"That Obscure Object of Historical Desire"

¹ See Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," and Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England.
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² See, especially, "Homosexuality's Closet."
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³ For a brilliant attempt to understand lesbianism as a cultural form in just these terms, see Crandall, "Do the Right Thing."
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⁴ Mudge might have acknowledged in this connection the work of Tim Hitchcock, particularly Hitchcock's "Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England" and the introduction to his edited collection, English Sexualities, 1700-1800.
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⁵ Mudge writes: "Feminist commentators, on the other hand, read 'pornography' as the quintessence of patriarchal oppression, objecting to sexualized violence and demeaning stereotypes. Both groups [i.e., traditional historians and feminist critics] treat 'pornography' as a monolithic discourse, generally unspecified as to text or image and uniformly self-evident both in purpose and affect. Both assume that the word will remain a pejorative and that the category it names is transhistorical in nature. Thinking of 'pornography' first and foremost as an act of the imagination, however, allows for a better understanding of pornography's satiric entanglements within the larger cultural field, for a more nuanced reading of its textual or visual strategies, and for a greater appreciation of its historical development." Mudge might have included Richlin's Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome among his examples of this transhistorical tendency in feminist criticism: for a critique of that collection along precisely these lines, see the review by Jackson. Gayle Rubin demonstrated long ago, in "The Traffic in Women," that it is possible to treat forms of female oppression as both universal and constructed: the enduring nature of an oppressive structure therefore provides no justification for essentializing it.
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⁶ The third chapter of How to Do the History of Homosexuality is entitled "Historicizing the Subject of Desire."
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⁷ It is curious in this context that Loesberg doesn't refer the reader to some of the most important scholarship on the connections between Foucault's thinking about sexuality and his personal life: see especially Davidson, "Ethics as Ascetics," and the third part of Eribon, Réflexions sur la question gay.
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⁸ See, for example, "Why is Diotima a Woman?" in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 113-151, 190-211.
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⁹ For example, Sha's "acting like a tourist in the archive" echoes my "behaves, in effect, like tourists in the archives" (How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 60); similarly, his "One thing is for sure: the Greeks did not define their sexual differences to enable the 'disintegration of our own concepts'" echoes my "the one thing about the original spectators of the Oedipus Rex that we can be sure of is that they did not wonder what it was like to be the original spectators of the Oedipus Rex" (ibid., 21).
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¹⁰ Cf. Nagel, The View from Nowhere.
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