Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Jason Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415358446
• eBook ISBN: 9781134244966
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was one of the most significant literary theorists of the last forty years and a key figure in contemporary queer theory. In this engaging and inspiring guide, Jason Edwards:

• introduces and explains key terms such as affects, the first person, homosocialities, and queer taxonomies, performativities and cusps
• considers Sedgwick's poetry and textile art alongside her theoretical texts
• encourages a personal as well as an academic response to Sedgwick's work, suggesting how life-changing it can be
• offers detailed suggestions for further reading

Written in an accessible and direct style, Edwards indicates the impact that Sedgwick's work continues to have on writers, readers, and literary and cultural theory today.

1
HOMOS

Does sexuality have a history? Did people in biblical and classical antiquity, and across all classes of early modern and late nineteenth-century Europe conceptualise male same-sex experiences similarly? And how do we conceive same-sex eroticism now? Do comparatively modern ideas of ‘inversion’ and ‘homo/heterosexuality’ make more sense to us than older conceptions, such as ‘sodomy’? In this chapter, I’ll introduce you to some of the most important and divergent ways of thinking about male same-sex eroticism. I’ll do so, first, in order to help you gain a stronger sense that sexuality has a history, that what we may currently, problematically and anachronistically conceptualise as ‘homosexuality’ was understood in quite different terms in the past and still is conceptualised differently in both our own and other cultural contexts. We’ll also start to think about some of the potential experiential and conceptual consequences of the overlap and apparent contradiction between the various available models.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

What counts as meaningfully or unacceptably sexual varies from person to person and changes in different cultural and historical contexts. With this in mind, I’m going to take you on a whistle-stop tour of some of the more influential ways of understanding male same sexuality in the post-antique Western world and document from the outset that the words and concepts that dominate our current understandings of sexuality are comparatively recent. For example, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘homosexual’ did not enter British English until the early 1890s, and ‘heterosexual’ appeared later still. I mention this not because I want to suggest that men did not have sex with men, women with women, or women with men before the 1890s, but to emphasise that how individuals understood and described their erotic experiences before the Victorian fin de siècle may have significantly differed from our own. Indeed, none of the conceptualisations that we’re about to discuss are interchangeable or value-neutral. Instead, as Sedgwick has persuasively argued, each has its own history and connotation. It may not, therefore, be particularly helpful to think about a Plato, Sappho, Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde as homosexual but, rather, to find out from their texts, archives and contexts in what ways they might have experienced, imagined and described their own or their protagonists’ eroticisms.

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE OR MINERAL: ‘SODOMY’

Although the numerous acts characterised as sodomy varied at different times and in a variety of places, in biblical antiquity and in many contexts up to and including parts of the contemporary United States of America, every form of non-procreative sex with man, woman or beast was potentially conceptualised as sodomy. That was because sodomites were and are imagined to be individuals with indiscriminate and ungovernable appetites whose desires might include a wide range of sexual acts irrespective of the number, gender or species of the participants involved or parts of the body employed. Sodomy, therefore, included buggery between people of the same and of the opposite sex, the withdrawal method, use of contraception, oral sex, solo and so-called mutual masturbation, again irrespective of the gender of the participant(s), as well as sex with other species.

As a concept, sodomy originally derived its name from a scene of homophobic genocide in the Old Testament; and, in Genesis, Chapter 19, to be precise, an entire civilisation, Sodom and Gomorrah, is destroyed by a merciless, vengeful divinity. As a result of this biblical derivation, sodomy was and is a sin as well as a crime, and individuals practising sodomy might associate their erotic actions with the risk of legal consequences, social and moral disapproval and divine damnation for both themselves and others in the vicinity, given the fate of the historical sodomites.

Increasingly, however, sodomy became difficult to prove within the law, whilst the legal consequences for the various acts contained under the umbrella of sodomy diminished, with sodomy shifting rapidly in Victorian England from a potential capital offence to being only rarely prosecuted. In addition, in a progressively more secularised, post-Enlightenment Europe, the theological bite of anti-sodomy agendas began to wane. As a result, there was increasingly less legal, sexual, moral and religious panic in relation to the various acts of sodomy, although some exploits remained more frowned upon than others. For instance, although there was a widespread popularisation of oral sex in the nineteenth century and relaxation of anxiety around masturbation across the twentieth, buggery, sex between people of the same gender, and sex with animals remain taboo in many contexts. Increasingly, then, whilst many people undoubtedly committed and continue to commit acts of so-called sodomy, they did and do not necessarily think of themselves as sodomites, seek to identify themselves as this erotic identity, or rally round the term as a point of potential resistance and solidarity.

FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

Things were conceptualised differently in classical antiquity, where sexual practices were not polarised between dyadic, reproductive sex and other deviant erotic tendencies but instead between insertive and receptive roles, along the axis of who penetrated who. Under this schema, those with more power ideally and phallically penetrated those with less, whether orally, anally, vaginally or intercrurally. (And for those of you who don’t know about or haven’t tried it, intercrural sex is penetration between the thighs or under the armpit.) Thus, men preferably penetrated women, adolescent boys and slaves of both genders, and penetrating boys was not perceived to be any less manly or desirable than penetrating women or slaves. Males of the same generation were not, however, encouraged to penetrate each other nor did ideal men let themselves be penetrated by women, slaves or adolescents. When they became men, though, former boys might move from the position of ‘catamite’—the anally receptive position—to active phallic penetrator. That was because classical sexuality was based on the assumption that male bonds of any duration must be structured around a diacritical difference, such as gender, class, ethnicity or generation, whilst eroticism between women proved difficult to conceptualise, given that the definition of sex involved phallic penetration. Within classical antiquity, then, far more forms of sexual behaviour were permitted than by the discourse of sodomy, but it would probably have made more sense to think about yourself as male or female, citizen or slave, old or young, active or passive, insertive or receptive, initiator or initiate, than to think about yourself as homo-or heterosexual.

REGENCY RAKES, OR, SEXUALITY WITHIN THE EARLY MODERN, EUROPEAN, ARISTOCRACY

Matters sexual were conceived differently again in early modern Europe. This was a period that Sedgwick has characterised as a ‘murderous interregnum or overlap between the rule of the priest and that of the doctor’ (T: 28), that is to say, an era in which sexuality tended to be governed decreasingly by religious institutions and increasingly by legal ones but in which mental-health professionals had not yet come to dominate thinking about eroticism.

Understandings of sexuality in early modern Europe were also highly stratified in terms of class. For example, Sedgwick has argued that there seems to have been a genuine, reasonably consistent, European subculture of aristocratic male same sexuality from the mid-seventeenth century onwards that was at once courtly and in touch with the criminal. It involved aristocratic men and small groups of their friends and dependents, including fellow bohemians and prostitutes from other classes, as well more ‘masculine’, less aristocratic sidekicks, such as cooks, valets, secretaries and others—a slippery group of servants-who-were-not-quite-servants who had unexplained bonds with their ‘masters’.

Individuals in this group were apparently already employing the term ‘gay’ in relation to their lifestyles, although these were not yet exclusively identified with male same sexuality as much as with a rakish eroticism potentially involving sexual contact with people of both genders and from more than one class. Members of this sub-culture were also likely to be effeminate connoisseurs and to have an interest in, or association with the High Church, initially European Catholic, later High Anglican. They might also promiscuously share these interests with passions for cross-dressing and the arts.

Because of the power associated with such men’s high-class position, Sedgwick has argued, they were less likely to be repressed or prosecuted, and more likely to leave records, than men from other backgrounds. Their experiences and accounts also tended to contain less emphasis upon anal thematics than either sodomy discourse or those of classical antiquity. It was, however, often impossible to predict from their feckless, ‘effeminate’ behaviour whether the final ruin of such individuals would be due to gambling, substance abuse, or the work of male or female favourites.

Like sodomy, therefore, the tragic narrative spirals often identified with early modern, aristocratic, rakish sexualities were based on the idea of indiscriminate erotic and economic wastage. Unlike sodomy, however, such scandals as there were tended to be more secular and social in flavour, in spite of this group’s aesthetic flirtation with the church. In addition, and unlike the conceptualisation of sexualities within classical antiquity, questions of masculine power were much less at stake. That was because, at this later historical juncture and for this class, effeminacy could connote either a similarity in a rake’s behaviour to the behaviour of women, for instance in a shared ‘effeminate’ taste for fashionable finery, or a promiscuous erotic flirtation with or conquest of many women. Questions of effeminacy were also less stigmatised in this subculture than they had been in classical antiquity or as they would again be in some of our current understandings of homosexuality because any potential feminisation occurred within a non-meritocratic political context in which the power of any given aristocrat tended to be material and hereditary rather than dependent on personal style. It was also the case that the aristocracy as a whole had become increasingly identified with effeminacy as the rising middle class successfully identified itself with manliness. As a result, the mutual exclusiveness of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits in general was less stressed, absolute and politically significant than it was to be for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, as we shall now go on to see.

OF MORALS AND MANLINESS: EARLY MODERN, MIDDLE-CLASS SEXUALITIES

When it comes to understanding how eroticism was conceptualised in early modern Europe in classes below the aristocracy, there are more considerable obstacles to mapping the territory. That is because, for the middle classes, the available evidence tends to be filtered through the ideological lens of bourgeois literature. As a result, Sedgwick suggested in 1985, considerably more historical research on primary sources was required to add texture and specificity to the provisional generalisations she was at that point able to offer, generalisations that she made available for revision by other scholars—including ourselves.

With this rider in place, however, Sedgwick suggested that those middle-class men in black who did incline towards same-sex eroticism often tended towards a more virile and classical, rather than effeminate, Continental or theatrical conception of themselves. For example, Sedgwick posited that lower-middle-class men did not tend to associate a particular personal style, such as rakishness or dandyism, with the genital activities now thought of as ‘homosexual’, whilst those without a classical education seemed to have operated sexually in something close to a cognitive vacuum, lacking access to unexpurgated antique erotic texts, to the aristocracy’s alternative subcultures and to the quotidian experience of public-school, same-sex eroticism.

If single and economically productive, such individuals did have a comparative amount of objective sexual freedom. But lacking the sense of legal and cultural immunity shared by the aristocracy and their more bohemian associates, lower-middle-class men inclined towards same-sex eroticism tended to be more marked by denials, rationalisations, fears, guilts and sublimations, as well as by an improvisatory resourcefulness valued in other contexts by their entrepreneurial class. Indeed, Sedgwick noted, the biographies of lower-middle-class men inclined towards queer eroticisms were full of oddities, surprises and apparent false starts, and there was not a particularly strong sense of a sexuality or predetermined erotic trajectory. Sexual encounters tended to be more silent, tentative and protean.

For those upper-middle-class men who were ‘lucky’ enough to have a public-school education, meanwhile, and who therefore had access to the erotic classics and to a range of ‘casual’ same-sexual adolescent experiences, they still did not, however, emerge into a developed sub-cultural community. They might have been able to turn to classical Sparta and Athens as models of virilising male bonds. They might have been able to imagine their single-sex schools, clubs, political institutions and armies, as well as at least penetrative same-sex eroticism, as potentially virilising. They might have perceived the exclusion of women from their intimate lives in the same virilising terms, rather than perceiving their choice of a male object as feminising them. Nevertheless, on leaving school, many such men seemed also to have identified same-sex eroticism with childishness and, consequently, as a mark of powerlessness; with shame, scorn and denial, although, Sedgwick notes, perhaps without the virulence of twentieth-century homophobia.

EROTICISMS MORE ESOTERIC: EARLY MODERN WORKING-CLASS SEXUALITIES

Reconstructing the evidence for early modern, working-class same-sex eroticism was even more difficult than for the bourgeoisie, Sedgwick acknowledged. That was because proletariat labour requirements and illiteracy resulted in few first-hand accounts of sexual experiences from this demographic group apart from legal documents relating to prosecutions for erotic misdemeanours and the obviously ideological evidence of texts such as bourgeois novels. As a result, there was little to no surviving evidence of a homosexual role or subculture indigenous to working-class men, apart from their potentially economically and culturally empowering sexual value to their more privileged peers amongst whom the objectification of proletarian men fitted neatly within classical models of powerful, penetrative eroticism moving down from the insertive master to the receptive participant.

With this in mind, though, Sedgwick quietly speculated on the possibility that for the majority of non-public-school-educated men, overt homosexual acts may have been recognised mainly as acts of violence. That was because such acts would more often become legally visible for the violence that accompanied them than for their distinctly sexual content. And that in turn was because the early modern period was a historical moment in which sodomy laws were less frequently applied and in which the new laws explicitly relating to male homosexuality that emerged in many European countries towards the end of the nineteenth century had not yet arrived on the statute books, a subsequently crucial period for our conceptualisations of same sexual activity, as we shall now see.

THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: OR, THE DISCOURSE OF ‘SEXUALITY’

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as French historian Michel Foucault has influentially argued, a discourse of ‘sexuality’ emerged, such that people were encouraged to talk about sex and to look out for eroticism in the widest variety of contexts, including the medical, legal, psychological and, Sedgwick would add, the literary. Indeed, according to Foucault, sex was driven out of hiding in this period and constrained to lead a discursive existence; and whereas sodomy had been conceptualised as a category of intermittent, occasional or habitual erotic acts, from the nineteenth century forwards individuals were encouraged to imagine that they had a sexuality that was at the core of their identities.

Exceeding the bare choreographies of heterosexual procreation, having a sexuality means considering ourselves predominantly sexual people, with erotic pasts and morphologies. Indeed, under this still-dominant regime, nothing that goes into or emerges out of our bodies or minds is imagined to be unaffected by our sexualities. We suppose that eroticism is at the root of all our actions. We believe that sexuality is written immodestly on our faces and bodies, a secret that is always giving itself away; and we suspect that eroticism is less a habitual sin than the secret of our singular selves. Thus, just as everybody is necessarily male or female, so too do we each possess a sexuality which has implications for the least ostensibly erotic aspects of our personalities.

Among the panoply of new sexualities that were first identified in the late nineteenth century, including ‘zooerasts’, ‘zoophiles’, ‘auto-monosexualists’, ‘mixoscopophiles’, ‘gynecomasts’, ‘presbyophiles’, ‘sexoesthetic inverts’ and ‘dyspareunist women’, two will particularly concern us here: ‘inverts’ and ‘homosexuals’.

INVERSION: ‘A WOMAN’S SOUL TRAPPED IN A MAN’S BODY’

Following David Halperin’s important work, Sedgwick has emphasised the importance of ideas of inversion to supposedly common-sense conceptualisations of same-sex desire from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day. The concept of inversion makes sense of male same-sex eroticism by positing, in German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrich’s famous 1869 phrase, ‘a female soul trapped in a man’s body’; and, in the case of lesbian women, ‘a male soul trapped in a woman’s body’. Thus, if I, as a man, am attracted to another man, the presumption goes, I must have a female soul, since desire is only conceivable in pseudo-reproductive, cross-gendered terms. Similarly, if I, as a woman, am attracted to another woman, I must possess a male soul.

It probably won’t take you long to work out the obvious conceptual problems with this model! For example, with inversion in mind, it is hard to understand how gay or lesbian couples ever get together. After all, I, as an inverted man attracted to men, and with a tacitly heterosexual woman’s soul trapped in my male body, would presumably only be attracted to straight men, rather than to other men with inner women’s souls, unless of course my inner soul was in fact an inner lesbian! Put another way, the inversion model implies that one half of every male—male couple would always ‘be the man’ and presumably act butch and do the phallic penetrating and one would always ‘be the woman’ and presumably act femme and be penetrated. At its most flexible, the inversion model might allow for the fact that the roles could be reversed. But the presumption is always ‘one man, one woman’, whoever happens to be taking the role of man or woman at any given time. And what the inversion model has very little explanatory power in relation to is same-sex couples in which both parties appear to be masculine or feminine, butch or femme.

As a model, then, inversion imagines that sexuality and gender map onto each other in two particular and perhaps even contradictory ways. And brace yourselves here because it may take a while before a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• WHY SEDGWICK?
• KEY IDEAS
• 1 Homos
• 2 Homosocialities
• 3 Epistemologies of the closet
• 4 Queer taxonomies
• 5 Queer performativities
• 6 Queer cusps
• 7 Affects
• 8 Autobiographies
• AFTER SEDGWICK
• FURTHER READING
• Works cited