Transnational Sex and U.S. History

Abstract

In the discipline of history, is the word of the day, or maybe the decade, but what it actually means is difficult to decipher. In the December 2006 issue of this journal, six historians discussed transnational history and circled around a definition. Their collective deliberations outlined the contours of an area of study and suggested a few core premises that might read as follows: At their most obvious, transnational histories question the nation as the default unit of analysis and remind us of the artificiality and permeability of political borders. Transnational histories, though, are neither world histories with comprehensive accounts of everything ev erywhere nor comparative histories that compare and contrast isolated or static en tities. Instead, they attend to specific movements, transits, and circulations that crossed or transcended one or more national borders. These transnational flows involved people, capital, goods, and knowledge; they took place through migrations, trade, conquest, and communications; and they included the spread and reworking of religion, science, popular culture, art, public policies, and social movements. Transnational histories may focus on interconnections, but they also recognize the power that some empires, nations, groups, or individuals held (and hold) over others. They acknowledge uneven connections and flows as well as the processes and net works that connected some people and excluded others. Although one can easily imagine other ways to construe transnational histories, a number of us seem to have groped our way from multiple directions—from postcolonial and cultural studies, from social, intellectual, economic, and political history, from the history of immi gration and diaspora, and from the Atlantic world and Pacific Rim—toward this particular version, and we can now track it as it works its way through our various historiographie domains.1 For the history of sexuality, this transnational approach seems especially apt.