(De-)Constructing Sexual Kinds Since 1750

Abstract

Historians of sexuality have addressed a number of hotspots since the 1970s: pornography, birth control, prostitution, and venereal diseases. All of these foci have more or less explicitly shown us the ways in which power (exercised through morality, social sanctioning, the law, etc.) have constrained the expressions of sexual pleasures and desires. A key part of this focus in sexual historiography has been directed towards the medicalization of ‘sexual perversions’ during the nineteenth century, especially homosexuality, but also other ‘aberrant’ forms of pleasure including sadism and masochism (hereafter S/M unless being discussed separately), cross-dressing, necrophilia, bestiality, as well as general medical understandings of the sexual impulse. Nevertheless, there remains much to explore with other ‘perverse’ manifestations of the sexual impulse, such as urolagnia, fetishism, sexual ‘self-harm’, and other sexual desires that have come under a medical gaze. Historians, like other social commentators, have largely remained in the comfort zone of describing more common (and therefore more acceptable) sexual acts, and so it is unlikely that there will be the same historical interest in these rarely depicted subjects (and subjectivities), despite the availability of (pornographic, medical, literary) material portraying water sports, latex fetishes, or giving and receiving enemas, and regardless of the possibilities for using these sexual practices to explore past manifestations of the sexual impulse. It seems, scanning the historiography of sexuality, that the same kinds of sexual categories developed by nineteenth-century sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Albert Moll, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Alfred Binet have been reified, regardless of the common slippage between these apparently naturally occurring separate categories and the actual practices of individuals classified into them, leaving us with a situation that continues to artificially construct (historical) experience in essentialist terms, as if all homosexual men are incapable of enjoying sexual situations involving women, or as if all masochists cannot occasionally switch and deliver a hard caning. Despite the fact that nineteenth-century sexologists adhered to these categories, seeking out the primary perversion in an individual case, 1 the historian is in something of a privileged position to read through these categories, and to (re-)construct narratives of past sexual pleasures without the necessary recourse to ideas of fixed sexual identities promulgated in sexological discourses. The methodological issues surrounding this tendency to equate a sexual act with a fixed sexual identity will be discussed below, but suffice it to say here that focusing on bodies and the sexual pleasures for which they are used is a way out of the categorical imperative that still haunts us with the use of labels first constructed by nineteenth-century sexologists.