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I was of course pleased but also quite surprised
when Richard Sha wrote me to say that he had conceived
the idea of a volume for the Romantic Circles Praxis
Series that would consist of responses to my 2002 book,
How to Do the History of Homosexuality. I know
little, and so I said little, about the Romantic period
in that book, and I didn't see how my speculations
would be especially helpful to Romanticists. So it was
with a good deal of interest that I read the
stimulating essays collected here, but it was also with
a continuing sense of puzzlement—a puzzlement
shared, evidently, by some of the contributors
themselves, who could identify only extremely tenuous
or general connections between their work and my own.
The result, which will be reflected in the commentary
that follows, has been a pronounced fluctuation in our
level of engagement with one another's work.
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I found myself most in sympathy with the projects of
Susan Lanser and Bradford Mudge. Lanser's effort to
imagine and to describe a history of female
homosexuality separate from that of male homosexuality
is very much in line with a couple of hints contained
in my book, as she notes, though the credit for
conceiving lesbianism as both a perennial potentiality
within and a possible menace to the social structures
of male dominance belongs to Gayle Rubin and to Valerie
Traub, as Lanser also knows.[1]
Moreover, Lanser seems to be elaborating the tension
that Traub discerns in English Renaissance discourses
between the figure of the tribade and the figure of the
friend, the former being a monstrous image of sex and
gender deviance while the latter embodies the
possibility of a female homoeroticism contained within
the bounds of virtue and the canons of femininity. When
Lanser writes of "the fine line of external appearance
that separates the gender-bending sapphist from the
virtuous friend," I wonder about two things. First,
what sort of historical connections does Lanser see
between the phenomena described by Traub in the earlier
period and what Lanser calls "the lines separating
virtuous from transgressive alliances" in her
period—lines which, she says, "were often
literally paper thin"? Second, I wonder whether or not
it makes sense to attempt to construct, from whatever
resemblances there might be between "the tribade" and
"the gender-bending sapphist" on the one hand and the
virtuous female friends of the early modern and
Romantic periods on the other, two enduring types or
figures or forms of life that would correspond, within
the history of lesbianism, to the sorts of
transhistorical categories that compose a genealogy of
male homosexuality, at least according to the model I
sketched out in the title essay of my book.
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The source of my greatest sympathy with Lanser
springs from her avowed interest in the possible
connections between homosexuality and cultural forms,
because that interest happens to coincide with my
current preoccupations.[2]
Lanser seeks to uncover and to clarify the relation
between poetic tropes and female homosexuality as well
as the relation between poetic discourse and the
history of sexuality in general: "I want to ask," she
writes, "what we can learn about the place of sapphism
in the Romantic imagination by looking at poetic
tropes." I would like to encourage her to pursue and
even to broaden that project, by analyzing the peculiar
relevance of specific cultural forms to homosexuality
itself. As she notes, Andrew Elfenbein has already
provided a model for such a project in Romantic
Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role, which
inquires into what might be called the culture of
homosexuality, by which I mean both homosexuality as a
cultural practice and culture as a carrier of
homosexual meanings. Elfenbein's achievement in that
book, at least in the eyes of this non-specialist,
consists in describing and assessing the particular
sexual value that could be attached, and that came
ultimately to be attached, to a cultural form—in
this case, the theory and practice of individual
genius. It is as if Elfenbein had identified, at a
formative stage in the developmental history of
European culture, what D. A. Miller identified at a
formative stage in the developmental history of the gay
male individual: namely, "those early pre-sexual
realities of gay experience" that impart a definite,
discernible gay orientation, a kind of gay internal
logic, to an existence that has yet to crystallize into
a homosexual identity—that can be described,
therefore, only as proto-gay (26).
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At least since the success of "Queer Eye for the
Straight Guy" and its spinoffs, it has become
commonplace to regard homosexuality as somehow
producing a unique perspective on the world as well as
a cluster of superior insights into life, love, and
matters of taste in general. According to this way of
thinking, homosexuality involves not only specific
sexual practices but a wide variety of distinctive
social and cultural practices, a particular attitude to
life, a critical take on straight society, a heightened
sense of taste and style, a collectively shared but
nonetheless singular outlook on the world. Of course,
as any reader of Elfenbein's book knows, such a notion
is nothing new—although its entry into the stock
of received ideas that constitute the common sense of
straight society has been relatively recent. It seems
to me that Lanser may be in a good position to
contribute an important and revealing chapter to the
history of that notion, and to expand its purview
within studies of female homoeroticism and
homosexuality. "Tropics of discourse," ethical as well
as literary genres, structures of feeling, and codes of
behavior may offer a lot of useful material with which
to think about sexuality as a cultural form no less
than as an erotic practice.[3]
It would be good to know more about the lesbian
specifics of sexuality as culture.
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Bradford Mudge's proposal "to include the emergence
of pornography as one of the premier events of modern
culture" in our new histories of both sexuality and
literature is also most welcome and long overdue.
Others have considered the rise of pornography in the
eighteenth century to be formative for the constitution
of modern sexual subjects.[4]
Mudge extends their work by providing a rigorously
historicist approach to the very category of
pornography that gives it new substance and greater
precision in historical terms. As he writes, "The
history of pornography begins at the moment that the
word itself is dislodged as a 'given,' as an absolute
that imposes itself anachronistically upon contested
terrain." Although he apologizes for taking part in a
"semantic shell game" that consists in arguing about
what exactly the word means and to what phenomena it
can be most accurately applied, he rightly insists that
this sort of semantic quibbling "performs a necessary
service, opening up 'pornography' as an imaginative
construct whose history has the potential to complicate
our ideas about human sexuality and its
representations." The study of the word, its meaning,
and the history of its deployment is crucial, because,
"like 'homosexuality,' in other words, 'pornography'
can uncritically erase the very historical process that
brought it into being—regardless of critical
intentions." Mudge's analysis dramatizes, and is
intended to dramatize, the usefulness of the kind of
historicism that I have tried to defend, so it's not
surprising that I like his essay. I also agree with
Mudge that many feminist critiques of pornography, in
the course of their laudable efforts to focus attention
on the enduring aspects of gender hierarchies, have
despecified and essentialized it.[5]
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Jill Heydt-Stevenson's study of the sexual
exuberance of Jane Austen's early writings clearly fits
in well with Mudge's project. Mudge writes:
What if, however, modern "literature" had an evil
twin, a shady and disreputable other whose pleasures
mocked the refined taste of the public sphere even as
they embodied the quintessence of its new consumer
capitalism? What if, in other words, literature and
pornography were complementary constructions whose
Manichean drama (as artificial and self-serving a
contest as those staged by professional wrestling)
obscures the power with which they together construct
and deploy sexual norms and deviancies? Then,
presumably, the sexual bodies imagined by romantic
fiction would become valuable prehistory to our
modern paradigms; no longer either legitimate or
illegitimate aesthetic representations, they would
instead become both imaginative prefigurements of our
lived realities and historical records of the
evolving conflicts between private acts and the
public domain that sought at once to express and
control those acts.
Heydt-Stevenson's reading of Austen, it
seems to me, provides an effective illustration of the
possible advantages that Mudge's conceptual gambit
might offer. That is why I would have liked to see a
greater degree of rapprochement between Mudge
and Heydt-Stevenson at the site of Jane Austen, or
perhaps I would have liked to see a less Manichean
conceptualization on Mudge's part of the relations
between pornography and literature (which Mudge does
describe as "complementary"). One possible pay-off that
greater attention to the intimate relations between
literature and its "evil twin" might yield is an
enhanced understanding of the erotics of Pride and
Prejudice. Although Mudge describes the ways that
Austen distances her mature novels from pornography,
and although he argues that "the realist novel of
manners must turn away from the very thing on which its
existence depends: the possibility of sexual pleasure
untrammeled by love and marriage," he also recognizes
that Pride and Prejudice consists in the
construction of a fantasy. The particular fantasy Mudge
discerns in that novel is the fantasy of "the union of
the finest offspring of the aspiring middle class
(Elizabeth) with the noblest scion of the landed gentry
(Darcy)." But surely Austen is fantasizing, like any
author of a Harlequin Romance, about a utopia that is
every bit as much sexual as it is social (even if no
bodices are actually ripped in Pride and
Prejudice): many details in the novel are
subordinated to the task of heightening the excitement
mobilized by the erotic dream of the perfect union
between the brooding, inaccessible hero and the
virtuous, deserving heroine. Heydt-Stevenson gives us
reason to believe that from her earliest writings Jane
Austen had been adept at crossing realism with fantasy,
that she was deeply invested in female sexual autonomy,
that she was not afraid of its excesses. Without
dehistoricizing or despecifying the definition of
pornography, then, might there be a way for Mudge and
Heydt-Stevenson to agree—perhaps with help from
Elizabeth Fay's historical account of
pornography-in-action, of pornography as social
text—on a set of protocols for describing the
pornographic design that shapes and informs Pride
and Prejudice?
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Daniel O'Quinn's effort to historicize "Equiano as a
subject of desire" did not fail to evoke a grateful
echo in me.[6]
I wonder if Equiano's post-conversion memoir affords
material of sufficient quality and quantity to enable
the critic to historicize his erotic subjectivity, but
I can only applaud O'Quinn's impulse to "bring styles
of thinking endemic to queer theory to bear on the
historical materialism of much recent work on the
relationship between colonial and metropolitan society
in Romantic studies."
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I now come to the essays by Jonathan Loesberg and
Richard Sha, both of which contain substantial
critiques of my work on Foucault and the history of
sexuality, and which call for a more extended response.
I shall try nonetheless to be brief.
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Loesberg is envious of me. That is not a moral
judgment: it is what he proudly and unapologetically
declares. He endows me (undoubtedly for the first and
last time in my life) with a heroic glamor, analogous
to that attached to the survivors of the Normandy
landings in the eyes of the post-Spielberg generation,
and he positions himself as a "hedgerow
historian"—that is, a detached, nostalgic
spectator longing, at a safe distance, for the danger
and glory of The Good Fight. In this case, that fight
is over the proper uses of Foucault, of gay history,
and of the interpretation of sexual life in ancient
Greece. Loesberg's ostensibly frank avowal of the
inauthenticity of his stake in these
controversies—he has, he confesses, "no Greek, no
Latin, no expertise in any of the requisite
fields"—is, and is meant to be, disarming. In
other words, it doesn't leave me much in the way of a
viable subject-position from which to respond. Can the
object of voyeuristic fascination speak? Can those who
already know their credentials to be inauthentic suffer
any further disqualification? As typically happens in
public self-abasement, however, Loesberg confesses to
the wrong sin: what he excuses himself for merely
serves as a cover for a more dubious maneuver that he
refuses to cop to.
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To be perfectly uncharitable about it, Loesberg is
unhappy because he feels excluded from the
philosophical thrills of the history of
homosexuality—and excluded by homosexuals, of all
people, who have somehow managed to shoulder him aside
in a come-from-behind triumph of radical chic. He wants
to stake his claim to this territory, in particular to
explore the philosophical issues that emerge from
scholarly efforts to link history with politics, truth
with power, Foucault's life with Foucault's work, and
homosexuality with the history of
homosexuality.[7]
In the case of Foucault, he objects to readings of
Foucault's History of Sexuality that invoke
Foucault's interest in sadomasochistic practices in
order either to defend or to discredit his work, and he
criticizes me for letting liberal critics "off the hook
by creating the authentic connection of a hagiography
that excludes them from the possibility of
comprehending." He goes on to say that "the problem
with all these connections (between S/M and life) is
that they reduce the challenge of Foucault's thought to
a reaction to a specific practice rather than using a
reaction to a practice to test our ability to
accommodate a way of thinking." (Loesberg's own
tendency to characterize my approach to Foucault and to
gay history as narrowly political rather than as
philosophical or scholarly seems to me reductive in
just this way.) Loesberg clearly has an investment in
this topic: he wants to be right there, in the front
lines of the battle, on Omaha Beach, but he thinks he's
too late to make it. He comforts himself for not being
an authentic warrior by constructing from his very
inauthenticity a passport to philosophy, if not to
Normandy, one which has (according to him) Foucault's
authenticating stamp on it. I do sympathize with him,
in fact: working occasionally as a man in feminism, I
too have experienced the masochistic joys and epistemic
benefits of inauthenticity, of being necessarily and
irredeemably the wrong man in the wrong place.[8]
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The problem is that Loesberg isn't willing to
interrogate the nature of his own investment in The
Good Cause beyond simply declaring it. Much less is he
willing to claim it and own it. What his handwringing
amounts to is a refusal to recognize that in fact he
has no "hedgerow envy": there is no detachment here, no
belatedness at the scene of battle. Loesberg is
passionately engaged, in his fashion. He is already
implicated in the history and theory of homosexuality,
but he is not willing to explore (indeed, he is almost
unwilling to name) his own implication in it as a
heterosexual postmodernist, except by entitling his
interest, defensively, "philosophy." Thus, his
apologetic, self-conscious, abashed, but ultimately
triumphal claim to join the party ends up looking too
much like what it had sincerely wanted to avoid:
namely, an assertion of heterosexual (philosophical)
privilege. But, really, as all the world knows,
identification is a solvent of identity. There is room
in gay history for all sorts of people, and the history
of sexuality matters to many of us for many sorts of
reasons. Identifying, claiming, and knowingly
mobilizing those reasons shouldn't be such a scary
business. Nor should it be necessary to make other
people pay for one's own lack of the "correct"
identitarian or scholarly qualifications, for one's
loss of a sense of entitlement. Come on, Loesberg and
other victims of hedgerow envy: encore un effort
pour être historiens!
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Richard Sha also wants to be me. At least he reworks
bits of my prose into his own text, more as a series of
in-jokes addressed to me, or so I presume, than as
winks at the reader.[9]
But he has a larger point to make: "alterity has become
a post-modern version of objectivity. By that I mean
that whereas under objectivity, historians could rely
upon an historical object independent of the subject
who wants it to become an historical object—a
position that can now seem naive—our recent
historicist self-consciousness that there are no
innocent objects of historical inquiry has meant that
alterity now takes on the possibility of distance
between subject and historical object without bringing
with it objectivity's naive baggage. Our alterities are
calculated." That criticism seems to me to be very
astute and far-reaching. It is quite canny of Sha to
notice the way that the category of "alterity" can
function in the history of sexuality as a badge of
honor, a test of rigor, a guarantee of objectivity. So
his criticism of the function of alterity seems
well-founded. But I'm not sure it represents a valid
criticism of me.
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In fact, I should have thought that Sha, in framing
his critique of the place of alterity in current
histories of sexuality, would have numbered me among
his allies instead of his targets. What I had singled
out as "priggish" about "my [earlier] insistence on the
alterity of the Greeks, about my [former] effort to get
historians of sexuality to adhere unfailingly to neat,
categorical, air-tight distinctions between ancient
paederasty and modern homosexuality," after all, was
precisely the tendency to dictate the proper uses of
alterity, to identify a historian's dedication to
alterity with objectivity, rigor, resistance to
pleasure, and intellectual virtue (How to do,
14). When I called my earlier attitude "priggish," what
I meant was that there was something excessively
strict, doctrinaire, righteous, superior, even
schoolmarmish about my desire to prescribe to students
of the past what sort of pleasure they were entitled to
find in the archive, and how they might connect
pleasure with truth. In undertaking a public
auto-critique, I intended to acknowledge that the
history of sexuality allows for multiple sites of
identification with the past, and that it is not the
historian's job to decide whether others should get off
by seeing themselves reflected in the surviving record
of antiquity or by discovering strange and exotic
historical creatures beyond the horizons of their own
cultural imagination. I clearly stated my own
preference for a historicist approach, and I also tried
to specify the reasons as well as the personal (erotic,
ethical) investments that lay behind that preference.
But I also recognized, in the end, that "a historicist
approach to sexuality needs to be argued for as a
preference, not insisted upon as a truth" (23). So
much, I would have thought, for alterity as
objectivity. Sha quotes this last remark of mine,
rather skeptically, but he discounts it, as if he
thought I didn't really mean it.
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To be sure, I do think there are some cognitive
advantages for historical understanding in attending to
and even emphasizing alterity. I don't deny that for a
moment. But to speak of "cognitive advantages for
historical understanding" is to open up the category of
"historical understanding" to further negotiation and
specification, to allow for an ongoing discussion of
what constitutes such an understanding, what kind of
understanding we seek when we undertake any particular
project of historical analysis, how that work is
carried out, within what sort of intellectual and
political and institutional horizons it is inscribed,
who wants it and for what reasons. My attachment to
alterity therefore has little to do with a notion of
historical objectivity as a kind of permanent court of
last appeal sitting in perpetual session to judge the
rightness or wrongness of historical statements. My own
belief is that my pragmatist understanding of the value
of alterity is consistent with my pragmatist notion of
objectivity—with an alternative view of what
constitutes objectivity within the realm of historical
practice. Such a revisionist notion of objectivity is
in any case far removed, I think, from Sha's somewhat
punitive, positivistic understanding of
"objectivity."
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Sha writes, "Just as imposing our notions of
sexuality onto the Greeks leads to blindnesses, so too
does insisting that the Greeks were absolutely other."
I agree. Did I not urge, after all, that "a sensitivity
to difference should not lead to the ghettoization or
exotification of the Other, to an othering of the Other
as an embodiment of difference itself"? (17). I rather
thought that by making an explicit defense of
historicism; by stating my preference for an approach
to the past that valued, without fixating
singlemindedly on, its alterity; by articulating the
reasons for my preference; and by emphasizing that
preference as a preference—and not as a
truth or a law or a method or a virtue or an
imperative: I thought that by doing all those things I
had opposed the very fetishizing of alterity of which
Sha now accuses me. I don't maintain that the Greeks
were "absolutely other." Indeed, my hermeneutic
principles, which insist that any notion of alterity is
inevitably determined by reference to the subject who
constructs it and thus by reference to our present,
forbid me to imagine, let alone to lobby for, any such
transcendental object of historical knowledge and
desire. Already in my 1990 book, One Hundred Years
of Homosexuality, I inveighed against what I
called "a kind of ethnocentrism in reverse, an
insistence on the absolute otherness of the Greeks, . .
. an ethnographic narcissism as old as
Herodotus—a tendency to dwell only on those
features of alien cultures that impress us as diverging
in interesting ways from 'our own'" (60). And in
How to Do the History of Homosexuality I
argued that we cannot reconstitute the otherness of the
Greeks "by an insistent methodological suspension of
modern categories, by an austerely historicist
determination to identify and bracket our own
ideological presuppositions so as to describe earlier
phenomena in all their irreducible cultural specificity
and time-bound purity" (107).
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It is Sha who dreams of an otherness that would be
really, truly, objectively Other:
On the one hand, Halperin wants to think outside of
our present concept of orientation. On the other
hand, he makes orientation his vantage point for
establishing the alterity of Ancient Greek sexuality.
His choice of orientation as the vantage point for
gauging the alterity of the Greeks has the unintended
effect of anchoring modern sexual categories in the
ontology of history. One could easily imagine other
ways of thinking about alterity: for example, by
examining how different cultures cope with the
elasticity and excessiveness of desire, orientation
thus becomes a strategy for dealing with—for
tempering—the mobility of desire just as gender
is one means of discouraging excess desire in Ancient
Greece. Such a reimagining demands that we truly
think outside of orientation by insisting upon its
ideological work without running the danger of
reifying orientation as a vantage point from which to
gauge alterity.
Sha wants "other ways of thinking about
alterity"; he seeks the possibility of "truly
think[ing] outside of orientation." In other words, Sha
is the one who desires an absolute alterity, a desire
he then falsely projects onto me.
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And so he is upset with me because he suspects that
I may have palmed off on him an alterity that is not
the genuine article. As the passage quoted above makes
clear, he thinks he has caught my version of alterity
in the act of smuggling in contemporary identities in
the guise of otherness, just as he has caught me in the
act of "anchoring modern sexual categories in the
ontology of history" and "reifying orientation as a
vantage point from which to gauge alterity." But I made
no secret of it. That is exactly what I set out to do.
There is no "unintended effect" here. My insistence on
approaching the history of sexuality from within the
cultural and sexual horizons of my own location is the
very thing that safeguards the version of alterity I
desire from ever being or claiming to be "absolutely
other." Contrary to what Sha claims, I don't try, as a
historian, to step out of my own world, to escape my
own culture, and I don't dream of a "view from
nowhere."[10]
I am happy to inhabit the contradictions of my own
existence.
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In other words, Sha is quite right when he claims
that I want both to think outside modern sexual
categories and to acknowledge them as framing my
historical inquiries—when he speaks of
"Halperin's resistance to orientation, a resistance
that simultaneously tries to step outside of it and to
enshrine it as a vantage point." That is what I think
historians of sexuality need to do. After all, to be a
historian of sexuality is necessarily to inhabit
multiple temporalities: as a sexual subject oneself,
one is bound to contemporary sexuality in an
instinctive and unarguable way, but as a historian one
engages in the thought-experiment of living in a
different world. To be a historian of sexuality is
therefore to give oneself over to an endlessly
stereoscopic sort of vision: it is to see the world
simultaneously as it makes sense to oneself, at a very
visceral level, and as it makes sense of the documented
experiences of others. It is to recognize that modern
sexual concepts compel belief with a force unlike that
of any other philosophical concepts, while also
recognizing that they do not determine the totality of
one's cognition or prevent one from entering
imaginatively into other people's experiences of desire
and pleasure. The elusive but seductive goal of this
intellectual ascesis is to turn us into
anthropologists of our own culture and historians of
our own present.
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Now, no one said that any of this was going to be
easy, that it would be free from contradiction and
paradox, that it would produce some stable and lasting
scholarly dispensation, that it would safeguard us from
noxious effects and consequences, that it would place
in our hands some surefire disciplinary method or set
us on the royal road to historical objectivity. But
that's precisely what makes it interesting—and,
in my view at least, preferable to the
alternatives.
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