Les Choses et les Mots: Missing Words and Blurry Things in the History of Sexuality

Abstract

In Solitary Sex, Thomas Laqueur adopts a position that might be called constructivist but not discursivist. He does not speak, as historians with an allegiance to Foucault's work often do, of 'invention', but argues that masturbation was 'something that had been perfectly well understood since Antiquity, even if it was variously classified and named'. The thing was there already: the word, and any change in words, came later. This article asks some questions about what it might mean for the history of sexuality to talk about unnamed things, missing words, or absent expressions. The examples are taken from the history of frigidity, as an attempt to trace the problematic absence of a name, and the name of a problematic absence.