one example, encounters between African American girls and women with the police, courts, and other forms of state power produced ideas about heterosexuality as a privileged status of “respectable” woman, usually but not always coded as white and often assumed to be middle class. Cheryl Hicks demonstrates the ways that juvenile courts, the policing of urban neighborhoods, and the prison system attempted to inculcate norms of middle-class heterosexuality among working-class African American girls and women in the early twentieth century. She finds that the working-class women who encountered agents of the state held distinct, if no less morally trenchant, ideas about the importance of different-sex relationships and heterosexual respectability. Rather than a top-down, middle-class imposition on a reluctantly regulated working class, heterosexuality emerged from multiple experiences of class and racial formation.43 Hicks’s work additionally reveals that, when incarcerated black and white women had sexual liaisons, administrators worried that “black women [were] function[ing] as masculine substitutes who fulfilled white women’s heterosexual desire.”44 What it meant to be heterosexual, then, evolved not simply through the measured advice of medical experts like Josephine Jackson but also in the sensational reporting of crimes, in the representations of racial otherness that pervaded accounts of interracial male-female sex, and within the very prison systems intended to discipline women who violated the norms of sexual respectability.

Ideas about racial otherness and gendered power, moreover, shaped the ways in which people experienced different-sex desire and/or constructed ideas of the sexually normal. For example, as Pablo Mitchell has compellingly revealed, the perception of an individual who “pushed the boundaries of ‘normal,’ early twentieth-century (hetero)sexual behavior” in territorial New Mexico could be all the more complicated if that person had indigenous, Hispano, and Anglo heritage. Work by Victor Jew and Mary Ting Yi Lui underscores that social anxieties regarding relationships between white women and men of color during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could result in Chinese and black men being demonized in ways that at once overlapped and diverged.45 As much as cross-cultural and interracial sex could facilitate degrees of mobility or even consolidations of power, interracial and cross-cultural sexual encounters could also generate pervasive notions about sexual deviance.

The historians Amy Sueyoshi, Nayan Shah, and Peggy Pascoe have produced rather revealing work on this front. Sueyoshi considers the case of Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who had love affairs with a white man and with at least two white women after immigrating to the United States in the early twentieth century but who expressed himself as unabashedly heterosexual after he returned to Japan. The white women who loved him did so through the prism of their Orientalist assumptions about Japanese masculinity, Sueyoshi argues, even as Noguchi’s male privilege permitted him a freedom of movement and career mobility unavailable to the educated women he courted. His life story challenges notions of presumed heterosexuality while also undermining accounts that view same-sex affairs as sites of resistance: “Heterosexuality does not simply exist everywhere unless explicitly renounced. Nor are those who resist compulsory heterosexuality necessarily exclusively ‘gay.’ In Noguchi’s case, sexual resistance came in the ‘straightest’ package possible as he insistently declared his heterosexuality after his return to Japan.”46 Certainly, the US legal system cast Asians as sexual deviants. Nayan Shah argues that criminal prosecutions of South Asian men for sex with (usually younger, if still adult) white men produced narratives of “Oriental depravity” that attributed the source of sexual deviance to a foreign “other” and thus shored up the normatively masculine status of white “youth.”47 On another front, by 1940 many states had adopted anti-miscegenation laws that criminalized interracial marriage. As the historian Peggy Pascoe underscores, legislation against such intermarriage at once produced, contained, and reflected “complex and convoluted” definitions of “race.” Those laws, which defined miscegenation in ways that set “Whites” against other racially defined groups, motivated some opponents of these laws to argue that interracial, different-sex attraction was especially natural. Indeed, in making such assertions, black writers such as George Schuyler and J. A. Rogers “played a role in producing a modern culture that increasingly assigned its fears of unnaturality to homosexuality rather than to race mixture.”48 Overall, the sexually normal emerged in the twentieth century as a state of being steadily defined in opposition to a racialized and classed understanding of difference. Notions about the “unnatural” nevertheless shifted away from interracial, different-sex sexuality as the century wore on.

Class, ability, and immigration status are central if often overlooked variables in the operation of ideas about the sexually “normal” and the meaning of heterosexuality. The history of the modern United States is replete with examples of individuals who engage in “heterosexual” relationships yet do not benefit from the cultural esteem afforded to “heteronormative” individuals and their families. Poverty, gender nonconformity, nonmarital pregnancy, undocumented immigration status, medical condition, and other variables produce multiple categories of heterosexuality (or, alternatively, proliferate the varieties of heterosexual perversity) that crisscross the borders of heteronormativity. Scholars of disability studies have offered historians valuable ways of interpreting the meaning of “normal” and tracing its origins. Like the contrasting spectacles of the freak show and the beauty pageant, homosexuality and heterosexuality created hypervisible (and hyperdiscursive) ways of defining the normal through the disparagement and abjection of the “other.”49

The insights and pitfalls of whiteness studies, another field investigating the historical construction of norms that are asserted if not demonstrated to be privileged, may offer a useful comparison for the history of heterosexuality. In an assessment of whiteness studies, the historian Peter Kolchin summarizes scholars’ finding that throughout North American history, “whiteness, even while omnipresent, appears unrecognized except as that which is normal.” Both whiteness and heterosexuality concern social identities that define norms, and both describe positions of social, economic, legal, and political privilege. Yet those norms function in idiosyncratic and unpredictable ways. We should differentiate between different-sex desires and heteronormativity, just as scholars of whiteness differentiate between “color” and “race” in the history of “whiteness.” As Kolchin cautions, “in making whiteness omnipresent, whiteness studies authors risk losing sight of contextual variations and thereby undermining the very understanding of race and whiteness as socially constructed.”50 Attending to the distinction between different-sex desires and heteronorms allows historians to discuss different-sex desires before the advent of “heterosexuality” without resorting to anachronism, and it calls attention to the gendered, racial, and class-based contingencies and exclusions that constitute heterosexuality itself.

We must be much clearer about what heterosexuality is and more willing to employ other terms (among them, different-sex desire, marriage, reproduction, patriarchy) that heterosexuality is too often tasked with presumptively indicating. As Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have written about the problematically expansive meanings of the term “identity,” we likewise highlight the “definitional incoherence” of heterosexuality. Brubaker and Cooper challenge scholars to recognize that if a term becomes meaningful only when prefaced by a list of its permutations, variability, flexibility, contingencies, or inconsistencies, then the individuals whose analysis includes that term need to consider seriously the possibility that another word or phrase might be more useful. Along those lines, we have asked, When are historians describing heterosexuality, and when are they investigating other forms of power or other operations of gender, marriage, family, or state authority?51 As Berlant and Warner have admonished, “Heterosexuality is not a thing. We speak of heterosexual culture rather than heterosexuality because that culture never has more than a provisional unity. It is neither a single Symbolic nor a single ideology nor a unified set of shared beliefs.” Instead, they argue, “heterosexuality” becomes a facile word to consolidate “widely differing practices, norms, and institutions.”52 In many ways, it is this paradox of heterosexuality, its tendency to produce a superstructural source of power relations that affect gender, race, class, and nation and its fundamental incoherency, that has motivated our project and inspired us to bring it to fruition.