Syncopated Sex: Transforming European Sexual Cultures

Abstract

Three fundamental impulses have nourished the field of the history of sexuality in modern Europe over the last thirty years. The original and most powerful of these was, in a sense, archaeological: the effort to excavate the material and imaginative universe of a past moment and reconstruct how human beings in a particular time and location experienced and made sense of sexual matters. The second major im pulse, which began to gather force in the mid-1990s even as the archaeological im pulse continued apace, could perhaps best be called integrationist (in the most pos itive sense of that word). This impulse took as axiomatic that there was no major phenomenon in modern European history that could not be more fully and deeply understood if attention to the history of sexuality was brought to bear on the study, from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to industrialization and Euro pean imperialism in Africa and Asia, to tsarism and Nazism, to post-World War II Americanization and the aftermath of communism. The third impulse has devel oped even more recently, as the density of information and conceptual insights ac cumulated over the years by the archaeologists and integrationists is finally making it possible for scholars to pursue projects that are comparativist. Having studied an ever wider array of national cultures—from the initial core of British and French and then also German and Swiss history to the histories of Italy, the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and Ireland, along with occasional, albeit still tentative, forays into Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Norway, Poland, Hun gary, and Romania—historians of sexuality now find it feasible to use cross-cultural comparisons and connections within Europe, including transnational flows of indi viduals, ideas, and movements, as a tool for challenging facile presumptions about causation and for thinking through more clearly than before the combinations of factors that determine changes in sexual cultures. The archaeological impulse was unquestionably inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, and it often remained deliberately agnostic about the causes of change. Nonetheless, the archaeologists were all the more profoundly historical for precisely that reason. They began from the idea that one purpose of history was to denaturalize the present, that sexuality itself had a history, and that all prior assumptions about I thank the anonymous readers for the AHR, audiences at Yale University and the University of Penn sylvania (with special thanks to George Chauncey, Joanne Meyerowitz, Kathleen Brown, and Benjamin Nathans), as well as the following, who brought their critical expertise and sharp eyes to bear: Caroline Arni, Robert Beachy, Eric Fassin, Myra Marx Ferree, Dicle Kogacioglu, Todd Shepard, and Michael Staub.