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8 Discourse, desire and sexual deviance Some problems in a history of homosexuality

Jeffrey Weeks [1981]

The publication by the Kinsey Institute of the book Homosexualities underlines what is likely to become a truism in the next few years: that we can no longer speak of a single homosexual category as if it embraced the wide range of same sex experiences in our society (Bell and Weinberg, 1978). But recognition of this, tardy as it has been, calls into question a much wider project: that of providing a universal theory and consequently a ‘history’ of homosexu- ality. The distinction originally made by sociologists (and slowly being taken up by histor- ians) between homosexual behaviours, roles and identities, or between homosexual desire and ‘homosexuality’ as a social and psychological category (Hocquenghem, 1978), is one that challenges fundamentally the coherence of the theme and poses major questions for the historian. This paper addresses some of these problems, first, by examining approaches that have helped construct our concepts of homosexuality, second, by tracing the actual evolution of the category of homosexuality, third, by exploring some of the theoretical approaches that have attempted to explain its emergence and, finally, by charting some of the problems that confront the modern researcher studying ‘homosexuality’.

Approaches

It has been widely recognized for almost a century that attitudes towards homosexual behav- iour are culturally specific, and have varied enormously across different cultures and through various historical periods. Two closely related and virtually reinforcing sources for this awareness can be pinpointed: first, the pioneering work of sexologists such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, Havelock Ellis and others, whose labelling, categorizing and taxo- nomic zeal led them, partially at least, outside their own culture, and, second, the work of anthropologists and ethnographers who attempted to chart the varieties of sexual behaviour and who supplied the data on which the sexologists relied. The actual interest and zeal in the pursuit of sex was, of course, a product of their own culture’s preoccupations, and the resulting findings often displayed an acute ‘ethnocentric bias’ (Trumbach, 1977, p. 1), partic- ularly with regard to homosexuality; but this early work has had a long resonance. The three most influential English-language cross-cultural studies – that of the traveller Sir Richard Burton in the 1880s (1888), the work of Edward Westermarck in the 1900s (1906), and the Human Area Files of Ford and Beach in the 1950s (1952) – have deeply affected perceptions of homosexuality in their respective generations. Unfortunately, awareness of different cultural patterns has been used to reinforce rather than confront our own culture-bound conceptions.

Three phases in the construction of a history of homosexuality are discernible. The first, manifested in the works of the early sexologists as well as the propagandists like Edward

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Carpenter (1914), attempted above all to demonstrate the trans-historical existence, and indeed value, of homosexuality as a distinct sexual experience. All the major works of writers such as Havelock Ellis (1936) had clear-cut historical sections; some, like Iwan Bloch’s (1938), were substantive historical works. Writers during this phase were above all anxious to establish the parameters of homosexuality, what distinguished it from other forms of sexu- ality, what history suggested for its aetiology and social worth, the changing cultural values accorded to it, and the great figures – in politics, art, literature – one could associate with the experience. These efforts, taking the form of naturalistic recordings of what was seen as a relatively minor but significant social experience, were actually profoundly constructing of modern concepts of homosexuality. They provided a good deal of the data on which later writers depended even as they reworked them, and a hagiographical sub-school produced a multitude of texts on the great homosexuals of the past, ‘great queens of history’; its most recent manifestation is found in the egregious essay of A.L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History (1977).

The second phase, most usefully associated with the reformist endeavours of the 1950s and 1960s, took as unproblematic the framework established by the pioneers. Homosexuality was a distinct social experience; the task was to detail it. The result was a new series of texts, some of which, such as H. Montgomery Hyde’s various essays, synthesized in The Other Love in 1970, brought together a good deal of empirical material even as they failed to theorize its contradictions adequately.

As a major aspect of the revival of historical interest was the various campaigns to change the law and public attitudes, both in Europe and America, the historical studies inevitably concentrated on issues relevant to these. The assumed distinction, derived from nineteenth- century sexological literature, between ‘perversion’ (a product of moral weakness) and ‘inversion’ (constitutional and hence unavoidable), which D.S. Bailey adumbrates in Homo- sexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (1955), was highly significant for debates in the churches. The influential essay on English legal attitudes by Francois Lafitte, ‘Homosex- uality and the Law’, was designed to indicate that laws that were so arbitrarily, indeed acci- dentally, imposed could as easily be removed (Lafitte, 1958–59). Donald Webster Cory’s various works of the 1950s, such as The Homosexual Outlook (1953), sought to underline the values of the homosexual experience. Employing the statistical information provided by Kinsey, the cross-cultural evidence of Ford and Beach, and the ethnographic studies of people such as Evelyn Hooker, historians were directed towards the commonness of the homosexual experience in history and began to trace some of the forces that shaped public attitudes.

A third phase, overlapping with the second but more vocal in tone, can be seen as the direct product of the emergence of more radical gay movements in the late 1960s and 1970s in Europe and North America. Here the emphasis was on reasserting the values of a lost experi- ence, stressing the positive value of homosexuality and locating the sources of its social oppression. A major early emphasis was on recovering the pre-history of the gay movement itself, particularly in Germany, the USA and Britain (Ford and Beach, 1952; Katz, 1976; Lauritsen and Thorstad, 1974; Steakley, 1975). Stretching beyond this was a search for what one might term ‘ethnicity’, the lineaments and validation of a minority experience that history had denied. But the actual work of research posed new problems, which threatened to burst out of the bounds established within the previous half century. This is admirably demon- strated in Jonathan Katz’s splendid documentary Gay American History (1976). But rather than exploring its virtues, I want to pick out two points that seem to me to pose fresh prob- lems. The first concerns the title. It seems to me that to use a modern self-labelling term,

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‘gay’, itself a product of contemporary political struggles, to define an ever-changing concept over a period of 400 years suggests a constant homosexual essence which the evidence presented in the book itself suggests is just not there. Katz in fact recognizes this very clearly. He makes the vital point that the ‘concept of homosexuality must be historicized’, and hopes that the book will revolutionize the traditional concept of homosexuality.

The problem of the historical researcher is thus to study and establish the character and meaning of each manifestation of same sex relations within a specific time and society … All homosexuality is situational.

(Katz, 1976, pp. 6–7)

This is absolutely correct and is the measure of the break between this type of history and, say, A.L. Rowse’s extravaganza. But to talk at the same time of our history as if homosexuals were a distinct, fixed minority suggests a slightly contradictory attitude. It poses a major theoretical problem on which the gay movement has had little to say until recently.

A second problem arises from this, concerning attitudes to lesbianism. Katz very commendably has, unlike most of his predecessors, attempted to give equal space to both male and female homosexuality, and although this is impossible in some sections, overall he succeeds. But this again suggests a problematic of a constant racial-sexual identity which Katz explicitly rejects theoretically. Lesbianism and male homosexuality in fact have quite different, if inevitably interconnected, social histories, related to the social evolution of distinct gender identities; there is a danger that this fundamental, if difficult, point will be obscured by discussing them as if they were part of the same experience. These points will be taken up later.

Certainly there has been a considerable extension of interest in the history of homosexu- ality over the past decade, and as well as the general works, a number of essays and mono- graphs have appeared, most of which accept readily the cultural specificity of attitudes and concepts. Nevertheless considerable contradictions recur. A.D. Harvey in a study of buggery prosecutions at the beginning of the nineteenth century has noted that:

It is too commonly forgotten how far the incidence of homosexual behaviour varies from age to age and from culture to culture. … In fact it is only very crudely true that there are homo- sexuals in every period and in every society. Societies which accept homosexual behaviour as normal almost certainly have a higher proportion of men who have experimented with homosexual activity than societies which regard homosexuality as abnormal but tolerate it, and societies which grudgingly tolerate homosexuality probably have a higher incidence of homosexual activity than societies where it is viciously persecuted.

(Harvey, 1978, p. 944)

But Harvey, despite making this highly significant point, goes on to speak of ‘homosexuals’ as if they realized a trans-historical nature. He writes of the Home Secretary complaining in 1808 that Hyde Park and St James’ Park were ‘being used as a resort for homosexuals’, appar- ently oblivious of the absence of such a term until the later part of the century. The actual term the Home Secretary used is extremely important in assessing his perception of the situation and the type of people involved, and the evidence suggests a problematic of public nuisance rather than a modern concept of the homosexual person. 1

Similarly Randolph Trumbach, in what is a very valuable study of London ‘sodomites’ in the eighteenth century, despite a long and carefully argued discussion of different cross-

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cultural patterns, writes as if the homosexual sub-culture had a natural existence serving the eternal social needs (or at least eternal in the West) of a fixed minority of people (Trumbach, 1977, p. 23). But there is plentiful evidence that the sub-culture changed considerably over time, partly at least dependent on factors such as urbanization, and can one really speak of the courtly or theatrical sub-cultures of the early seventeenth century as if they were the same as the modern sub-cultures of New York or San Francisco?

Implicit in Trumbach’s essay is an alternative view that profoundly challenges such assumptions. He notes ‘only one significant change’ in attitudes during the Christian millennia: ‘Beginning in the late 19th century it was no longer the act that was stigmatised, but the state of mind’ (Trumbach, 1977, p. 9). But this, I would argue, is the crucial change, indicating a massive shift in attitude, giving rise to what is distinctively new in our culture: the categorization of homosexuality as a separate condition and the correlative emergence of a homosexual identity.

I would argue that we should employ cross-cultural and historical evidence not only to chart changing attitudes but to challenge the very concept of a single trans-historical notion of homosexuality. In different cultures (and at different historical moments or conjunctures within the same culture) very different meanings are given to same-sex activity both by society at large and by the individual participants. The physical acts might be similar, but the social construction of meanings around them are profoundly different. The social integration of forms of pedagogic homosexual relations in ancient Greece have no continuity with contemporary notions of a homosexual identity (Dover, 1978). To put it another way, the various possibilities of what Hocquenghem calls homosexual desire, or what more neutrally might be termed homosexual behaviours, which seem from historical evidence to be a perma- nent and ineradicable aspect of human sexual possibilities, are variously constructed in different cultures as an aspect of wider gender and sexual regulation. If this is the case, it is pointless discussing questions such as, what are the origins of homosexual oppression, or what is the nature of the homosexual taboo, as if there was a single, causative factor. The crucial question must be: what are the conditions for the emergence of this particular form of regulation of sexual behaviour in this particular society? Transferred to our own history, this must involve an exploration of what Mary McIntosh (1968) pin-pointed as the significant problem: the emergence of the notion that homosexuality is a condition peculiar to some people and not others.

A historical study of homosexuality over the past two centuries or so must therefore have as its focus three closely related questions: the social conditions for the emergence of the cat- egory of homosexuality and its construction as the unification of disparate experiences, the relation of this categorization to other socio-sexual categorizations, and the relationship of this categorization to those defined, not simply ‘described’ or labelled but ‘invented’ by it, in particular historical circumstances.

Evolution

The historical evidence points to the latter part of the nineteenth century as the crucial period in the conceptualization of homosexuality as the distinguishing characteristic of a particular type of person, the ‘invert’ or ‘homosexual’, and the corresponding development of a new awareness of self amongst some ‘homosexuals’ (Weeks, 1977). From the mid-nineteenth century there is a bubbling of debate, notation and classification, associated with names such as Casper, Tardieu, Ulrichs, Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Moll, Freud, all of whom sought to define, and hence psychologically or medically to

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construct, new categorizations. Westphal’s description of the ‘contrary sexual instinct’ in the 1870s may be taken as the crucial formative moment, for out of it grew the notion of ‘sexual inversion’, the dominant formulation until the 1950s.

The word ‘homosexuality’ itself was not invented until 1869 (by the Hungarian Benkert von Kertbeny) and did not enter English usage until the 1880s and 1890s, and then largely as a result of the work of Havelock Ellis. I suggest that the widespread adoption of these neolo- gisms during this period marks as crucial a turning point in attitudes to homosexuality as the adoption of ‘gay’ as a self-description of homosexuals in the 1970s. It indicated not just a changing usage but the emergence of a whole new set of assumptions. And in Britain (as also in Germany and elsewhere) the reconceptualization and categorization (at first medical and later social) coincided with the development of new legal and ideological sanctions, particu- larly against male homosexuality.

Until 1885 the only law dealing directly with homosexual behaviour in England was that relating to buggery, and legally, at least, little distinction was made between buggery between man and woman, man and beast and man and man, though the majority of prosecutions were directed at men for homosexual offences. This had been a capital crime from the 1530s, when the incorporation of traditional ecclesiastical sanctions into law had been part of the decisive assumption by the state of many of the powers of the medieval church. Prosecutions under this law had fluctuated, partly because of changing rules on evidence, partly through other social pressures. There seems, for instance, to have been a higher incidence of prosecutions (and executions) in times of war; penalties were particularly harsh in cases affecting the disci- pline of the armed services, particularly the navy (Radzinowicz, 1968; Gilbert, 1974, 1976, 1977). ‘Sodomite’ (denoting contact between men) became the typical epithet of abuse for the sexual deviant.

The legal classification and the epithet had, however, an uncertain status and was often used loosely to describe various forms of non-reproductive sex. There was therefore a crucial distinction between traditional concepts of buggery and modern concepts of homosexuality. The former was seen as a potentiality in all sinful nature, unless severely execrated and judi- cially punished; homosexuality, however, is seen as the characteristic of a particular type of person, a type whose specific characteristics (inability to whistle, penchant for the colour green, adoration of mother or father, age of sexual maturation, ‘promiscuity’, etc.) have been exhaustively and inconclusively detailed in many twentieth-century textbooks. It became a major task of psychology in the present century to attempt to explain the aetiology of this homosexual ‘condition’ (McIntosh, 1968). The early articles on homosexuality in the 1880s and 1890s treated the subject as if they were entering a strange continent. An eminent doctor, Sir George Savage, described in the Journal of Mental Science the homosexual case histories of a young man and woman and wondered if ‘this perversion is as rare as it appears’, while Havelock Ellis was to claim that he was the first to record any homosexual cases unconnected with prison or asylums. The sodomite, as Michel Foucault has put it (1979), was a temporary aberration; the homosexual belongs to a species, and social science during this century has made various – if by and large unsuccessful – efforts to explore this phenomenon.

These changing concepts do not mean, of course, that those who engaged in a predomin- antly homosexual life style did not regard themselves as somehow different until the late nineteenth century, and there is evidence for sub-cultural formation around certain monarchs and in the theatre for centuries. But there is much stronger evidence for the emergence of a distinctive male homosexual sub-culture in London and one or two other cities from the late seventeenth century, often characterized by transvestism and gender-role inversion; and by the early nineteenth century there was a recognition in the courts that homosexuality

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represented a condition different from the norm (McIntosh, 1968; Trumbach, 1977). By the mid-nineteenth century, it seems the male homosexual sub-culture at least had characteristics not dissimilar to the modern, with recognized cruising places and homosexual haunts, ritual- ized sexual contact and a distinctive argot and ‘style’. But there is also abundant evidence until late into the nineteenth century of practices which by modern standards would be regarded as highly sexually compromising. Lawrence Stone (1977) describes how Oxbridge male students often slept with male students with no sexual connotations until comparatively late in the eighteenth century, while Smith-Rosenberg (1975) has described the intimate – and seemingly non-sexualized – relations between women in the nineteenth century.

Nevertheless, even as late as the 1870s there was considerable doubt in the minds of the police, the medical profession and the judiciary about the nature and extent of homosexual offences. When the transvestites Boulton and Park were brought to trial in 1871 for conspiracy to commit buggery, there was considerable police confusion about the nature of the alleged offences, the medical profession differed over the relevance of the evidence relating to anal intercourse, the counsel seemed never to have worked on similar cases before, the ‘scientific’ literature cited from British sources was nugatory, while the court was either ignorant of the French sources or ready to despise them. The Attorney General suggested that it was fortunate that there was ‘very little learning or knowledge upon this subject in this country’, while a defence counsel attacked ‘the new found treasures of French literature upon the subject which thank God is still foreign to the libraries of British surgeons’.2 Boulton and Park were eventually acquitted, despite an overwhelming mass of evidence, including corres- pondence, that today would be regarded as highly compromising.

The latter part of the nineteenth century, however, saw a variety of concerns that helped to focus awareness: the controversy about ‘immorality’ in public schools, various sexual scan- dals, a new legal situation, the beginnings of a ‘scientific’ discussion of homosexuality and the emergence of the ‘medical model’. The subject, as Edward Carpenter put it at the time, ‘has great actuality and is pressing upon us from all sides’ (Carpenter, 1908, p. 9). It appears likely that it was in this developing context that some of those with homosexual inclinations began to perceive themselves as ‘inverts’, ‘homosexuals’, ‘Uranians’, a crucial stage in the prolonged and uneven process whereby homosexuality began to take on a recognizably modern configuration. And although the evidence cited here has been largely British, this development was widespread throughout Western Europe and America.

The changing legal and ideological situations were crucial markers in this development. The 1861 Offences Against the Person Act removed the death penalty for buggery (which had not been used since the 1830s), replacing it by sentences of between ten years and life. But in 1885 the famous Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act made all male homosexual activities (acts of ‘gross indecency’) illegal, punishable by up to two years’ hard labour. And in 1898 the laws on importuning for ‘immoral purposes’ were tightened up and effectively applied to male homosexuals (this was clarified by the Criminal Law Amend- ment Act of 1912 with respect to England and Wales – Scotland has different provisions). Both were significant extensions of the legal controls on male homosexuality, whatever their origins or intentions (Smith, 1976; Bristow, 1977; Weeks, 1977, p. 2). Though formally less severe than capital punishments for sodomy, the new legal situation is likely to have ground harder on a much wider circle of people, particularly as it was dramatized in a series of sensa- tional scandals, culminating in the trials of Oscar Wilde, which had the function of drawing a sharp dividing line between permissible and tabooed forms of behaviour. The Wilde scandal in particular was a vital moment in the creation of a male homosexual identity (Ellis, 1936, p. 392). It must be noted, however, that the new legal situation did not apply to women, and the

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attempt in 1921 to extend the 1885 provisions to women failed, in part at least on the grounds that publicity would only serve to make more women aware of homosexuality (Weeks, 1977, p. 107). But the different legal situation alone does not explain the different social resonances of male and female homosexuality. Much more likely, this must be related to the complexly developing social structuring of male and female sexualities.

The emergence of a psychological and medical model of homosexuality was intimately connected with the legal situation. The most commonly quoted European writers on homo- sexuality in the mid-nineteenth century were Casper and Tardieu, the leading medico-legal experts of Germany and France respectively. Both, as Arno Karlen has put it, were ‘chiefly concerned with whether the disgusting breed of perverts could be physically identified for courts, and whether they should be held legally responsible for their acts’ (Karlen, 1971, p. 185). The same problem was apparent in Britain. According to Magnus Hirschfeld, most of the 1000 or so works on homosexuality that appeared between 1898 and 1908 were directed, in part at least, at the legal profession. Even J.A. Symond’s privately printed pamphlet A Problem in Modern Ethics (1983 [orig. 1883]) declared itself to be addressed ‘especially to Medical psychologists and jurists’, while Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1936 [orig. 1897]) was attacked for not being published by a medical press and for being too popular in tone. The medicalization of homosexuality – a transition from notions of sin to concepts of sickness or mental illness – was a vitally significant move, even though its application was uneven. Around it the poles of scientific discourse ranged for decades: was homosexuality congenital or acquired, ineradicable or susceptible to cure, to be quietly if unenthusiastically accepted as unavoidable (even the liberal Havelock Ellis felt it necessary to warn his invert reader not to ‘set himself in violent opposition’ to his society) or to be resisted with all the force of one’s Christian will? In the discussions of the 1950s and 1960s these were crucial issues: was it right, it was sometimes wondered, to lock an alcoholic up in a brewery; should those who suffered from an incurable (or at best unfortunate) condition be punished? Old notions of the immorality or sinfulness of homosexuality did not die in the nineteenth century; they still survive, unfortunately, in many dark corners. But from the nineteenth century they were inextricably entangled with ‘scientific’ theories that formed the boundaries within which homosexuals had to begin to define themselves.

The challenge to essentialism

Clearly the emergence of the homosexual category was not arbitrary or accidental. The scientific and medical speculation can be seen in one sense as a product of the characteristic nineteenth-century process whereby the traditionally execrated (and monolithic) crimes against nature – linking up, for instance, homosexuality with masturbation and mechanical birth control (Bullough and Voght, 1973) – are differentiated into discrete deviations whose aetiologies are mapped out in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works (Ellis, 1936; Hirschfeld, 1938, 1946; Krafft-Ebing, 1965). In another series of relationships the emergence of the concept of the homosexual can be seen as corresponding to and comp- lexly linked with the classification and articulation of a variety of social categories: the redefinitions of childhood and adolescence, the hysterical woman, the congenitally inclined prostitute (or indeed, in the work of Ellis and others, the congenital criminal as well) and linked to the contemporaneous debate and ideological definition of the role of housewife and mother.3 On the other hand, the categorization was never simply an imposition of a new definition; it was the result of various pressures and forces, in which new concepts merged into older definitions.

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It is striking that the social purity campaigners of the 1880s saw both prostitution and male homosexuality as products of undifferentiated male lust (Weeks, 1977, p. 17), and equally significant, if generally unremarked, that the major enactments affecting male homosexuality from the 1880s (the Labouchere Amendment, the 1898 Vagrancy Act) were primarily concerned with female prostitution. Indeed as late as the 1950s it was still seen as logical to set up a single government committee – the Wolfenden Committee – to study both prostitu- tion and male homosexuality. It is clear, however, that the emergence of the homosexual cate- gory and the changing focus of the definition of homosexual behaviour are intimately related to wider changes. The problem is to find means of explaining and theorizing these changes without falling into the twin traps of a naive empiricism or a reductive materialism. The former would assume that what was happening was simply a discovery of pre-existing phenomena, a problematic which, as we have suggested, has little historical validity; the latter poses the danger of seeing the restrictive definitions of homosexual behaviours as a necessary effect of a pre-existing causative complex (usually ‘capitalism’). Given the absence in orthodox Marxism of any theorization of sexuality and gender that is able to cope with the actual historical phenomena, the tendency has been to graft a form of functionalism on to historical materialism, which, while it suggests useful connections which might be worth exploring, simultaneously produces historical descriptions that are often difficult to fit with more empirical substantiation.

Most attempts to explain this more closely have relied on variations of role theory. Male homosexuality has been seen as a threat to the ensemble of assumptions about male sexuality and a perceived challenge to the male heterosexual role within capitalism.

In Britain sexual intercourse has been contained within marriage which has been presented as the ultimate form of sexual maturity … the heterosexual nuclear family assists a system like capitalism because it produces and socialises the young in certain values … the maintenance of the nuclear family with its role-specific behaviour creates an apparent consensus concerning sexual normalcy.

(Brake, 1976, p. 178)

So that:

Any ambiguity such as transvestism, hermaphrodism, transsexuality, or homosexuality is moulded into ‘normal’ appropriate gender behaviour or is relegated to the categories of sick, dangerous or pathological. The actor is forced to slot into patterns of behaviour appropriate to heterosexual gender roles.

(Brake, 1976, p. 176)

The result is the emergence of a specific male ‘homosexual role’, a specialized, despised and punished role which ‘keeps the bulk of society pure in rather the same way that the similar treatment of some kinds of criminal helps keep the rest of society law abiding’ (McIntosh, 1968, p. 184). Such a role has two effects: first, it helps to provide a clear-cut threshold between permissible and impermissible behaviour, and, second, it helps to segregate those labelled as deviant from others, and thus contains and limits their behaviour patterns. In the same way, a homosexual sub-culture, which is the correlative of the development of a special- ized role, provides both access to the socially outlawed need (sex) and contains the deviant. Male homosexuals can thus be conceptualized as those excluded from the sexual family, and as potential scapegoats whose oppression can keep the family members in line.

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The notion of a homosexual role in this posing of it has certain difficulties. It is, for example, a negative role, not one that is socially sustained. It also assumes a unilinear fit between the socially created role and the identity that it delineates, whereas all the evidence indicates that this is problematical. It also suggests an intentionality in the creation of the role that again is historically dubious. But beyond this are other related problems in the function- alist model. It apparently assumes that the family acts as a unilinear funnel for the channelling of socially necessary sexual identities and responds automatically to the needs of society (or in the Marxist functionalist model, capitalism). It assumes, in other words, that the family can be simply defined as a unitary form (the ‘nuclear family’) that acts in a determined way on society’s members, and at the same time it takes for granted a sexual essence that can be orga- nized through this institution.4 Neither is true.

Mark Poster has recently suggested that ‘historians and social scientists in general have gone astray by viewing the family as a unitary phenomenon which has undergone some type of linear transformation’ (1978, p. xvii). He argues instead that the history of the family is discontinuous, evolving several distinct family structures, each with its own emotional pattern. What this points to is the construction of different family forms in different historical periods and with different class effects. A functionalist model which sees the family as an essential and necessary agent of social control and with the role of ensuring efficient repro- duction ignores both the constant ineffectiveness of the family in doing so and the immense class variations in family forms.

But even more problematic are the assumptions classically made about the nature of sexu- ality, assumptions current both in traditionalist and in Left thought (and particularly evident in the writings of the Freudian Left: Reich, Fromm, Marcuse). They also have the undoubted strength of the appearance of common sense: in this view sex is conceived of as an overpow- ering, instinctive force, whose characteristics are built into the biology of the human animal, which shapes human institutions and whose will must express itself, either in the form of direct sexual expression or, if blocked, in the form of perversion or neurosis. Krafft-Ebing expressed an orthodox view in the late nineteenth century when he described sex as a ‘natural instinct’, which ‘with all conquering force and might demands fulfilment’ (1965, p. 1). The clear presupposition here is that the sex drive is basically male in character, with the female conceived of as a passive receptacle. More sophisticated versions of what Gagnon and Simon have termed the ‘drive reduction’ model (1973) recur in twentieth-century thought. It is ambiguously there in parts of Freud’s work, though the careful distinction he draws between ‘instinct’ and ‘drive’ has often been lost, both by commentators and translators. But it is unambiguously present in the writings of his epigones. Thus Rattray Taylor in his neo- Freudian interpretation of Sex in History:

The history of civilisation is the history of a long warfare between the dangerous and powerful forces of the id, and the various systems of taboos and inhibitions which man has erected to control them.

(Taylor, 1964, n.p.n.)

Here we have a clear notion of a ‘basic biological mandate’ that presses on, and so must be firmly controlled by the cultural and social matrix (Gagnon and Simon, 1973, p. 11). What is peculiar about this model is that is has been adopted both by Marxists, who in other regards have firmly rejected the notion of ‘natural man’, and by taxonomists, such as Kinsey, whose findings have revealed a wide variety of sexual experiences. With regard to homosexuality, the instinctual model has seen it either as a more or less pathological deviation, a failure of

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socially necessary repression, as the effect of the morally restrictive organization of sexual morality, or, more romantically but no less ahistorically, as the ‘great refusal’ (Marcuse, 1969) of sexual normality in the capitalist organization of sexuality.5

Against this, Gagnon and Simon have argued that sexuality is subject to ‘socio-cultural moulding to a degree surpassed by few other forms of human behaviour’ (1973, p. 26), and in so arguing they are building both on a century of sex research and on a century of ‘decentring’ natural man. Marx’s formulation of historical materialism and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious have been the major contributions to what over the past few decades, in structuralism, anthropology, psychoanalysis and Marxism, has been a major theoretical effort to challenge the unitary subject in social theory. ‘Sexuality’ has in many ways been most resistant to this challenge, precisely because its power seems to derive from our natural being, but there have recently been three sustained challenges to sexual essentialism from three quite different theoretical approaches: the interactionist (associated with the work of Gagnon and Simon), the psychoanalytic (associated with the re-interpretation of Freud initiated by Jacques Lacan) and the discursive, taking as its starting point the work of Michel Foucault. They have quite different epistemological starting points and different objects of study – the social sources of human conduct, the unconscious and power – but between them they have posed formidable challenges to our received notions of sexuality, challenges which have already been reflected in the presentation of this paper.6

Despite their different approaches and in the end different aims, their work converges on several important issues. First, they all reject sex as an autonomous realm, a natural force with specific effects, a rebellious energy that the ‘social’ controls. In the work of Gagnon and Simon, it seems to be suggested that nothing is intrinsically sexual, or rather that anything can be sexualized (though what creates the notion of ‘sexuality’ is itself never answered). In Lacan’s ‘recovery’ of Freud, it is the law of the father, the castration fear and the pained entry into the symbolic order – the order of language – at the Oedipal moment that instigates desire (cf. Mitchell, 1974). It is the expression of a fundamental absence, which can never be fulfilled, the desire to be the other, the father, which is both alienated and insatiable: alienated because the child can only express its desire by means of language that itself constitutes its submission to the father, and insatiable because it is desire for a symbolic position that is itself arbiter of the possibilities for the expression of desire. The law of the father therefore consti- tutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated.

In Foucault’s work ‘sexuality’ is seen as a historical apparatus, and ‘sex’ is a ‘complex idea that was formed within the deployment of sexuality’.

Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge gradually tries to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.

(Foucault, 1979, pp. 105–6)

It is not fully clear what are the elements on which these social constructs of sexuality play. In the neo-psychoanalytic school there is certainly rejection of the concept of a pool of natural instincts that are distorted by society, but nevertheless there seems to be an accep- tance of permanent drives; and the situation is complicated by what must be termed an

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essentialist and trans-historical reading of Oedipus, which seems to be essential for any culture, or in Juliet Mitchell’s version, ‘patriarchal’ culture.7 Gagnon and Simon and Plummer (1975) seem to accept the existence of a pool of possibilities on which ‘sexuality’ draws, and in this they do not seem far removed from Foucault’s version that ‘sexuality’ plays upon ‘bodies, organs, somatic localizations, functions, anatamophysiological systems, sensations, and pleasures’, which have no intrinsic unity or ‘laws’ of their own (Foucault, 1979, p. 153).

Second, then, what links the anti-essentialist critique is a recognition of the social sources of sexual definitions. In the feminist appropriation of Lacan this can be seen as a result of patriarchal structures and the differential entry into the symbolic of the human male and female. But this poses massive theoretical problems, particularly in the attempt at a materi- alist position. The problem here is that the trans-historical perception of the Oedipal crisis and the consequent focusing of sex and gender already presuppose the existence of a unified notion of sexuality which we are suggesting is historically specific. Both the interactionists and Foucault make this clear. Gagnon and Simon suggest that:

It is possible that, given the historical nature of human societies we are victim to the needs of earlier social orders. To earlier societies it may not have been a need to constrain severely the powerful sexual impulse in order to maintain social stability or limit inher- ently anti-social force, but rather a matter of having to invent an importance for sexu- ality. This would not only assure a high level of reproductive activity but also provide socially available rewards unlimited by natural resources, rewards that promote conforming behaviour in sectors of social life far more important than the sexual.

(Gagnon and Simon, 1973, p. 17, my italics)

Foucault makes much clearer a historical specification and locates the rise of the sexuality apparatus in the eighteenth century, linked with specific historical processes. As a conse- quence of this, a third point of contact lies in the rejection, both by the interactionists and Foucault, of the notion that the history of sexuality can fruitfully be seen in terms of ‘repres- sion’. Foucault, as Zinner has put it:

… offers four major arguments against the repression hypothesis. (1) it is based on an outmoded model of power; (2) it leads to a narrow construction of the family’s function; (3) it is class specific and applies historically to bourgeois sexuality; and (4) it often results in a one-sided conception of how authority interacts with sexuality – a negative rather than a positive conception.

(Zinner, 1978, pp. 215–16)

Again Gagnon and Simon have been less historically specific, but both interactionists and Foucault tend to the view that sexuality is organized not by repression but through definition and regulation. More specifically, regulation is organized though the creation of sexual cat- egories – homosexual, paedophile, transvestite and so on. In the case of Gagnon and Simon and those influenced by them (for example, Plummer) the theoretical framework derives both from Meadean social psychology, which sees the individual as having a developing person- ality that is created in an interaction with others, and from labelling theories of deviance. In the case of Foucault it derives from his belief that it is through discourse that our relation to reality is organized – or rather, language structures the real – and in particular Foucault anal- yses discourse ‘as an act of violence imposed upon things’ (Zinner, 1978, p. 219).

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Fourth, however, in all three tendencies there is a curious relationship to history. Symbolic interactionism, by stressing the subjective and the impact of particular labelling events, has almost invariably displayed an ahistorical bias. The psychoanalytical school, almost by def- inition, has based itself on supra-historical assumptions which have been almost valueless in conjunctural analyses. Foucault stresses that his work is basically aimed at constructing a ‘genealogy’, the locating of the ‘traces’ of the present; it is basically a history of the present. So while the interactional adherent by and large has stressed the contingent and personalist, the tendency in the others is towards a form of structuralism in which ‘history cannot be a study of man but only of determinate structures of social relations of which men and women are “bearers”’ (History Workshop, 1978).

It is this ambiguous relationship of the critique of essentialism to traditional historical work which has made it seem difficult to absorb unproblematically any one of the particular approaches. Nevertheless, each in quite different ways ultimately poses problems which any historical approach to homosexuality must confront, particularly in the difficult relationship of historical structuration to individualized meanings. A close examination of the historical implications of the various approaches will illustrate this.

Constructing the homosexual

The dominant theoretical framework in Britain and the USA has derived from ‘symbolic interactionism’. Here ideas are not treated in terms of their historical roots or practical effect- iveness, but are seen as forming the background to every social process so that social processes are treated essentially in terms of ideas, and it is through ideas that we construct social reality itself. Most of the important work that has informed the theoretical study of homosexuality in Britain has derived from symbolic interactionism (for example, Kenneth Plummer’s Sexual Stigma [1975], which is the major British study of how homosexual mean- ings are acquired). In this theory sexual meanings are constructed in social interaction: a homosexual identity is not inherent, but is socially created. This has had a vitally important clarifying influence, and has, as we have seen, broken with lay ideas of sex as a goal-directed instinct. Linked to labelling theories of deviance, it has been a valuable tool for exploring the effects of public stigmatizations and their impact on sub-cultural formation.

But interactionism has been unable fully to theorize the sexual variations that it can so ably describe; nor has it conceptualized the relations between possible sexual patterns and other social variables. Although it recognizes the disparities of power between various groups and the importance of the power to label, it has often had difficulties in theorizing questions of structural power and authority. Nor has it been willing, in the field of sexuality, to investigate the question of determination. It is unable to theorize why, despite the endless possibilities of sexualization it suggests, the genitals continue to be the focus of sexual imagination, nor why there are, at various times, shifts in the location of the sexual taboos. And there is a political consequence too, for if meanings are entirely developed in social interaction, an act of collec- tive will can transform them; this leads, as Mary McIntosh has suggested, to a politics of ‘col- lective voluntarism’. Both in theory and practice it has ignored the historical location of sexual taboos. Interactionism therefore stops precisely at the point where theorization seems essential: at the point of historical determination and ideological structuring in the creation of subjectivity.

It is for this reason that recently, particularly amongst feminists, interest has begun to switch to a reassessment of Freud and psychoanalysis with a view to employing it as a tool for developing a theoretical understanding of patriarchy. It is becoming apparent that if the

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emergence of a distinct homosexual identity is linked to the evolution of the family, then within this it is the role of the male – theorized in terms of the symbolic role of the phallus and the law of the father – that is of central significance. This, it is suggested, will allow the space to begin to understand the relationship between gender and sex (for it is in the family that the anatomical differences between the sexes acquire their social significance) and also to begin to uncover the specific history of female sexuality, within which the social history of lesbi- anism must ultimately be located. The focal point for most of the preliminary discussion has been Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), which takes as its starting point the work of Lacan, Althusser and Lévi-Strauss and which, as it was recently put by a sympa- thetic critic:

… opens the way to a re-evaluation of psychoanalysis as a theory which can provide scientific knowledge of the way in which patriarchal ideology is maintained through the foundation of psychological ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’.

(Albury, 1976, p. 7)

But though the question of sexuality (and its role in the creation of sexed and gendered subjects) has now been strategically linked to the whole problematic of patriarchy, there has been no effort to theorize the question of sexual variation.

The tendency of thought that Juliet Mitchell represents can be criticized on a number of grounds. Politically she seems to accept that separation of the struggle against patriarchy from the struggle against capitalism which most socialist feminist work has in theory attempted to overcome. Historically she appears to accept the universality of the Oedipal experience. A historical materialist when analysing capitalist social relations, she readily accepts idealist notions of the primal father when discussing the origins of patriarchy. Theo- retically in her universalizing of the Oedipal processes she comes close to accepting drive as autonomous, pre-individual and again trans-historical and transcultural. It is a peculiar feature of recent radical thought that while stressing the conjunctural forces which partly at least shape the political, social and ideological, and while stressing the historical construction of subjectivity, it has nevertheless at the same time implicitly fallen back on a form of psychic determinism which it nominally rejects.

It is this which gives a particular interest to the recent appearance in English translation of Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire (1978 [first published in France as Le Désir Homo- sexuel in 1972]). The essay is located in the general area generated by the Lacanian reinter- pretation of Freud, linguistic theory and the question of ideology, but its specific debt is to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, their work L’Anti Oedipe, their critique of Freudian (and Lacanian) categories and their subsequent theory of ‘desire’ and their espousal of schizoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977). As in our argument, Hocquenghem recognizes the culturally specific function of the concept of ‘the homosexual’; Hocquenghem makes references to Foucault and he points to what he calls the ‘growing imperialism’ of society, which seeks to attribute a social status to everything, even the unclassified. The result has been that homosexuality has been ever more closely defined (see Weeks, 1978).

Hocquenghem argues that ‘homosexual desire’, indeed like heterosexual, is an arbitrary division of the flux of desire, which in itself is polyvocal and undifferentiated, so that the notion of exclusive homosexuality is a ‘fallacy of the imaginary’, a misrecognition and ideological misperception. But despite this, homosexuality has a vivid social presence, and this is because it expresses an aspect of desire which appears nowhere else. For the direct manifesta- tion of homosexual desire opposes the relations of roles and identities necessarily imposed by

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the Oedipus complex in order to ensure the reproduction of society. Capitalism, in its neces- sary employment of Oedipalization to control the tendency to decoding, manufactures ‘homosexuals’ just as it produces proletarians, and what is manufactured is a psychologically repressive category. He argues that the principal ideological means of thinking about homo- sexuality are ultimately, though not mechanically, connected with the advance of Western capi- talism. They amount to a perverse ‘re-territorialization’, a massive effort to regain social control, in a world tending towards disorder and decoding. As a result the establishment of homosexuality as a separate category goes hand in hand with its repression. On the one hand, we have the creation of a minority of ‘homosexuals’, on the other, the transformation in the majority of the repressed homosexual elements of desire into the desire to repress. Hence subli- mated homosexuality is the basis of the paranoia about homosexuality which pervades social behaviour, which in turn is a guarantee of the survival of the Oedipal relations, the victory of the law of the father. Hocquenghem argues that only one organ is allowed in the Oedipal triangle, what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘despotic signifier’, the phallus. And as money is the true universal reference point for capitalism, so the phallus is the reference point for heterosexism. The phallus determines, whether by absence or presence, the girl’s penis envy, the boy’s castra- tion anxiety; it draws on libidinal energy in the same way as money draws on labour. And as this comment underlines, this Oedipalization is itself a product of capitalism and not, as the Lacanian school might argue, a law of culture or of all patriarchal societies.

Without going into further details several difficulties emerge. The first relates to the whole question of homosexual paranoia – reminiscent in many ways of the recent discussion of homophobia in Britain and the USA (Weinberg, 1973). The idea that repression of homosex- uality in modern society is a product of suppressed homosexuality comes at times very close to a hydraulic theory of sexuality, which both symbolic interactionism and Lacanian interpre- tations of Freud have ostensibly rejected. It is not a sufficient explanatory principle simply to reverse the idea that homosexuality is a paranoia, peddled by the medical profession in the present century, into the idea that hostile attitudes to homosexuality are themselves paranoid. Nor does the theory help explain the real, if limited, liberalization of attitudes that has taken place in some Western countries or the range of attitudes that are empirically known to exist in different countries and even in different families.

Second, following from this, there is the still unanswered problem of why some individuals become ‘homosexual’ and others do not. The use of the concept of Oedipalization restores some notion of social determinacy that symbolic interactionism lacks, but, by corollary, its use loses any sense of the relevance of the specific family pressures, the educational and labelling processes, the media images that reinforce the identity and the individual shaping of meaning. Third, there is the ambiguous relationship of capitalism to patriarchy. If Mitchell can be rightly criticized for creating two separate areas for political struggle, the economic (against capitalism) and the ideological (against patriarchy), then Hocquenghem can be criti- cized for collapsing them together.

Finally, there is Hocquenghem’s failure to explore the different modalities of lesbianism. It is important to note that what Hocquenghem is discussing is essentially male homosexuality, for in Hocquenghem’s view, although the law of the father dominates both the male and the female, it is to the authority of the father in reproduction (both of the species and of Oedipalization itself) that homosexuality poses the major challenge; as Deleuze and Guattari note, male homosexuality, far from being a product of the Oedipus complex, as some Freud- ians imply, itself constitutes a totally different mode of social relationships, no longer vertical, but horizontal. Lesbianism, by implication, assumes its significance as a challenge to the secondary position accorded to female sexuality in capitalist society. It is not so much

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lesbianism as female sexuality that society denies. But Hocquenghem quite fails to pursue the point, which is central if we are to grasp the formation of sexual meanings. Despite these objections, however, Hocquenghem’s essay raises important questions, some of which will be taken up below.

Whereas Hocquenghem, following Deleuze and Guattari, is intent on developing a philosophy of desire, Foucault, though much influenced by and having influence on this tendency, is more concerned in his later works with delineating a theory of power and the complex interplay between power and discourses. Foucault’s work marks a break with conventional views of power. Power is not unitary, it does not reside in the state, it is not a thing to hold.

By power, I do not mean ‘Power’ as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another … these are only the terminal forms power takes. It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations, immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organisation; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disfunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.

(Foucault, 1979, pp. 92–3)

The problem with this theory of power is that by breaking with a reductive or negative view, power ‘remains almost as a process, without specification within different instances’ (Coward, 1978, p. 20). And although he is unwilling to specify in advance any privileged source of power, there nevertheless underlies his work what might be termed a ‘philosophical monism’ (Zinner, 1978, p. 220), a conception of a will to power (and hence his complex linkage with Nietzsche) forever expanding and bursting forth in the form of the will to know. It is the complexes of power/knowledge that Foucault explores in his essay on The History of Sexuality; the original French version of its ‘Introduction’ has the title ‘La volonté de savoir’, ‘The will to knowledge’, which makes his concerns transparent:

Things are accorded the weight of creation, while the human subject becomes a mere appendage – the speaker, the knower, the listener, the transmitter – and above all the spectator of the passage of discourse.

(Zinner, 1978, p. 220)

It is through discourse that the complex of power/knowledge is realized. Foucault is not inter- ested in the history of mind but in the history of discourse:

The question which I ask is not of codes but of events: the law of existence of the state- ments, that which has rendered them possible – these and none other in their place: the conditions of their singular emergence; their correlations with other previous or simulta- neous events, discursive or not. The question, however, I try to answer without referring

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to the consciousness, obscure or explicit, of speaking subjects; without relating the facts of discourse to the will – perhaps involuntary – of their authors.

(Foucault, 1978b, p. 14)

What he is suggesting is that the relationship between symbol and symbolized is not only referential but productive. The order of language produces its own material forms and desires as much as the physical possibilities. But there is no single hidden hand of history, no complex causative complex, no pre-ordained goal, no final truth of human history. Discourses produce their own truths as the possibilities of seeing the world in fresh ways emerge.

The history of sexuality therefore becomes a history of our discourses about sexuality. And the Western experience of sex, he argues, is not the inhibition of discourse but a constant, and historically changing, deployment of discourses on sex, and this ever-expanding discursive explosion is part of a complex growth of control over individuals, partly though the apparatus of sexuality. Power is articulated through discourse: it invests, creates, produces. ‘Power as form of productivity forms the subject rather than simply imposing itself; power is desiring rather than constraining’ (D’Amico, 1978, p. 179).

But behind the vast explosion of discourses on sexuality since the eighteenth century, there is no single unifying strategy valid for the whole of society. And in particular, breaking with an orthodox Marxist problematic, he denies that it can be simply interpreted in terms of prob- lems of ‘reproduction’. In the ‘Introduction’ to The History of Sexuality (which is a method- ological excursus, rather than a complete ‘history’) Foucault suggests four strategic unities, linking together a host of practices and techniques, which formed specific mechanics of knowledge and power centring on sex: a hysterization of women’s bodies, a pedagogization of children’s sex, a socialization of procreative behaviour, a psychiatrization of perverse plea- sures. And four figures emerged from these preoccupations, four objects of knowledge, four subjects subjected, targets of and anchorages for the categories that were being simultaneously investigated and regulated: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple and the perversive adult. The thrust of these discursive creations is control, control not through denial or prohibition, but through production, through imposing a grid of definition on the possibilities of the body.

The deployment of sexuality has its reasons for being, not in reproducing itself, but in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way.

(Foucault, 1979, p. 107)

This is obviously related to Foucault’s analysis of the genealogy of the disciplinary society, a society of surveillance and control, in Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977a) and to his argument that power proceeds not in the traditional model of sovereignty but through admin- istering and fostering life.

The old power of death that symbolised sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.

(Foucault, 1979, pp. 139–40)

The obvious question is why. Foucault’s ‘radical nominalism’ rejects the question of causa- tion, but he quite clearly perceives the significance of extra-discursive references. In I, Pierre

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Riviere, the French revolution is perceived as having profound resonances (Foucault, 1978a). In The History of Sexuality, as in Discipline and Punish, he refers to the profound changes of the eighteenth century:

What occurred in the eighteenth century in some western countries, an event bound up with the development of capitalism, was … nothing less than the entry of life into history.

(Foucault, 1979, p. 141)

And in the emergence of ‘bio-power’, Foucault’s characteristic term of ‘modern’ social forms, sexuality becomes a key element. For sex, argues Foucault, is the pivot of two axes along which the whole technology of life developed; it was the point of entry to the body, to the harnessing, identification and distribution of forces over the body, and it was the entry to control and regulation of populations. ‘Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 146). As a result, sex becomes a crucial target of power organized around the management of life, rather than the sovereign threat of death which organizes ‘pre-modern’ societies.

Foucault stresses not the historical cause of events but the conditions for the emergence of discourses and practices. Nevertheless there appears to be a strong functionalist tendency in his work. ‘Social control’ is no longer a product of a materially motivated ruling class but the concept of subjection within discourse seems as ultimately enveloping a concept.

‘Where there is power, there is resistance’, he argues, but nevertheless, and because of this, ‘resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 95). Indeed the very existence of power relies on a multiplicity of points of resistance, which play the role of ‘adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations’. Foucault apparently envisages the power of social explosions in forcing new ways of seeing: the great social changes (industrial capitalism?) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the French Revo- lution, the possibilities opened up by the ‘événements’ of 1968. But one reading of his work would suggest that without such explosions, techniques of discipline and surveillance, strat- egies of power/knowledge leave us always, already, trapped.

But an alternative reading is possible. First of all there is the possibility of struggles over definition. This can be seen both in struggles over definitions of female sexuality and over the various and subtle forms of control of homosexuality.

There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and ‘psychic hermaphrodism’ made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of ‘perversity’; but it also made possible the formation of a ‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak on its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabu- lary, using the same categories by which it was radically disqualified.

(Foucault, 1979, p. 101)

This reverse affirmation is the sub-text of the history of the homosexual rights movement; it points to the significance of the definitional struggle and to its limitations. Hence Foucault’s comment:

I believe that the movements labelled ‘sexual liberation’ ought to be understood as movements of affirmation starting with sexuality. Which means two things: they are

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movements that start with sexuality, with the apparatus of sexuality in the midst of which we’re caught, and which make it function to the limit; but, at the same time, they are in motion relative to it, disengaging themselves and surmounting it.

(Foucault, 1977b, p. 155)

The ramifications of this ‘surmounting’ are not clear, but it is apparent that both the evolution of homosexual meanings and identities is not complete or ‘scientifically’ established and that homosexuals are, possibly for the first time, self-consciously participating as a group in that evolution.

The other point of high importance in Foucault’s work is the emphasis on the genesis of particular institutions: of prisons, the clinic, medical and psychiatric practices that both produce and regulate the objects of knowledge. Appreciation of this emphasis will draw us away from such questions as: what is the relationship between the mode of production and this form of sexuality? Instead we can concentrate on the practices that actually constitute social and sexual categories and ensure their controlling impact. But, in turn, to do this we need to recognize that discourses do not arbitrarily emerge from the flux of possibilities, nor are discourses our only contact with the real: they have their conditions of existence and their effects in concrete, historical, social, economic and ideological situations.

Perspectives and projects

We are now in a sounder position to indicate more effective lines of historical research, or rather to pose the questions to which the historians of sexuality need to address themselves. They are effectively in two parts. First, what were the conditions for the emergence of the homosexual category (or indeed other sexual categories), the complex of factors which fixed the possibilities of homosexual behaviours into a system of defining concepts? Second, what were and are the factors which define the individual acceptance or rejection of categoriza- tions? This is a question that many might regard as invalid but which seems to us of critical importance in determining the impact of control and regulation.

Conditions

Foucault and others have stressed the growing importance of the ‘norm’ since the eighteenth century.

Another consequence of this development of bio-power was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm at the expense of the juridical system of the law.

(Foucault, 1979, p. 149)

A power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It has to qualify, measure, appraise and hierarchize: ‘it affects distributions around the norms’. This is not far removed from a more commonplace observation that the development of liberal (‘individualistic’) society in the nineteenth century led to an increase of conventionality, or to discussions of ideological ‘interpellations’ in the construction of hegemonic forms (Laclau, 1977); but the examination of the ‘norm’ does point effectively to the centrality since the nineteenth century of the norm of the monoga- mous, heterosexual family. The uncertain status of sodomy points to the fact that before the nineteenth century, the codes governing sexual practices – canonical, pastoral, civil – all

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centred on non-reproductive relations. Sodomy was part of a continuum of non-procreative practices, often more serious than rape precisely because it was barren. But these regula- tions were not extra-marital; they entered the marriage bed, were directly about non-repro- ductive sex in conjugality, whatever the effectiveness of enforcement. From the nineteenth century the regulations are increasingly of non-conjugal relations: from incest and child- hood sex to homosexuality. As sexuality is increasingly privatized, seen as the character- istic of the personal sphere, as its public manifestations are challenged (in terms that speak all the time of sex while denying it), so deviant forms of sex become subject to more closely defined public regulation. The family norm is strengthened by a series of extra-marital regulations, which refer back all the time to its normality and morality. This is, of course, underlined by a whole series of other developments, from the enforcement of the Poor Laws and the Factory Acts to the Welfare State support of particular household models in the twentieth century. To repeat a point made earlier, the specification, and hence greater regulation, of homosexual behaviour is closely interconnected with the revaluation and construction of the bourgeois family, not necessarily as a conscious effort to support or sustain the family but because, as Plummer has put it:

The family as a social institution does not of itself condemn homosexuality, but through its mere existence it implicitly provides a model that renders the homosexual experience invalid.

(Plummer, 1975, p. 210)

But if we accept this outline as a fruitful guideline for research we need, second, to stress its class specificities. For if ‘sexuality’ and its derivative sexual categorizations are social constructs, then they are constructions within specific class milieux, whatever the impact of their ‘diffusion’ or reappropriation. We need to explore, in much greater depth than before, the class application of the homosexual categorizations. The common interest among many early twentieth-century middle-class, self-defined homosexuals with the male working class, conceived of as relatively indifferent to homosexual behaviour, is a highly significant element in the homosexual sub-culture.

There was in fact a notable predominance of upper-middle-class values. Perhaps on one level only middle-class men had a sufficient sense of a ‘personal life’ through which to develop a homosexual identity (Zaretsky, 1976). The stress that is evident among male homo- sexual writers on cross-class liaisons and on youth (typically the representative idealized rela- tionship is between an upper-middle-class man and a working-class youth) is striking, and not dissimilar, it may be noted in passing, to certain middle-class heterosexual patterns of the nineteenth century and earlier. See for example, the anonymous author, usually known as Walter, of the nineteenth-century sexual chronicle My Secret Life (Anonymous, c.1880). The impossibility of same-class liaisons is a constant theme of homosexual literature, demon- strating the strong elements of guilt (class and sexual) that pervade the male identity. But it also illustrates a pattern of what can be called ‘sexual colonialism’, which saw the working- class youth or soldier as a source of ‘trade’, often coinciding uneasily with an idealization of the reconciling effect of cross-class liaisons.

But if the idealization of working-class youth was one major theme, the attitude of these working-class men themselves is less easy to trace. They appear in all the major scandals (for example, the Wilde trial, the Cleveland Street scandal) but their self-conceptions are almost impossible to disinter. We may hypothesize that the spread of a homosexual consciousness was much less strong among working-class men than middle-class – for obvious family and

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social factors – even though the law in Britain (on, for example, importuning) probably affected more working-class than middle-class men. We can also note the evidence regarding the patterns of male prostitution as, for example, in the Brigade of Guards, a European-wide phenomenon. Most of the so far sparse evidence on male prostitution suggests a reluctance on the part of the ‘prostitute’ to define himself as homosexual (Weeks, 1980).

A third point relates to this, concerning the gender specificity of homosexual behaviour. The lesbian sense of self has been much less pronounced than the male homosexual and the sub-cultural development exiguous. If the Wilde trial was a major labelling event for men, the comparable event for lesbianism, the trial of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, was much less devastating in its impact, and a generation later. Even science, so anxious to detail the characteristics of male homosexuals, largely ignored lesbianism.

These factors underline the fact that what is needed is not so much a monist explanation for the emergence of a ‘homosexual identity’ as a differential social history of male homosexu- ality and lesbianism. But this in turn demands an awareness of the construction of specific gender definitions, and their relationship to sexual identities. Gagnon and Simon have noted that:

… the patterns of overt sexual behaviour on the part of homosexual females tend to resemble those of heterosexual females and to differ radically from the sexual patterns of both heterosexual and homosexual males.

(Gagnon and Simon, 1973, p. 180)

The impact on lesbianism of, for example, the discourses on (basically male) homosexuality has never been explored.

Fourth, this underscores again the need to explore the various practices that create the terrain or space in which behaviour is constructed. There is a long historical tradition, as we have seen, of exploring legal regulation, but its impact in constructing categories has never been considered. The role of the medicalization of sexual deviance has also been tentatively explored, but it is only now that its complexly differentiated impact is being traced. Equally important are the various forms of ideological representations of homosexual behaviour, whether through the press or through the dramatizing effects of major rituals of public condemnation, such as the Oscar Wilde trial in the 1890s.

Fifth, there is an absence of any study of the political appropriation of concepts of sexual perversity, although there is a great deal of empirical evidence from the nineteenth century to the present that sexual deviance had a significant place in sexual-political discourse. This indicates the need for a close attention to specific conjunctures of sexual politics and to the social forces at work in constructing political alliances around crimes of morality. The role of sexual respectability in helping to cement the dominant power bloc in the nineteenth century and the relevance of sexual liberalism in constructing the social democratic hegemony of the 1960s in Britain and elsewhere are examples in point (Gray, 1977; Hall et al., 1978).

What this schematic sketch suggests is the importance of locating sexual categorization within a complex of discourses and practices, but also at the same time it is important to reject descriptions that ignore the importance of external referents. The agitation for legal regula- tion, the impact of medicalization and the stereotyping of media representation all have sources in perceptions of the world and in complex power situations. One may mention, for example, the network of fears over moral decay, imperial decline and public vice behind the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act or the Cold War fears that form the background to the establishment of the Wolfenden Committee in 1954. Or, with regard to the growth of a

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medical model, we cannot disregard the significance of the growing professionalization of medicine in the nineteenth century, its ideological and material links with upper-middle-class male society and its consequent role in defining sexuality as well as ‘sexual perversions’. So although it would be wrong to see the regulation of homosexual behaviour as a simple effect of capitalist development, it is intricately linked to wider changes within the growth of a highly industrialized, bourgeois society.

Identities

All ideologies, Althusser has argued, work by interpellating (‘hailing’) particular subjects, and the ideological discourses that establish the categories of sexual perversity address partic- ular types of persons. They also, as Foucault suggests, create the possibility of reversals within the discourses: where there is power, there is resistance. Foucault is here offering a space for the self-creation of a homosexual identity, but what is absent is any interest in why some are able to respond or recognize themselves in the interpellation and others are not (Johnson, 1979, p. 75).

There are major problems in this area for which our guidelines are tentative. There is abun- dant evidence that individual, self-defined homosexuals see their sexuality as deeply rooted, and often manifest at a very early age. This would, on the surface at least, seem to deny that interaction with significant others creates the desire (as opposed to the identity), hence under- mining a purely voluntarist position. On the other hand, the notion of a deeply structured homosexual component is equally questionable, if for no other reason than that all the evidence of historical variations contradicts it. Labelling theory has been quite able to accept the distinctions we are making, for example, between primary and secondary deviation.

Primary deviation, as contrasted with secondary, is polygenetic, arising out of a variety of social, cultural, psychological, and adventitious or recurring combinations … secondary deviance refers to a special class of socially defined responses which people make to problems created by the societal reaction to their deviance … The secondary deviant, as opposed to his actions, is a person whose life and identity are organised around the facts of deviance.

(Lemert, 1967, p. 40)

This is a valuable distinction stressing the real (and hitherto ignored) importance of social labelling, but it ignores precisely those historical (and hence variable) factors which structure the differences. To put it another way, if the homosexual component is not a factor present only in a fixed minority of people, but on the contrary an aspect of the body’s sexual possibili- ties, what social and cultural forces are at work which ensure its dominance in some people, whereas in others the heterosexual element is apparently as strong and determined? Social labelling is obviously central in making the divide between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’, but what shapes the components at the level of the human animal?

This must lead us again to ask whether we can rescue any lessons from psychoanalytical speculations. A recent attempt to reinterpret Freud’s analysis of Little Hans throws some light on this question. Mia Campioni and Liz Gross appear to accept the arguments of Deleuze and Guattari (and Foucault) that Freud’s work was simultaneously a recognition of, and another form of control over, the organization of desire under capitalism (Campioni and Gross, 1978). The function of Oedipus is thus to organize sexuality into properly different gender roles to accord both with patriarchal norms and a society that privileges sexuality.

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The purpose of concentrating on the case of Little Hans is to reveal the precise mecha- nisms whereby a system of representation (ideology), correlative with existing social structures, is inscribed upon the child within the constraints of relations specified by the family … the process by which Hans is inserted into his patriarchal heritage gives us an indication of this process’s mechanisms – at least in the case of male socialization. … Moreover, the case allows us to clarify the strategies by which the child is inscribed into the power relations that stratify society, and to discover that this occurs by means of the sexualization of privileged erogenous zones. It is by the privileging of sexual zones, desires and objects, and by their social control through psychical defence mechanisms, in particular repression, that class and patriarchal social values are instilled in the child which are constructive of his or her very identity. Sexualization is the means both of the production and the limitation of desire, and therefore is also the locus of the control of desire. Sexual desire provides the socio-political structure with a specific site for power relations (relations of domination and subordination in general) to be exercised.

(Campioni and Gross, 1978, p. 103)

At the beginning of Hans’ case what is most apparent are the overwhelming number of objects and aims of his eroticism. Over the two years of the analysis this sexuality is chan- nelled into the forms of masculine sexuality demanded by familial ideology, and in this we can see, dramatically at work in Freud’s analysis and the father’s work as agent, the actual imposition of the Oedipal network by the psychoanalytical institution, a paradigm of its controlling role in the twentieth century.

Several points come out of this which are worth underlining. First, this re-analysis does not assume the family is a natural, biological entity with single effects. On the contrary, it is seen as historically constituted and a consequent intersection of various developments, including the development of childhood and the social differentiation of women and men. Second, the analysis does not assume the naturalness of heterosexuality. Instead it relates its privileging precisely to the construction of masculinity and femininity within the monogamous (and socially constituted) family. Third, it does not see the Oedipus complex as in any way universal. Not only is it historically specific, but it is also class specific. Fourth, the analysis suggests that the child’s development is neither natural nor internal to the family unit. The young human animal, with all his or her potentialities, is structured within a family, which all the time is a combination of social processes, and by constant reference to the social other.

It is within this context that psychological masculinity and femininity are structured at the level of the emotions. It seems likely that the possibilities of heterosexuality and homosexu- ality as socially structured limitations on the flux of potentialities are developed in this nexus in the process of emotional socialization. The emotion thus draws on sexuality rather than being created by it.

But what is created, this would suggest, is not an identity but a propensity. It is the whole series of social interactions, encounters with peers, educational processes, rituals of exclusion, labelling events, chance encounters, political identifications, and so on, which structure the sexual identities. They are not pre-given in nature; probably like the propensities themselves they are social creations, though at different levels in the formation of psychological individu- ality. This again suggests a rich field for historical explorations: the conditions for the growth of sub-cultural formations (urbanization, response to social pressure, etc.), the degree of sub- cultural participation, the role of sub-cultural involvement in the fixing of sexual identities, the impact of legal and ideological regulation, the political responses to the sub-culture, both from within the homosexual community and without, and the possibilities for transformations.

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Conclusion

What has been offered here is neither a prescription for correct research procedures nor a collection of dogmatic answers, but a posing of important and fundamentally historical ques- tions which the historians of sexuality have generally ignored. Earlier in the paper, the problem was posed on two levels: the level of the social categorization and the level of the individual, subjective construction of meaning. Until very recently, as Mary McIntosh pointed out, the latter level was exclusively concentrated on, to the extent that the question of aetiology dominated. Since then, particularly with the rise of sociological studies, the social has rightly been emphasized. What I am now tentatively suggesting is that we must see both as aspects of the same process, which is above all a historical process. Social processes construct subjectivities not just as ‘categories’ but at the level of individual desires. This perception, rather than the search for epistemological purity, should be the starting point for future social and historical studies of ‘homosexuality’ and indeed of ‘sexuality’ in general.

Notes

1 See, for example, Public Record Office, HO 79/1 66: Lord Hawkesbury to Lord Sydney, 8 November 1808.

2 Public Record Office: transcript of Regina v. Boulton and Others, 1871, DDP4/6, Day 1, p. 82; Day 3, p. 299.

3 On youth, see Gillis (1974); Gorham (1978); and on housework and motherhood, see Oakley (1976) and Davin (1978).

4 For comments on this theme, see Adams and Minson (1978), Coward (1978), Kuhn (1978, pp. 61–2). 5 For Wilhelm Reich’s comments on homosexuality, see Reich, 1970. ‘It can be reduced only by estab-

lishing all necessary prerequisites for a natural love life among the masses’ [n.p.n.]. For a useful comment on the historical context of Reich’s views, see Mitchell, 1974, p. 141. A similar leftist view that homosexuality was a ‘symptom of arrested or distorted development’ can be seen in Craig, 1934, p. 129. Herbert Marcuse’s views are to be found in Eros and Civilization (1969). Reich, The Sexual Revolution (1970), expresses a viewpoint that homosexuality is a product of capitalist distortion of the libido.

6 Compare Plummer’s slightly different account in the SSRC Report (Plummer, 1979). 7 Campioni and Gross (1978, p. 100) in their paper on ‘Little Hans: The Production of Oedipus’

propose a useful critique of Mitchell. See also Hall’s point: ‘Surely, we must say that, without further work, further historical specification, the mechanisms of the Oedipus in the discourse both of Freud and Lacan are universalist, trans-historical and therefore “essentialist” … the concepts elaborated by Freud (and reworked by Lacan) cannot, in their in-general and universalist form, enter the theoretical space of historical materialism, without further specification and elaboration – specification at the level at which the concepts of historical materialism operate’ (Hall, 1978, pp. 118–19).

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