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Queer physiognomies; or, how many ways can we do the history of sexuality?
Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Dana Seitler
The guiding questions of queer theory have focused on how to de-naturalize the categories of homosexuality gay and lesbian identity, and heterosexuality, revealing them as socially and historically constructed identities that have worked to establish the binary opposition between "normal" and "abnormal" sexual practices. Ostensibly moving away from the assumptions of identity politics, queer theory has had as its promise a project that was less interested in "discovering" stable sexual subjects from the past than in developing an understanding of the process of deviant subject formation that helped constitute the prescriptions for compulsory heterosexuality. (22) Accompanying the increasingly nuanced accounts of modern sexual formation has been, more or less, an agreement with Foucault that while "the sodomite had been a temporary aberration[,] the homosexual was now a species." (23) As a result, many queer readings have fallen along either side of this historical fault line: some attempt to complicate Foucault by identifying pre-twentieth-century semantic fields of same-sex desire whereby certain signs could be seen as coalescing around a "proto-homosexual" identity; others engage in descriptive explorations of the emergence of early-twentieth-century medico-juridical identity categories.
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While many have followed Foucault's lead in suggesting that these categories were productive as opposed to prohibitive--that they enabled sexual practice rather than simply repressing or regulating it--David Halperin demonstrates some of the costs of twentieth-century medical taxonomy. In One Hundred Years of Sexuality, Halperin describes how, prior to the twentieth century (a period he refers to as "before sexuality"), sexual formation and practice did not conform to the modern period's binary designation of sexual desire: "For the classical Athenians, there were not ... two different kinds of 'sexuality,' two differently structured psychosexual states or modes of affective orientation, corresponding to the sameness or difference of the anatomical sexes of the persons engaged in the sex act." (24) Instead, Halperin describes how pre-twentieth-century sexual practice and expression organized itself around a different and multiple set of axes that, in turn, generated a plurality of "discourses, practices, categories, patterns, or models" by which sexuality could be experienced and understood: axes around youth, generational difference, power relations, active and passive roles, gender crossing, and/or dominant and submissive subject positions. (25) The conception of same-sexual desire was manifold and variously constructed in relation to a series of asymmetrical social and sexual positions and hierarchies. Nonetheless, as Halperin describes it, by the twentieth century the new medical regime, positioning itself as the center of knowledge about human beings, worked effectively to shut down this multiplicity, for the different models for the expression of same-sex sexual feeling were superseded and replaced by the more stringent modern sexual identities with which we have become familiar--homosexuality and heterosexuality. In particular, male-male forms of sexual experience, along with all other same-sex sexual practices for both genders, became subsumed under the singular classification of "homosexuality." In his GLQ article "How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality," Halperin asserts: "The very notion of homosexuality implied that same-sex sexual feeling and expression, in all their many forms, constitute a single thing, called 'homosexuality,' which can be thought of as a single integrated phenomenon, distinct and separate from 'heterosexuality.' 'Homosexuality' refers to all same-sexual desire and behavior, whether hierarchical or mutual, gender-polarized or ungendered, latent or actual, mental or physical." (20)
