Masculinity and the Science of Desire

Abstract

'Male sexuality', Richard Dyer has suggested, 'is a bit like air — you breathe in it all the time, but you aren't aware of it much.' If this is true, then it makes any attempted deconstruction very hazardous — especially when it is attempted by three men, as it will be on this panel. This session in fact has two major preoccupations. The first is with the impact of popular and theoretical assumptions about what it is to be a man. My own contribution will be an analysis of the influence of sexology. The importance of this would-be scientific discourse, as I have tried to argue in my book Sexuality and its Discontents, is that it codifies assumptions and beliefs which still structure the way we think about sexuality. The second preoccupation is with male homosexuality, and with the key role concepts of homosexuality have had during the past century in thinking about masculinity. This preoccupation may have something to do with the particular desires, identities or object choices of the speakers. More critically from my point of view, this concern with homosexuality has been central to the discourse of sexology since the late nineteenth century. Over 1,000 publications on homosexuality — and chiefly male homosexuality — appeared between 1898 and 1908. The love that dared not speak its name was already becoming pretty vocal. Nor was this concern accidental or arbitrary. Then as today, homosexuality posed crucial questions about the relationship between masculinity and sexuality. The putative 'Science of Sex' is just about a hundred years old. Its key moments of public emergence came with path breaking publications in the 1870s and 1880s: the first was Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex in 1871, which suggested that survival depended upon sexual selection and that the