Queering the Study of Early American Sexuality

Abstract

HE study of sexuality in history is predicated on the implicit assumption that sexuality comprises a set of acts, desires, and codes that can be distinguished from other dimensions of experience. While this division produces at least the aura of a stable object of study, it also leads toward the difficulty repeatedly cited by speakers at the MCEAS/Omohundro conference Sexuality in Early America, that of finding evidentiary material on which to found a richer history of sexuality in early America. Yet a comment made by Kathy Peiss in her closing remarks at the conference encourages us to question this division. A scholar whose research focuses on twentieth-century sexuality, Peiss commented on the difference made by the historical presence or absence of a specific domain of sexuality-her point being that early Americans did not recognize the as a discrete category the way people in the present do. If the realm of the sexual not only failed to signify semantically for early Americans what it does for us, as Bruce Burgett reminds us, but did not even exist recognizably, the study of the area, while certainly not simplified, may in fact be liberated. We are free to consider not only documented acts and institutions but also how discourses and desires that can make a reasonable case for considering in relation to the realm of the or erotic are deployed in society. Such a study becomes as much a matter of reading as of documentation. And while I have said we thus far, I cannot proceed without revealing my own academic perspective: I come to early American studies not as a historian but as a literary scholar, and gatherings such as the conference remind me to what extent our habits and assumptions sometimes render us very different creatures indeed. In literary criticism, as well as other disciplines, one of the most active current methodologies for thinking about the ways literal and symbolic sexuality circulates through the realms of power, knowledge, and discourse is queer theory. For anyone coming from a background in