Discourse and Sexual Desire: German-Language Discourse on Masturbation in the Late Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Discourse and Sexual Desire:German-Language Discourse on Masturbation in the Late Eighteenth Century Franz X. Eder (bio) Discourse analysis and the history of sexuality have enjoyed a brief but very stimulating relationship. Since the 1970s the historiography of sexuality has increasingly been written in terms of the history of discourses on things sexual. Over the same period there has also been debate about what should be understood by the term discourse and about what meanings can be attributed to discourses on sexual matters. Regardless of how discourse has been defined and understood, scholars have raised questions about the kind of discourse analysis that is most appropriate for the history of sexuality. Likewise, they have discussed how best to conceive of the relationship between discursive texts and social practices or sexual experiences. This interaction between discourse analysis and the history of sexuality has proven so productive because, over the years, considerable doubts have been raised about the viability of a historiography determined by discourse-led approaches. Radical critics of discourse-based histories of sexuality claim that it represents little more than a novel repackaging of the old "history of ideas," whereby the construction of knowledge is examined without reference to the actual life-worlds inhabited by sexual actors. At the same time, other scholars have voiced their doubts about whether in earlier times sexual discourses impacted the lives of the average population and were able to influence actual sexual behavior. This article explores the conflict-laden relationship between discourse analysis and the history of sexualities on a number of levels.1 First, it shows how discourse and discourse analysis have become relevant to the study of sexual history. Then, it discusses the theoretical connections between [End Page 428] discourse and sexual experience along with the question as to which form of discourse analysis is best able to reflect the complexity of that relationship. The main part of the article examines in detail German-language pedagogical discourse on masturbation during the late eighteenth century. By applying an "interactive" concept of discourse this case study enables us to demonstrate just how fruitful so-called text-oriented discourse analysis can be for the study of the history of sexuality. Discourse Analysis and the History of Sexuality The troubled relationship between discourse analysis and the history of sexuality began in the 1960s and 1970s. According to the then-dominant psychoanalytic mode of interpretation, modern society led to the suppression of everything sexual.2 This "repression hypothesis" postulated the existence of an active, biologically fixed sexual drive that stood in opposition to culture and society. In line with this approach the historiography of sexuality concentrated on specific periods of suppression and emancipation, which were then incorporated into historical grand theories—in particular, the "civilization process" proposed by Norbert Elias. This led to a special focus on the transition from early modern forms of sexuality to modern, bourgeois society. According to this schema, the hostility toward sexuality expressed by bourgeois society since the eighteenth century led to a lasting repression of the sexual, accompanied by public and private silence regarding sexual matters, frigidity, and neuroses. It was only the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s that loosened these cultural constraints. At the end of the 1970s, however, repression-oriented views of sexuality came under heavy fire from the likes of Mary MacIntosh, Jeffrey Weeks, Randolph Trumbach, and, especially, Michel Foucault.3 These authors pleaded for a break with the Freudian "steam-kettle" model and for a radical historicization and denaturalization of sex.4 Foucault's agenda-setting work indicated that the notion of increasing sexual repression in bourgeois society was not to be discarded completely but argued that this obscured [End Page 429] the really important point. Foucault suggested that it was only in human sciences discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that modern conceptions of "sexuality" first began to emerge. Foucault referred to "dispositives," by which he meant sexual discourses and social technologies of sex. These dispositives drew more and more aspects of human life into the sexual realm during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thereby sexualizing the modern individual's search for truth and identity. For Foucault, discourses of sexuality thus formed...