Towards an Etiology of the Closet: Sexuality Studies “After Sedgwick”

Abstract

Towards an Etiology of The Closet:Sexuality Studies "After Sedgwick" Kazuki Yamada (bio) The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality by Benjamin Kahan . Chicago: University of Chicago Press , 2019. 242 pp. $99.00 cloth, $32.00 paper. If after the appearance of The History of Sexuality (1976) many works in sexuality studies could be reasonably described as "After Foucault," then Benjamin Kahan's ambitious work is best described in addition as "After Sedgwick" (115). 1 Self-professed as a "susained exploration of [Eve Kosofsky Sedg wick's] work and thought in order to understand its impact," The Book of Minor Perverts explicitly positions itself as a study that aims to more fully describe, if not cut, the "Gordian Knots" that still remain unresolved and undertheorized in the field of sexuality studies in the wake of Sedgwick's critical insights in her 1990 Epistemology of the Closet (118). Fittingly, Kahan's central preoccupation in this book is to more thoroughly investigate what Sedgwick herself was hesitant to excavate: the story of the "invention of the homo/hetero binary," which she almost mockingly called the Great Paradigm Shift (116). For Kahan, the Great Paradigm Shift is a narrative of sexual etiology that posits the diachronic emergence of a sexual modality where desire has no cause beyond the gender-based object attractions which we are born with. In turn, The Book of Minor Perverts earnestly posits that if we hope to more deeply understand the history of the modern sexual etiology of congenital homo/heterosexuality and unravel its full consequences, there is no [End Page 435] more room for Sedgwick's hesitation in being attentive to the alternative sexual etiologies and "thousand aberrant sexualities" that the homo/hetero binary has historically "effaced" (8)—including those suggesting an acquired sexual etiology rather than a "born this way" explanation. Kahan's work instead emphatically urges readers to seek a way forward in what he describes as "historical etiology" amidst a contemporary political landscape where the homo/hetero binary is beginning to come undone (25), and in the process of doing so constructs a compelling foundation for how sexuality studies might proceed long after Sedgwick and Foucault. The Book of Minor Perverts is composed of seven chapters. Other than the introduction outlining the book's central concerns and methodology and the concluding afterword, each chapter focuses on one specific sexual etiology, balancing discussions of each etiology's technical mechanics with close readings of their manifestations and modifications in a diverse range of literary works (a dynamic Kahan calls "vernacular sexology" after Stephanie Foote). In this sense, Kahan's work very much follows Sedgwick in recognizing the value literary studies offer to historical and critical analyses of sexuality, and simultaneously joins a growing body of recent historical scholarship that is attentive to fin de siècle sexology's literary character even while the precise relationship between literature and sexology remains somewhat undertheorized. Readers familiar with the history of sexology will be most comfortable in chapters 1, 2, and 5, even as their arguments and approaches challenge dominant disciplinary, archival, and narrative demarcations. Chapter 1 traces the "uneasy" crystallization of situational homosexuality in the 1930s to earlier etiologies of sexual desire as cyclical and in tune with the seasons (27). By reading sexological theory alongside Thomas Dickinson's Winter Bound (1929) and Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934), Kahan explores how early twentieth century sexologists longed and failed to return modern heterosexuality's pathological "constant desire" for the "nostalgic past" of a healthy periodicity synchronized with the rhythms of nature. Kahan traces how, in doing so, an etiological framework was inadvertently created where heterosexuality's constancy became the norm against which the periodic and temporary became characteristic of homosexuality's cause, and heterosexuality was established as the congenital, psychologically rooted "always" to which contemporary discourses insisting on homosexuality's congenital nature aspire (29–30). [End Page 436] Chapter 2 continues this thinking around the relationship of environmental etiologies to the origin of congenital theories of sexuality. Collecting such etiologies of sexual situatedness under the term anthropologia sexualis after German sexologist Iwan Bloch (47), Kahan explores through a reading of Thomas mann...