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CHAPTER 4

The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography

This chapter builds on the critique offered in the previous chapter by offering some new strategies for negotiating the apprehension of similarity and difference in the history of sexuality. It does so by means of the particular case of lesbian historiography. The genesis for this chapter, as for the book as a whole, lies in my sense that the future of studies of sexuality demands more deliberate reflection about how we go about constructing historical narratives. To the extent that historiographic method has been a topic of debate, for a long time it took the form of the by now notorious distinction between acts versus identity, and its corollary, alterity versus continuism. Scholars whose historical accounts take a continuist form tended to emphasize a similarity between past and present concepts of sexual understanding; those who instead highlight historical difference or alterity (as it is termed by literary scholars) tended to emphasize problems of anachronism, changing terminologies and typologies, and resistance to teleology.¹ In my estimation, the relative weight accorded to alterity or continuism has had a more pronounced impact on the practice of lesbian history than any other issue (including debates about what counts as evidence of same-gender desire).

The premise of the present chapter is that the methodological assumption of a sameness/difference polarity has outlived its utility. Indeed, as the previous chapter’s critique of unhistoricism suggested, what now requires methodological scrutiny is how queer historicism, and the history of sexuality more generally, can pursue both synchronic and diachronic explanations by using a range of different methods. The historiographic choice is no longer between a supersessionist continuous history and an examination of synchronic complexities and contradictions, for few scholars of sexuality are indifferent to the simultaneous existence of incoherent discourses of sexuality, whether in the past or in the present. Nor would many commit to writing a teleological history, in which one model of identity seamlessly supersedes the next. I have begun to intimate that attention should focus on how to think about multiple similarities and differences, whether conceived as continuous or discontinuous, not by juxtaposing periods but by constructing an analytic focused on the “across” of time.

But first, let us recall how the opposition between alterity and continuism evolved within lesbian history, for it took a very decided form that has influenced, under cover, as it were, the terms of subsequent debate. As was true in the previous chapter, the point of this historical exercise is not to reenact old debates, but to take stock of where they have led us and where we might go. The first implicitly continuist approach was Lillian Faderman’s groundbreaking 1981 Surpassing the Love of Men, which, as its subtitle announced, traced romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present. Terry Castle’s 1993 The Apparitional Lesbian, although it opposed Faderman’s desexualized paradigm of romantic friends, nonetheless reiterated her continuist premises by provocatively collapsing eighteenth-century representations with twentieth-century cultural formations.² The continuist approach was extended backward in time through Bernadette Brooten’s magisterial Love Between Women, which, even as it treads cautiously through the historical specificities of ancient Rome, in its effort to demonstrate a lesbian identity in antiquity nonetheless implicitly employs concepts of 1970s lesbianism to read the early Christian West.³

Castle and Brooten, in particular, were critical of the influence of Michel Foucault on the periodization of homosexual identity, including his notorious pronouncement in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, that “the sodomite was a temporary aberration; the homosexual is now a species,”⁴ which has served as a banner cry for the alterist position. The critique of methodologies that stress historical difference, however, has also taken a form less dismissive of Foucault and the historical methods he inspired. In a thoughtful challenge to the practices of women’s history, Judith Bennett has argued that a “patriarchal equilibrium” has “worked to maintain the status of European women in times of political, social, and economic change.”⁵ Writing as a social historian who views history as necessarily a story of both continuity and change, Bennett proposes a distinction between changes in women’s experiences and structural transformations of women’s social status, while also proposing the term “lesbian-like” to resolve the issues of alterity posed by the distant past.⁶ Diagnosing various reasons for gender historians’ penchant for focusing on change, Bennett suggests that European women’s history may be profitably viewed as “a history of change without transformation.”⁷ From a rather different angle, Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, editors of the collection Premodern Sexualities, critique the fascination with alterity that, they argue, had taken hold of queer historical studies. Suggesting that identification with the past is an important motivation for historicist work, they advocate a practice that observes “similarities or even continuities” while eschewing “an ahistoricist or universalizing effect.”⁸ Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval similarly advocates the affective need for apprehending similarities, this time through the metaphor of “touches across time.”⁹ And Martha Vicinus echoes these sentiments in Intimate Friends, maintaining that “attitudes toward and behaviors by lesbians show a rich combination of change and continuity.”¹⁰ Arguing that “we gain a better sense of intimate friendship by tracing repetitive patterns,” she notes that “even though the structures of intimacy remained in place, their meanings changed over time.”¹¹

I rehearse these forays into lesbian, women’s, and queer history because I believe they indicate that, methodologically speaking, we are poised to enter a new stage, wherein some of the theoretically motivated and archivally supported claims that have absorbed the attention of scholars over the past twenty-five years can be reassessed. As more archival materials support more subtly calibrated concepts of identity and orientation, debates about acts versus identities, alterity versus continuism, have—at least for some scholars—begun to recede in importance, while other scholars, as the previous chapter makes clear, have given these debates new life in reconfigured forms.¹² I want to suggest that what I call the present future of lesbian historiography—by which I mean those methods that might enable us to imagine a future historicist practice—necessitates analyzing recurring patterns across large spans of time in the identification, social statuses, behaviors, and meanings of women who erotically desired other women. Doing so, I believe, could result in a new paradigm for lesbian history.¹³

I thus want to register a shift in my own thinking (which in The Renaissance of Lesbianism had fallen more on the side of emphasizing alterity) toward an engagement with the following tripartite hypothesis:

• There exist certain recurrent explanatory metalogics that accord to the history of lesbianism over a vast temporal expanse a sense of consistency and, at times, uncanny familiarity.

• These explanatory metalogics draw their specific content from perennial axes of social definition, which become particularly resonant or acute at different historical moments.

• The recurring moments in which these metalogics are manifested might profitably be understood as cycles of salience—that is, as forms of intelligibility whose meanings recur, intermittently and with a difference, across time.

This chapter will attempt to fill in the contours of these hypotheses by drawing on the work of a number of scholars. Before doing so, however, I want to suggest what is at stake in such patterns of discourse for current historiographic practices. Such cycles of salience are what lead us to encounter what can look a lot like “lesbianism” in the distant historical periods in which we work. They indicate, I propose, not lesbianism per se—by which I mean the canonical form that now circulates globally as a modern identity category¹⁴—but the presence of symptomatic preoccupations about the meanings of women’s bodies and behaviors. The appearance of consistency and familiarity produced by these metalogics, the axes of social definition from which they draw their energy, and the cycles of salience during which they reappear are not, therefore, simple or self-evident. Nor are these cycles, precisely, continuity—if by that we mean an unbroken line connecting the past to the present.¹⁵ I am not, in other words, forgoing an alterist conception for a continuous or transhistorical one. It is less that there exist transhistorical categories that comprise and subsume historical variation than that certain perennial logics and definitions have remained useful, across time, for conceptualizing the meaning of female bodies and bonds.¹⁶ Emerging at certain moments, silently disappearing from view, and then reemerging as particularly relevant (or explosively volatile), these recurrent explanatory logics seem to underlie the organization, and reorganization, of women’s erotic lives. Sometimes these preoccupations arise as repeated expressions of identical concerns; sometimes they emerge differently or under an altered guise. Recurrence, in other words, does not imply transhistoricity, and cycles can be nonidentical to themselves. As endemic features of erotic discourse and experience, these logics and definitions, as well as the ideological fault lines they subtend, not only contribute to the existence of historically specific types and figures but also enable correspondences across time. At the same time, the forms these metalogics take, their specific content, the discourses in which they are embedded, and the angle of relations among them all are subject to change. Social preoccupations come in and out of focus, new political exigencies emerge, discourses converge and the points of contact between them shift—and in the process, the meanings of female-female desire are reconfigured.

The methodological reassessment I am offering is made possible by a wealth of published studies. Thanks to social and cultural history, as well as to an even larger body of work by literary critics analyzing cultural representations, we now possess a densely textured picture of what it might have meant for women to love, desire, and have sex with each other at various times in specific communities.¹⁷ The research that has taken place in almost every historical period, particularly for England, France, and North America, offers a heretofore unimagined opportunity to confront the conceptual challenges of change and continuity on a larger, more capacious scale than typically has been tried—including pushing against the analytical paradigms and geographic boundaries of the Anglo-European West. Lesbian history will continue to locate its subjects in specific temporal and spatial contexts, while also addressing how their histories intersect and diverge across national, ethnic, racial, and geographical borders. However, by identifying certain axes of definition that have been developed largely out of the histories of white women in western Europe and the United States, analyzing the reasons for their recurrence, and then submitting these narratives to comparative analysis across the boundaries of race, religion, and geography, it may, over time, be possible to fashion a broadly synoptic account of historical regimes of eroticism—without losing sight of each regime’s specificity, complexity, relative coherence, and instability. In short, recognition of these periodic cycles of salience—flaring up and abating—could provide us with a means to collectively write that which, for good reason, has not been attempted since Faderman’s inaugural study: a transnational, culturally specific, and comparative history of lesbianism over the longue durée.

A search for “types” has framed much of the scholarship on lesbian history of England and the United States. From my own book on the relations between representations of the “masculine tribade” and the “chaste feminine friend” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,¹⁸ to Susan Lanser’s work on the “sapphist” as a flashpoint for modernity in the eighteenth century,¹⁹ to Martha Vicinus’s early delineation of four antecedents to modern lesbianism and, more recently, her exploration of nineteenth-century familial models for female intimacy such as mother/daughter and husband/wife,²⁰ to Judith Halberstam’s exploration of twentieth-century forms of female masculinity,²¹ an implicit typological impulse has framed efforts to render female-female desires intelligible—both in their own historical terms, and in ours.

In part this typological inclination results from the medical taxonomies from which the modern category of homosexuality was derived.²² Thus, a reliance on systems of classification similarly has dominated studies of male homosexuality, both within the West and cross-culturally.²³ David M. Halperin has provided the most explicit description and theorization of typologies of male homosexuality across a broad temporal expanse. Halperin—previously one of the most influential advocates of historical discontinuity—attempts in How to Do the History of Homosexuality “to rehabilitate a modified constructionist approach to the history of sexuality by readily acknowledging the existence of transhistorical continuities, reintegrating them into the frame of the analysis, and reinterpreting their significance within a genealogical understanding of the emergence of (homo)sexuality itself.”²⁴

Revisiting his own historicist practice in order to balance the conceptual appeals of historical continuity and change, Halperin offers a sophisticated analytical paradigm based on four “transhistorical” “pre-homosexual categories of male sex and gender deviance”: effeminacy; pederasty or active sodomy; friendship or male love; and passivity or inversion.²⁵ This rehabilitation implicitly relies on classical models of male-male relations, which are viewed as variously applicable at different times and places. Halperin proposes, however, a transhistorical model only up to the emergence of modern homosexuality—when, owing to a “long historical process of accumulation, accretion, and overlay,” the relations among these categories definitively changed.²⁶

Although I have been inspired by Halperin’s engagement with continuist arguments, my current interest lies not in creating a transhistorical taxonomy of categories or figures—or, at least, this would only be one task in a larger project I envision. I am less interested in describing the contents of typologies and exposing the conceptual strands that contribute to them than in investigating the cultural conditions that render such types culturally salient at particular moments.²⁷ This reflects my desire to build methodologically on the project pursued in The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England while also moving beyond it. There I argued that, under the auspices of divergent discourses circulating in England, a symptomatic break in the representation of female homoeroticism occurred over the course of the seventeenth century, a shift in the terms of female embodiment, which led to a “cultural perversion” of female-female desire. This process of perversion, which involved particular negotiations of significance and insignificance, articulation and negation, intelligibility and unintelligibility, provided some of the primary materials out of which modern identity categories were fashioned. I also argued, however, that early modern representations are definitively estranged from modern conceptual categories. Rather than attempt to forge links between the tribade, the tommy, the invert, and the butch, for instance, I focused on certain conceptual axes that, within the temporal parameters of two centuries, organized the meanings of tribadism and female friendship. Building on the work of Annamarie Jagose on the terms of “lesbian inconsequence,”²⁸ the book attempts to expose the fragile nature of a governing regime of visibility (and its corollary, invisibility) by focusing on the specific incoherences that have governed the intelligibility—and lack of intelligibility—of female-female desire.

The two figures whose genealogies I traced nonetheless appear strangely similar to subsequent emanations of female homoerotic desire. Figures that, since the foundational work in lesbian history, have been treated as prototypical for the nineteenth century (the passing woman and the romantic friend), as fundamental to the pathologizing discourses of sexology and early psychoanalysis (the invert and the pervert), and as vital to twentieth-century selfdefinitions (butch and femme) seem to have been cut from much of the same cloth as the early modern tribade and friend. Noting such resemblances linking various manifestations across time, I asked in closing: why do such apparent resonances assert themselves?

It would seem that certain representational features of female bodies and bonds slip into and out of historical view; some acquire more importance and visibility as others decline and fade, only to reappear in a different guise under changed social conditions. The discourses in which they are articulated shift and mutate as well. By the late eighteenth century, for instance, the sexually deviant figure that arguably had the most potential to signify transgressively—the tribade who supposedly used her enlarged clitoris to “imitate” the sex acts of men—had almost disappeared from the medical discourse that first gave her cultural intelligibility. Given the changes during this period to the practice of anatomy and physiology, it makes sense that she waned as an object of medical curiosity; but why did she linger in other genres, such as literature, and then later reappear in medicine (albeit in much different form) as the invert of sexology and psychoanalysis? The differences between the tribade and the invert, of course, are as considerable as those between Galen and Freud, but the metalogic of a figure composed by a masculinized style of desire persists. No longer diagnosed routinely, as she was in the early modern period, through the presence of an oversized clitoris, the tribade’s “monstrous” abuse of her body and other women was refigured by sexology as the mannish invert’s hypervirility, her masculine characteristics imbuing not only her physical nature, but her very soul.²⁹ Nonetheless, the common recourse to a physiological explanation for a masculinized desire, as well as the projection of such desire onto women of Africa and the Middle East in both the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, has been striking enough to invite continuist narratives.

In order to defend the hypothesis of continuity, however, one would need to analyze the intervening period and the discursive regimes at work within it. What happened to the terms of cultural representation between the production of the masculine tribade and the masculine invert? For one thing, the emergence of a new type: the sapphist. Susan Lanser has located the cultural production of the sapphist in a historical moment when “private intimacies between women became public relations.”³⁰ Rather than residing in the pages of medical textbooks, the sapphist’s “publicity” was largely a construction of a variety of fictional forms, from picaresque novels to satiric pornography, which alternately celebrated and condemned her.³¹ By the latter part of the eighteenth century, so notorious was the figure of the sapphist that, as Martha Vicinus maintains, “women’s intimate friendships were divided into two types, sensual romantic friendship and sexual Sapphism.”³² Nonetheless, as Lisa Moore argues, sapphism and romantic friendship “continued to exhibit a dangerous intimacy.”³³ What separated romantic friendship from suspect sapphism, contends Lanser, was less the masculinized gender performance of the sapphist than her deviation from class propriety. Indeed, Lanser argues that it is only through a kind of back-formation that figures suspected of sapphism—because of their violations of genteel respectability—were later deemed “masculine.”³⁴

Over this same period, the intimate female friend was reconstituted as something both akin and alien to the innocent, chaste, yet desiring adolescent who is represented widely in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. By the late eighteenth century, under the auspices of a culture of manners, sensibility, and taste, the idioms of chastity and innocence that figured early modern friendship seem to have been channeled into the twin virtues of propriety and sentiment. Fictionally immortalized by that hypervirtuous exemplar of moral womanhood, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, the “particular friend” of the Enlightenment appears to be both libidinally attached to and tragically barred from those female intimacies that might protect her from the worst abuses of patriarchal masculinity.³⁵ A real-life Clarissa may have had access to “sensual romantic friendship” with such a friend as Anna, but it is the project of Richardson’s text—as it was of many eighteenth-century novels—to explicitly frustrate such desire.³⁶

Yet, in their attempts to contain and stave off intimate female friendships, such texts had more in common with early modern literature than with later configurations of desire. For, by the next century, sensual romantic friendship—or, to invoke its function as an effect of domestic ideology, the “female world of love and ritual”—subsisted hand in glove with the Victorian bourgeois ideal of female passionlessness. Bolstered by a socioeconomic investment in women’s domesticity and the separation of spheres, the expectation of women’s lack of interest in sex with men paradoxically fostered the fervid expressions of love and desire among girls and women characterized by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg as “socially acceptable and fully compatible with heterosexual marriage.”³⁷ Indeed, the nineteenth century, in Vicinus’s terms, “saw a concerted effort to spiritualize all love.”³⁸ Out of the contradictory idioms of romantic friendship and sapphic sexuality, women in the nineteenth century were, as Vicinus asserts, able “to fashion something new—a personal identity based upon a sexualized, or at least recognizably eroticized, relationship with another woman.”³⁹

This eroticized personal identity and public persona often depended on a form of gender inversion signified through sartorial and behavioral style. As both objects of and agents in the formation of modern identity categories, sapphists and inverts sought to make themselves legible (to themselves and to others) through the adoption of masculine dress. Yet, at the beginning of the modern era, as Vicinus argues, “gender inversion was the most important signifier of same-sex desire, but interpretations of the so-called mannish woman varied considerably.”⁴⁰ As Laura Doan has shown, especially during the relaxation of gender conventions during World War I, certain British women who adopted masculine fashion neither perceived themselves nor were perceived by others as sapphists.⁴¹ Following the postwar tightening of gender ideology, and especially after the notorious 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall, many sapphists proclaimed their erotic independence by means of closely cropped hair, starched shirts, jackets, ties, cigarette lighters, and monocles.⁴² Their manipulation of the tropes of masculine dress drew upon prior preoccupations with the cultural signification of gendered clothes, yet did so within the context of a different gender regime and by means of vastly different material technologies. Tribades, one might say, did not smoke.

Why do certain figures and tropes of eroticism (and gender) become culturally salient at certain moments, becoming saturated with meaning, and then fade from view? Why do suspicions of deviant behavior sometimes seep into the most innocuous-seeming of friendships, and why are such friendships at other times immune from suspicion? Why do certain figures, separated by vast temporal expanses, appear to adumbrate, echo, or reference one another? To adequately address these questions, we need to sharpen our analytical focus. Which characteristics of their social formation actually recur? Which social forces foster an interest in bodily or expressive acts among women, and through which discursive domains and by means of which material technologies are such intelligibilities circulated?

A focus on lesbian typologies, I have come to feel, enables only partial answers to these questions.⁴³ For instance, from one set of concerns, the female-oriented (although mixed-sex) “Society of Friendship” formed by seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips looks a lot like an avatar of late nineteenth-century Boston marriage; both social forms spiritualize female emotional bonds; both derive sustenance from women’s intellectual capacities; both arise from within the confines of feminine domesticity; both defer to class decorum in matters of the desiring body. But from another angle—say, the freedom to advocate for female intimacy as a political alternative to patriarchal marriage—the gulf between them is profound.

Or consider the ways that the same-sex intimacies that occurred among certain women living in medieval and early modern convents appear to provide a prototype for the fervid romantic friendships of nineteenth-century women. In both cases, intimacies were authorized by a tight relation between spirituality and eroticism, and both were materially supported by gender segregation. Yet the erotic spirituality of the nun is very different from that professed by romantic friends, and the domesticity enforced on bourgeois women as they were shunted out of the public sphere was a wholly different matter from the (largely) voluntary rigors of monastic life. Whereas the “particular friend” of the medieval monastery was debarred by the rules of her religious order from embracing or even holding hands, her nineteenth-century counterpart was likely to be encouraged by family and kin to kiss and caress her “particular friend.”

So too, the gender-bending common to the medieval virago, the early modern tribade, the female husband or the passing woman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the mannish invert of sexology, the 1950s bar dyke, the stone butch, and the transgender subject of today suggests one powerful line of historical and affective connection. Yet, several other lines—including concepts of bodily morphology, extent or desirability of gender passing, relations between secrecy and disclosure, economic imperatives, and claims to an erotic subjectivity—crosscut them in such a way as to disrupt the appearance of similitude.⁴⁴ In this respect, rhetorics, vocabularies, and conventions matter as much as do wide-scale changes in material conditions. Within the frame of a particular set of identifications, for instance, a lesbian drag king might claim as historical precursor the gender-bending passing woman of eighteenth-century narrative; but if she were to submit herself to the narrative conventions structuring earlier discourses of gender passing, she quickly would find that the gulf of history is wide.⁴⁵ For one thing, as Sally O’Driscoll has argued, the passing woman depicted in eighteenth-century ballads is associated almost exclusively with heterosexuality.⁴⁶

The ideological utility of body parts to social discipline is another case in point. The metonymic logic that governed the representation of the early modern tribade’s enlarged clitoris can be seen in the determination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexologists to discover the reasons of behavioral aberrations in a particular bodily source. Like the tribade’s clitoris, the essentialized characteristics attributed to the invert attest to a will to discover in the body an explanatory mechanism for its own deviations. From this perspective, the quest, during our contemporary age of biogenetics and psychobiology, for a “gay gene” (supposedly manifest in a specific gene on the X chromosome or in the hypothalamus) and for hormonal sources of sexual orientation reiterates a desire to pin the mystery of sexuality onto a discrete physical essence. This twenty-first-century means of understanding the relation between desire and biology, psychology and the body echoes earlier cultural formations, as Siobhan Somerville has argued: “the current effort to re-biologize sexual orientation and to invoke the vocabulary of immutable difference” has its origins in the “historically coincident” yet “structurally interdependent” discourses of nineteenth-century sexology, comparative anatomy, and scientific racism.⁴⁷ Those nineteenth-century discourses, I would add, trace some of their structural components—for instance, their anatomical essentialism—back to early modern attempts to diagnose the tribade’s transgression as a function of bodily morphology and, at times, racial difference.⁴⁸

At the same time, the material technologies by which gay genes can even be thought as such—much less investigated—are profoundly modern in orientation. Yet material technologies need not be particularly sophisticated or “scientific” to affect the range of available discourses. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, for example, tales of tribades would have remained a fairly elite knowledge had they not made their way through the new genre of travel literature and into vernacular medical advice books. So too, an even wider array of print media—newspapers, scandal sheets, published trial records, novels, and pornography—disseminated an epistemology of suspicion about alleged sapphists in the eighteenth century.⁴⁹

Resemblances, then, shimmer unsteadily and unevenly, moving closer or receding, depending on the axes of definition that inform one’s perspective or capture one’s attention. Such attention may be the result of forces extrinsic to sexuality itself. Certain axes of social definition may become more pronounced during eras when social discourse about sexuality draws into its orbit concerns and signifiers external to it. Like the periodic moral panics first adduced by Gayle Rubin and Jeffrey Weeks,⁵⁰ cycles of salience may be linked temporally and conceptually to moments of social crisis which have their source in anxieties peripheral to eroticism, such as reactions to feminism and changing gender roles, reservations about redefinitions of the family, nationalist or racist fears of contamination, concerns about morality and social discipline, and violent upheavals in the political order.⁵¹ Conversely, a resurgence of salience for other axes of social definition may be more likely to occur precisely when such anxieties are absent.

I do not propose that we create rubrics (e.g., a paradigm of bodily morphology or gender inversion or intimate friendship) under which all historical variants would be gathered, organized, and codified. To offer the tribade, the invert, and the romantic friend, for instance, as transhistorical figures of lesbian history would move us only a small step beyond models of a single, unified lesbianism. To do the history of sexuality is not to turn a blind eye to perennial features of the erotic system in the name of historical alterity. But neither is it to too quickly assume homology when not every facet repeats.

As noted in Chapter 2, with the exception of Alan Bray’s The Friend, a history of homosexuality over the longue durée largely has been avoided since Faderman’s foundational survey. Such avoidance stems from the association of overarching historical narratives with the “gay ancestors” approach to history, as well as from a postmodern suspicion toward the explanatory power of metanarratives. There have, to be sure, been histories of sexuality more generally that traverse several centuries (such as John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s Intimate Matters and Richard Godbeer’s Sexual Revolution in Early America; Anna Clark’s Desire: A History of European Sexuality; Leila Rupp’s introductory overviews, A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America and Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women;⁵² Joseph Boone’s The Homoerotics of Orientalism; as well as sourcebooks such as Alison Oram and Annmarie Turnbull’s The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex Between Women in Britain from 1780 to 1970). There also have been temporally broad, theoretically inflected studies, such as Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence, Lee Edelman’s Homographesis, and Annamarie Jagose’s Inconsequence. With the exception of Boone, however, none of these has explicitly theorized the implications of connecting the strands of gay, lesbian, or queer history across multiple historical periods. To the extent that a longer vantage has been raised as a methodological or theoretical question, it largely has been framed within the context of the acts-versus-identity debate. Dominated by the impulse to create densely local and socially contextualized interpretations, the field’s center of gravity has resulted in some remarkable period-based studies that will inform our understanding for a great while.⁵³

But note the phrase “period-based studies.” Since the move away from the famous-gay-people-in-history approach, the history of homosexuality—both male and female—mainly has been written by means of research segmented along traditional period lines. Even as queer theory, post-structuralism, and the “linguistic turn” have pressured many of the methodological premises of literary critics and traditional historians, the power of periodization has not been shaken—as titles such as Queering the Renaissance, Queering the Middle Ages, and Queering the Moderns attest.⁵⁴ Although it has become a tenet of historicist queer studies to disrupt the “straight,” reproductive logic of sequential temporality, to expose periodization as a fetish, and to keep one eye on our contemporary situation, the ensuing conversation between past and present generally has been accomplished by relying on a period-bound concept of the past: one historical moment, situated in proximity to modernity (or postmodernity).⁵⁵ To queer the Middle Ages, for instance, is also to historicize the modern—with the injunction to “get medieval” pursued by considering how medieval concepts inhabit, resonate, or are at odds with contemporary categories and crises: the U.S. military policy of don’t ask, don’t tell; the sexual politics of the Clinton impeachment; the discourse of HIV/AIDS; the love lyrics of rock star Melissa Etheridge.⁵⁶

Queer historiography, in other words, has enabled a provocative conversation between the past and the present, history and (post)modernity. Notwithstanding this provocation, the retrospective fiction of periodization has functioned epistemologically as a force field, encouraging certain questions while obstructing others.⁵⁷ In particular, the common sense of periodization has kept our analytical attention off those problematic areas where historical boundaries meet: the ragged edges, margins, and interstices of periodization that frame our narratives.⁵⁸ It is here that historical claims, especially about the advent of change or novelty, can rub uncomfortably against one another—sometimes calling into question the basic premises and arguments of temporally discrete historical studies and sometimes leading to charges of scholarly ignorance or special pleading. Yet, as understandable as is the desire to expose other scholars’ epistemic privileging of their own turf, a strategy of border surveillance does not help us learn to speak across period divides.⁵⁹

I want to suggest a different strategy—one based on acknowledgment of perennial axes of social definition and their temporal appearance as cycles of salience, and which is in pursuit of the explanatory metalogics that such definitions manifest. Many of the issues in gay/lesbian/queer history that have structured the asking of questions and the seeking of answers traverse historical domains. Whereas these issues may not all function as axes of social definition, they provide one means of access to them as well as to a better understanding of the moments when they accrue social significance. Presented as a large set of substantive themes, they include:

• the relationship between erotic acts and erotic identities;

• the quest for the etiology of erotic desire in the physical body, including the role of anatomy;

• the status accorded to the genitals in defining sexual acts;

• the relations of love, intimacy, and friendship to eroticism, including the defensive separation of sex from friendship;

• the fine line between virtue and transgression, orderly and disorderly homoeroticism;

• the relationship of eroticism to gender deviance and conformity;

• the symbolic and social functions of gendered clothing;

• the relevance of age, class/status, and ethnic/racial hierarchies to erotic relations;

• the composition and effects of familial, marital, and household arrangements;

• the role of voluntary kinship and familial nomenclatures in mediating and expressing erotic bonds;

• the relationship of homoeroticism to homosociality;

• the role of gender-segregated spaces, including religious, educational, criminal, and medical institutions;

• the existence of communities and subcultures, including public sexual cultures and spaces;

• the division between public and private sexualities;

• the effects of racial, geographical, religious, and national othering;

• the effects of social and geographical mobility;

• assessments of appropriate erotic knowledge, including the ambiguous line separating medicine from obscenity;

• the credibility of religious, medical, scientific, and legal discourses in the production of sexual categories, including definitions of nature, the unnatural, normality, and the abnormal;

• the differences between concepts of erotic identity, predisposition, and habitual behaviors;

• the dynamic of secrecy and disclosure, including covert signs, coding, and open secrets;

• the efficacy of representations of (homo)sexual contamination and/or predation to the body politic;

• the impact of sexually transmitted diseases on fears of mortality and social catastrophe;

• the interdiction against and circulation of sexual prostheses and supplemental technologies of sex;

• the relationship of hermaphrodites and the intersexed to same-sex desires and practices;

• the attractions of aesthetic conventions of erotic similitude versus erotic difference and/or hierarchy;

• the effects of narrative, poetic, and visual form on representations of homoeroticism.

Because of pervasive gender asymmetries, additional themes have had more consequence for the history of female bodies, experiences, and representations:

• the misogynist logic of female imperfection, excessive appetite, susceptibility to seduction, and inconstancy;

• the role of female anatomy, especially the clitoris, in cultural representations;

• the import of chastity, reproductive marriage, and the sexual double standard on women’s erotic options;

• women’s unequal access to sex education and sexual knowledge, including sexual language, anatomical definitions, and medical taxonomies;

• the effects of reproductive choice and constraint on women’s erotic welfare;

• the gendering of propriety, emotion, and sensibility;

• the derivative, secondary order of lesbian visibility, which underpins conceptual misrecognitions such as lesbian “impossibility” and “imitation”;

• the social power of lesbians (and representations of female homoeroticism) relative to that of men;

• the relation of women’s erotic ties to their political subjectivity—that is, to feminism;

• the potential threat that female-female eroticism poses to patriarchal relations and male dominance.

This list is unwieldy, but even so, it is not comprehensive. Each of these themes assumes different contours, contents, and emphases when examined from historically specific locations.⁶⁰ Some of them have been discussed at length in queer scholarship; others hardly have been raised. Some have settled in one or another historical location; others have been assumed to possess no past. Not only does each one provide a specific angle for investigating how subjects might have understood—or not understood—themselves, but in the aggregate they allow us to appreciate the extent to which their powers of definition extend across discrete historical moments and, thus, beyond the subjects so defined by them. They are substantive and constitutive: organizing the self-perceptions and contributing to the intelligibility of same-sex desire (as both representation and lived experience) for people in the past, while also providing the terms by which we have identified those subjects and made the past intelligible to ourselves. To the extent that they precipitate the establishment of temporal patterns of meaning making, they have been complicit in framing queer historical investigation as an inquiry into an already constituted object: as Laura Doan has put it, “identity history” as “a hunt for x.”⁶¹

At the same time, the range and diversity of these themes enable us to see that social constructivist claims regarding the emergence of modern homosexuality—whatever the date proposed—have been founded on the basis of a relatively limited set of preoccupations (e.g., identity, subcultures, medical concepts, and legal codes), which have been used to stand in, metonymically, as evidence of homosexuality tout court. In the aggregate, these themes prod us to query whether the different dates that have been proposed for the “birth” of the modern homosexual may not result from their separate temporal arcs. Upsetting the premises of identity history by proliferating the range of relevant issues, they urge us to ask whether what is sometimes presented as whole-scale diachronic change (before and after sexuality, before and after identity, before and after modernity) might rather be a manifestation of ongoing synchronic tensions in conceptualizations about bodies and desires (and their relations to the gender system). As these tensions are confronted with the material realities of new social formations—attacks on monastic culture, the rise of empirical science, the emergence of print and media technologies, the public sphere, political satire and pornography, secularism, mandatory schooling, scientific racism, transnational gay and lesbian movements, the resurgence of religious fundamentalisms—they are played out, differently, yet again.

This list of substantive themes is intended to bring more clarity to the principles of selection by which one figure might be made to correspond to another across time. It aims to bring more exactitude to the practice of genealogy within queer historicism by encouraging more precise definition of terms and setting of conceptual parameters. As should be clear to readers of Chapter 3, the proposal I am advocating runs counter to others’ efforts to confront the challenges posed by teleology, chronology, and periodization. Rather than “dispense with periodization” as Carolyn Dinshaw and Karma Lochrie suggest,⁶² I suggest we instead use the significant period-based studies published over the past twenty years in order to piece together the questions, concepts, and propositions that have emerged from them into a multilayered genealogy of sexuality. This involves a perspective that is simultaneously synchronic and diachronic: perennial axes of social definition are the synchronic materials out of which diachronic cycles of salience emerge. Poised between the nowin options of attempting to manufacture a coherent, seamless, successionist metanarrative or of eschewing chronological temporality altogether, the genealogy I envision would derive out of and retain the questions, issues, arguments, and contradictions of our fragmented, periodized, discontinuous research. This process of piecing together would encourage us to scrutinize multiple points of intersection, both temporal and spatial, forged from a variety of angles, among different erotic regimes, while also requiring analysis of the ways these linkages are disrupted or crosscut by other angles of vision. Viewed from a wide angle but with all the rough edges showing, this genealogy would necessitate a method of historiography that is literally dialogical; it would be motivated, in both form and content, by the question: how might we stage a dialogue between one queer past and another?⁶³

It is, admittedly, difficult to imagine how such a multifaceted dialogue might happen or take place. Given the highly periodized institutional conditions within which we pursue our scholarly work, and given, as well, the mandate to examine such an enormous temporal and spatial expanse, its creation clearly is not the task of any one scholar. Such a complex act of creation would require a collective conversation, or, rather, many conversations imbued with multiple voices, each of them engaged in a proliferating and contestatory syntax of “and, but, and, but.” This collaboration, born of a common purpose, would not erase friction but embrace it. I imagine such voices and the histories they articulate coming together and falling apart, like the fractured and vacillating images of a rotating kaleidoscope: mimetic, repetitive, but changing, with each of its aspects reverberating off others, but nonetheless possessed of their own autonomy. Such a kaleidoscopic vision of historiography is, no doubt, a utopian dream. But like all dreams, it gestures toward a horizon of possibility, provocatively tilting our angle of vision and providing us with new questions and, perhaps, new ways of answering them.

Moving toward this horizon is not the sole direction for lesbian historiography; our approaches need not, indeed should not, be mutually exclusive. Not all questions related to the writing of queer history would be resolved by joining in this effort. Gaps in our knowledge remain and may never be filled; archives remain to be investigated in even greater abundance than we were aware prior to digitization; different racial, national, geographic, and linguistic traditions call out for specification and comparison (including comparisons made available by historicism).⁶⁴ Significant methodological problems require more analysis, including the complex role of emotional affect in our construction of the past.⁶⁵ Perhaps the largest questions of the moment concern how to continue to hone methods appropriate to investigating homoerotic desires and experiences specific to various ethnic and racial groups in the past⁶⁶ (especially the construction of female-female desire in non-Western cultures),⁶⁷ as well as how to best situate the history of sexuality in a transnational and comparative frame.⁶⁸ Just as the historical object of study is implicated in the temporal issues addressed above, so too it is framed by spatial configurations. To the extent that teleological history has positioned non-Western sexualities as anterior, primitive, and inevitably progressing toward Western models, resistance to that paradigm must involve a decolonization that is not only archival but methodological.⁶⁹

It is my hope that the identification of perennial axes of social definition and the metalogics they reflect will help scholars investigating different racial, ethnic, national, linguistic, and religious traditions to further develop methodological tools appropriate to their own questions and contexts. Which of these axes of definition function across cultural as well as historical boundaries? Which are culturally specific to Europe and North America? What do such differential presences and absences tell us about indigenous modes of comprehending and organizing sexuality, and how does recognition of them promote alternative genealogies of sexual modernity?

The implication of lesbian historiography in both space and time thus raises additional questions regarding its present future. Most pertinent to the dialogue I have advocated: Would its aim be to create a single lesbian historiography which produces multiple histories that intersect at different points? Or would its goal be to create multiple lesbian historiographies which refract and bounce off of one another in continual oscillation? Finally, how might a reconceived lesbian historiography pressure the development of a global history of sexuality? Whatever our answers to these questions, the future of lesbian historiography will require a more ambitious and capacious response to our growing historical knowledge. The past deserves no less than this; the future demands this and more.