People with a History/CLGH Book Review:
Whitney Davis:
Review of Merrick and Ragan, eds., Homosexuality in Modern France
Whitney Davis, Department of Art History, Northwestern University
Review of Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., Homosexuality in Modern France.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. x + 253 pp.
This highly readable collection of lucid and useful essays, a new contribution to
Oxford's distinguished series of ‘Studies in the History of Sexuality," arose
from a conference on "Homosexuality in Modern France" organized by the editors,
Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., and hosted by the Center for Gay and Lesbian
Studies at CUNY Graduate Center in 1994. It contains ten essays by intellectual, social,
and cultural historians, six male and four female, covering diverse but interrelated
topics in the study of male and female homosexuality in late eighteenth, nineteenth, and
early twentieth century France. (France is conceived largely as the Continental
nation-state, since no chapter deals with Francophone colonies.) It gives about equal
emphasis to each of the decades from the 1780s to the 1920s, covered in eight chapters,
framed by chapters on views of same-sex eroticism in the earlier and mid-1700s, by Ragan,
and on Michel Foucault’s sexuality and theory of historical sexualities (in the
1960s, 70s, and 80s), by Robert Nye. The overall title might suggest an interdisciplinary
purview, but the volume does not contain work by literary or art historians or by scholars
working in French academic institutions. Instead, it reflects the latest research and the
preferred methods of professional historians in North America. Reading it through in one
sitting leaves one with the strong impression of a subdisciplinary consensus working with
considerable assurance and power, despite obvious differences between individual chapters
in research topic and specific analytic emphasis. In fact, Homosexuality in Modern
France should probably be regarded as the book in which gay and lesbian studies in
modern French history "come of age" and confidently display their range, depth,
and solidity. This shared sense of important questions to be addressed by a collective
program of on-going discussion has been built from and draws upon a substantial dossier of
ground-breaking work by several authors represented in the volume and by other scholars.
This rich background certainly includes work by Foucault himself, though in practice
several essays do not wholly accept his discourse-deterministic notions of historical
causality and revise his sense of the emergence of modern "homosexuality" as a
discursive construction. But it also draws on succeeding French historians of sodomitical
and homosexual "subcultures" and vocabularies, including Michel Rey (whose
pioneering 1985 article on eighteenth-century Parisian homosexuals’ "creation of
a lifestyle" echoes through several chapters), Claude Courove (whose 1985 Vocabulaire
del'homosexualite masculine continues to prove itself), and Maurice Lever (Les
Buchers de Sodome: Histoire des infames, also of 1985, offered an initial synthesis);
on historians of subversive and pornographic literatures (such as Robert Darnton, Lynn
Hunt, and Sara Maza; on historians of medicine and psychiatry, among whom Foucault looms
large but including a much-needed return to primary texts of sexual advice, sexual
anthropology or criminology, and psychopathology; and the general history of European
middle-class nationalisms and their emerging ideologies of sex and gender (represented,
for example, in the work of George Mosse and Robert Nye).
The volume successfully supplements the existing emphasis in gay and lesbian studies
generally--especially in its literary and cultural-studies variants--on British and
American historical sources and problems. It shows the wide range and depth of the French
sources and focuses the historical questions to which they give rise, complementing the
existing (and somewhat different) scholarship on German-speaking countries in the same
period. As an outsider to "French studies" in the American historical
profession, however, I was sometimes a little puzzled, though never greatly disturbed, by
the limits imposed by accepting the boundaries of the French language and nation-state as
the general frame of analysis. Some features of the history under review--such as the
increasingly internationalized nature of medical-scientific communication in the
nineteenth century or the structural relation between capitalist imperialism and the
colonization of "national" subjects--do not always seem completely well served
by this; where necessary, in fact, several authors implicitly focus their lens differently
and consider European or international materials.
It is difficult, and perhaps a little unfair to individual chapters, to summarize ten
different complex studies. But as the volume does have a coherence, at least compared to
debates within poststructural or cultural theory or in literary and art history, it is
worth attempting to draw out its general perspective, however provisionally. The authors
seem to me to have three chief interests. First, they examine the relation between the
actual economic, political, and social formation of sodomitical and homosexual
"subcultures" in France (documented from the earlier eighteenth century on) and
changing conceptions of same-sex eroticism, sexual behavior, and personal and group
identity--both inside and outside those subcultures, but always responding to the specific
history of subcultural development in its wider national contexts. Second, they examine
the role of those changing conceptions--or "representations"—in
transforming the very possibilities for subcultural formation, growth, or reorganization
and for the (non)integration of the subculture into national society. Third, they examine
the influence of a variety of nationally circulated sociocultural ideologies--religious,
philosophical, legal, medical--on the discursive or rhetorical structure of the
representations themselves, on their terms, points of reference, and imaginative horizons.
Compared to earlier writers, most of the authors do not strongly privilege one or the
other of these three kinds of historical relation. For example, compared to an earlier
generation of more "Foucauldian" studies they are less likely to assume that
discursive development—for example, the structure of the conceptual classification of
sexual behavior--wholly drives the realization and transformation of sexual identity, as
it were calling it into being. Instead, they stress the interaction between subculture,
representation, and ideology in their linked and mutually constitutive social histories.
In terms of both historical method and historical theory, there is, however, one key term
throughout. It is the concept of "subculture." In modern France, "men with
similar sexual interests," as the editors put it (p. 6), came to know how and where
to meet one another. The grounding phenomenon, then, would seem to be the need of and
desire for same-sex erotic-sexual sociability, even though it is not wholly clear how men
knew one another to have ‘similar sexual interests"--that is, interests in one
another--prior to or outside of their integration into a subculture. Time and again, the
chapters document episodes of sexual contact, some clearly coincidental or spontaneous and
sometimes clearly stage-managed, between people of the same sex, but much work remains to
be done on the modes of visibility and codes of recognition--the primal "glue"
of a subculture increasingly and somewhat paradoxically founded on the invisibility of its
defining interest--that partly governed and partly emerged from these erotic situations.
In turn, the visibility of the subculture, however achieved, partly provoked social
responses, even as such management effectively constituted the subculture. Hence the
subculture partly conceived itself under the influence of wider ideologies, even as such
ideologies had to take the measure of subcultural realities. Still, transformation in
discourse could derive partly the differing sense given by members of the subculture to
the terms of reference current in a wider system of representation. And so on: an
intricate circuitry can be tracked. Not surprisingly, then, for many of the essays the
central task is definitively to establish and richly to characterize the presence and
specific history of sodomitical and homosexual subcultures in modern France. They bring to
bear a wide range of contemporary sources, especially police and legal documents of
various kinds, literary and quasi-literary representations, and medical-scientific
treatments of same-sex sexual behavior and relationships. I place preliminary emphasis on
this matter because among these ten authors the causally determining role of same-sex
sexual-erotic sociability "in the last instance"--as the sociocultural
phenomenon sine qua non—seems to have definitively replaced earlier historians'
much-criticized (but still covertly attractive) appeals to the existence of a stable,
intrinsic ‘homosexual" nature. There, the simple question was how
"homosexuals"--always existing as intrinsically homosexual monads born into
every human generation--found one another socially and over time produced a variety of
erotic, political, and cultural institutions. Now, the more complex question has become
how "homosexuality,""in its modern cultural and ideological senses and
practices, has emerged from situations or what many essays in this volume call
"networks" of same-sex sexual-erotic sociability. Barring tautology, we cannot
presume that initially these had a "homosexual’ character--though over time, of
course, the circuitry can become to some extent self-fulfilling. If these essays are any
guide, one might say that the historian’s problem has become the two-way and
continuously developing passage from "networks," relatively open to and
traversed by all kinds of actual and possible participants, from the most casual to the
most regular, to "subcultures," coding and configuring such sociability in
increasingly conventional ways and tending to stabilize established categories of status,
class, and other affiliations and certain ritualized interactions between them, and then
to ‘identities," understanding these conventions and rituals to direct, to
express, and to fulfill one's innermost teleology in erotic-sexual life, imaginatively
reconstructed as a psychosexual drive, nature, or essence.
None of the essays schematizes the question exactly as I have phrased it here. In fact,
one awaits a full theoretical clarification of the continuities and discontinuities
between ‘networks" and "subcultures" (this appears to me to be a
pressing desideratum) and between these and ‘identities" (here gay-lesbian
studies in its "social-constructionist" variant has concentrated a good deal of
attention already)--for the actual ‘glue," the system of recognitions, that
inaugurally bound people together in the required erotic sociabilities remains poorly
understood. Many of the existing records only start from the observed (but in itself
historically constructed) fact that people had had or were in such a elation. But all the
essays in the volume provide rich, exciting, and suggestive documentation for and
interpretive ideas about the historical processes in question. Yet one cannot help
wondering about the way in which the historical record must be managed in order to set up
this framework. What do we make of men and women possessed of the requisite interests in
sociability who for whatever reason did not traverse--or actively rejected the possibility
of participation in--a sodomitical or homosexual "network"? Equally, what do we
make of those men and women who participated to some extent in the sociabilities of the
"network" but whose conceptions or imaginations of its situations were not
organized and conventionalized in the "subculture," let alone stabilized
retrospectively (and for future participants) as psychological and social
"identity"? What is their status in a history of ‘homosexuality"?
I do not wish to suggest that the essays ignore these questions. To the contrary, they
approach them in a variety of interesting ways. For example, they consider such problems
as the various social-economic and erotic-fantasmatic roles within male prostitution or
enforced all-male societies; the overall condemnation of man-boy eroticism or
intergenerational sex (in this period, not to be confused with "pederasty,"
which often simply signified same-sex sodomy, regardless of the age of participants); and
the continuing nostalgic-utopian production of imaginative works (frequently based on
classical traditions inflected by modern tempers of belatedness or alienation) projecting
social, erotic, or sexual possibilities unavailable within modern life, including the
homosexual subcultures. In these and other arenas, we find notable disjunctions between
the full assimilation (or what the editors appropriately criticize as the
"Whiggish" progress) of "networks" into ""subcultures"
into "identities."
What interests many of the essays, in fact, is the continuing social reorganization and
conceptual reimagination of possibilities always only partly achieved--strictly speaking,
the on-going devolution accompanying the evolution. Still, the "Whiggish"
tendency cannot be wholly avoided, and most authors would not wish wholly to avoid it. To
the extent that their topic is ‘homosexuality" in modern France, they follow a
particular track in the ongoing and openly ramified overlapping of networks, subcultures,
and identities, namely, the gradual consolidation of "homosexuality" as a
distinct and well-defined psychological, social, and cultural possibility, more or less
independent of homosexual acts and whether approved or disapproved. The chronology of this
development appears to be roughly comparable with its chronology in English- and in
German-speaking countries, although in France the initial push of certain Enlightenment
and revolutionary ideas and debates was apparently more substantial than elsewhere. In
"The Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality" (Chapter 1) Bryant T. Ragan, Jr.,
suggests that certain writings by the philosophes "helped open up discursive
space in which the traditional intolerance of same-sex sexuality could be contested, or at
least quietly dropped" (p. 25). The role of later eighteenth-century rationalist and
relativist reasoning in this "opening" can now, it seems, be assumed. Building
on earlier work by Jacob Stockinger, Michel Delon, and others, Ragan summarizes a
compellingly wide range of texts.
It is interesting that the parallel role of somewhat later and of nineteenth-century
philosophies--for example, Kant's, Hegel's, or Schopenhauer's--remains much less well
investigated. For the nineteenth century, comparatively greater attention has been paid to
"medical-scientific" than to strictly philosophical writing, despite its
prestige and the fact that crucial debates about the person, reason, and the state
launched by the philosophes continued to be pursued. (In Britain, for example, John
Addington Symonds regarded himself as a Hegelian and formulated many of his ideas about
homoeroticist history--from Dorian to Victorian times--as a Hegelian narrative revised to
accommodate homoerotic values.) Possibly because critical idealism can hardly be seen as
relativistic, its compatibility with certain emergent homosexualisms is less visible (and
attractive) to twentieth-century readers than the philosophical anthropology of the
Enlightenment. But Ragan’s study suggests that the pay-off in pursuing the story of Aufklärung beyond the1780s and 1790s might be quite great.
Jeffrey Merrick studies "Representations of Male and Female Deviance in Late
Eighteenth-Century France" in his essay (Chapter 2) on the Marquis de Villette and
Mademoiselle de Raucourt. In contemporary comments on these characters, whom he describes
as an "aristocratic sodomite" and a "theatrical tribade," Merrick
finds the ""gradual emergence of a conception of unconventional sexual
identity" (p. 31). The actual intentions of the two protagonists--the personal
significance of their practices—cannot readily be reconstructed from the
fictionalized portrayals. But Merrick is more interested in their "public
significance" anyway; to some extent, both Villette and Raucourt represented social
fears and fantasies. To some extent they or their kind (to the extent that they were seen
as emblematic) might even have been understood in structural relation to one another, a
possibility at which Merrick hints in a provocative set of "comparisons" (pp.
45-47) without fully committing himself; Villette, he concludes, "put the right thing
in the wrong place, so to speak, and [Raucourt] put the wrong thing in the right
place" (p. 46). The matter is worth pursuing. At the time, if male and female
homosexuality had, in fact, achieved a structured relationship in an overall
classification maintained in the public imagination, one must rigorously treat them
together as reciprocally defining or constitutive--a requirement that would have many
implications for present-day "gay and lesbian studies" and its ambiguous copula.
At present, however, it remains unclear when the possibility remarked in the contemporary
responses to the lives and affairs of Villette and Raucourt became general and stable, if
ever. Merrick’s fascinating juxtaposition of materials, as it is meant to do, will
provoke further discussion about its status and implications.
Elizabeth Colwill’s study of "Marie Antoinette as Tribade in the Pornography
of the French Revolution" (Chapter 3) examines representations of the queen's
supposed desire to "pass as a woman, [but] act like a man"--to indulge a
"purported taste for women" (p. 54). A number of historians, including in this
country Robert Darnton, Marilyn Gutwirth, Sara Maza, and Merrick, have stressed the role
similar representations played in wider political affairs in expressing contemporary
fantasies about courtly licentiousness and hypocrisy, about the power of women, and about
forms of social disorder, some of which revolutionary ideologies hoped to embrace and some
of which they intended to police. Colwill refocuses the question to consider the primary
materials as documents of the "shifting meanings of the tribade in the eighteenth
century" (p. 55). The (imagined) body and the (imagined) sexual practices of the
queen, she concludes, took up but also reorganized earlier and contemporary debates about
roles and positions in the sex-gender system. Although the queen was reviled by the
pornographers, the very act of representing her "noxious femininity" (p.
69)--for example, her supposed masturbatory and sodomitical lusts--might have contributed
to the social realization of previously unimaginable (or at least discursively suppressed)
eroticisms; it likely marked off the acceptable from the unacceptable in ways that
"circumscribed the boundaries of female sexuality in the modern era" (p. 72).
The model of pornography as simultaneously creatively enabling and morally disabling
nonstandard eroticism works to especially good effect in Colwill’s study, although
one continues to wonder about the actual reception of these ephemeral texts. Their
stereotyped visualizations and limited, generic vocabularies admitted particularized
sentiments--for example, contemporary hatred of the queen’s Austrian origins--only
occasionally, but Colwill suggests how the selection of imagery and structural
juxtaposition of epithets structurally positioned the queen’s alleged tribadism in
unique ways.
Michael David Sibalis reviews "The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in
Revolutionary and Napoleonic France" from 1789 to 1815 (Chapter 4). Here minds us
that it was the Constituent Assembly that originally decriminalized sodomy--not the
legislation developed by Cambaceres, who merely "incorporated this previous
reform" (p. 80); moreover, as Sibalis shows, despite the code Napoleonic officials
could strongly repress pederastic and sodomitical activity. Sibalis’ close reading
shows that the laws gave individual administrators considerable room for maneuver in
prosecuting individual cases of offenses against public decency (eventually systematized
and classified in the medical forensics of Ambroise Tardieuand others in the 1850s),
whether or not they always acted on this power. In reviewing these situations, Sibalis
judges that officials detested "crimes against nature" but made varying
practical decisions about the ease, value, and consequences of pursuing them in the
criminal-justice system, often preferring quiet repression by the police; based on primary
archival materials, he presents an exhaustive discussion (pp. 87-93) of a regional case of
male-male sodomy that went all the way to Napoleon himself, who rejected further legal
proceedings in the interest of keeping the whole phenomenon quiet. Sibalis concludes that
pederasty and sodomy were actually seldom tried as such in Napoleonic courts--only four
cases are known (p. 95)--and that despite police surveillance and harassment "the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic period was a time of relative freedom," partially
anticipating "contemporary legal toleration""(p. 96). Sibalis’
materials should provoke reflection on the supposedly constitutive role of intolerance,
harassment, and persecution in the construction of "homosexual" experience (the
category itself, of course, derives in part, though not wholly, from a
"pathologizing" imperative) in relation to the comparative freedom from actual
repressive entanglements that the "vast majority" of male homosexuals probably
secured. (Indeed, as Sibalis puts it, paradoxically "the ambient social prejudice
against sodomy often worked to some extent to protect men accused of sex crimes that were
punishable under law" [p. 96].) Obviously we cannot gainsay the vehemence of
long-standing institutional condemnations of homosexual activity. Still, in the light of
Sibalis’ and other current research one can admit that the experience of regulation
and repression might not have been the only or the chief social-erotic reality of same-sex
imagination and sociability in the modern period. Same-sex erotic relations have been
"bounded" by regulation and repression, to be sure, but--setting aside
deterministic theories in which the result would be achieved simply by definition--does
this really mean, as some writers seem to suppose, that it was internally and inherently
constituted or determined by it? This is a hard question; it will, I think, be one of the
most important ones for the next round of historical debates.
The question of "Creating Boundaries" is pursued by Victoria Thompson
(Chapter 5) in her study of "Homosexuality and the Changing Social Order in
France" from 1830 to 1870. For the period of the July Monarchy, she considers
novelistic representations of gender and sexual variation (specifically, of
"hermaphrodites" and of cross-dressing) by Henri de Latouche, HonoreéBalzac,
and Théophile Gautier as well as debates about prison reform that acknowledged same-sex
relations among inmates. In this period, perhaps consistent with Sibalis’ emphasis on
relative tolerance as late as the 1840s, Thompson argues that the "permeability of
boundaries" in gender and sexual relations sometimes expressed new visions of social
order not wholly rejected by the public--or at least the individual artistic or
official--imagination. By contrast, in the Second Empire--here Thompson considers the
linking of male homosexuality to crime and certain images of female homosexuality
fantasied as challenges to male domination--it would appear that same-sex sexuality
signified undesirable forms of social disruption; "Second Empire sources clearly
warned that crossing boundaries of gender, class, and sexuality led to disorder" (p.
120).
In general, many of the essays in the volume suggest that in the Second Empire and then
in the Third Republic a firm classification of gender and sexuality in hierarchically
organized categories, much of it persisting well into this century and today, was
articulated by and for the bourgeois nation-state and, to use Thompson’s words,
"paved the way for the construction of the ‘homosexual’ as a type outside
heterosexuality" (p. 121). At risk of oversimplifying these conclusions, the
watershed appears to be the years of revolutionary upheaval at mid-century. After 1848, it
would seem virtually certain that a conception of a specific, pathological
"homosexuality" would eventually emerge, as it began to do in the 1850s. It
remains to be seen what kind of impact revolutionary agitations and national reactions had
on the erotic-political consciousness of sodomites themselves--that is, those old enough
to remember libertine survivals and young enough to experience burgeoning nationalist and
bourgeois moralism. The figure of Balzac’s character Vautrin, who appeared in three
works in the 1830s and 40s briefly discussed by Thompson (p. 111), literally seems to
figure a number of aspects of this development through the middle decades of the century.
In "Love and Death in Gay Paris" (Chapter 6), William A. Peniston considers
"Homosexuality and Criminality in the 1870s." Specifically, he narrates and
analyzes a criminal case involving two "common people," ordinary working men and
lovers. These men likely would have lived "quietly in the relative obscurity of their
neighborhood" (p. 129) had their personal erotic troubles not led to the death of the
younger friend and a subsequent police investigation of their liaison, background, and
other associations. Whether the young man died by accident, by suicide, or by murder
cannot really be determined. But the older friend was convicted of manslaughter; he was,
Peniston judges, "probably responsible" for the deed (p. 142). Based on the
police records, Peniston shows that a ramified homosexual subculture framed the relation
of the two principals. It offered not only casual sex and prostitution but also
well-established places of sociability and long-running friendships. Equally important, it
was more or less visible to family members, to neighbors, and finally to the police.
"Even though their sexual habits were not illegal," in this environment
homosexual men self-protectively had to "deny their own emotional or sexual
needs" in order to avoid censure on the part of the non-homosexuals among whom they
lived, whose "social prejudices" were in turn rationalized in middle-class
theories of homosexual pathology (p. 142). Peniston does not quite close the circle by
asking whether his two protagonists "internalized" such prejudices and in tragic
(but almost inevitable) fashion ultimately enacted, however indirectly, the viciousness
commonly attributed to their kind; although obviously homosexual men were not
"born" criminals, oppression might have "made" one of them into such.
At any rate, the question of "responsibility"--not only for one's individual
acts, legal or illegal, but also for one’s ethical orientation and moral
identity--lies behind and gives paradigmatic weight to Peniston’s fascinating
narrative.
By the early 1870s, Karl-Maria Kertbeny, Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, and other reformers
argued that men manifesting "contrary sexual instinct" (or, slightly later,
"inversion") could not be held responsible for their ordinary sexual activities
(in Prussia, of course, homosexual sodomy was illegal), for their psychosexual
character--understood to be an orienting sensation or deep emotional temperament--was
innate or inborn. Earlier, certain German psychiatrists had almost reached parallel
conclusions in different language. At the same time, however, as noted already, the
European nation-states "after 1848" decisively codified the sex-gender system;
same-sex sexual attractions were definitively construed as socially unacceptable. Thus a
complex and contradictory discourse was set up between and among psychological, medical,
legal, and moral theorists, each of whom had an individual intellectual genealogy and
cultural attitude. Was inversion congenital or not? If congenital, degenerate and
pathological or not? If pathological, treatable or not? If not congenital, how acquired?
If acquired, morally or viciously? In his important analysis of "The Pederast's
Inversions" (Chapter 7), Vernon A. Rosario II surveys the turns and twists of this
discourse in later nineteenth-century France. He puts special emphasis on the early work
of Ambroise Tardieu (commonly cited well into this century, his Étude medico-légale
sur les attentats aux moeurs first appeared in 1857), on studies of
"hysterical" men in the 1870s, and on the medico-scientific conceptualization of
homosexual "inversion" in the 1880s. A final section (pp. 161-66) discusses
responses issuing from surprisingly courageous writers, especially Marc-Andre Raffalovich
(later the enemy of Oscar Wilde) and Eugen Wilhelm ("Numa Praetorius"), one of
Freud’s sources for the literature of "bisexuality," who had internal,
personal knowledge of urban homosexual subcultures.
Compared to the sub-Foucauldian claim that "homosexuality" appeared as an
intellectual construction, and an "epistemic break," rather narrowly datable to
the early 1870s, Rosario’s chapter suggests, as he intends, that the
conceptualization of "homosexuality" in France, as in English- and
German-speaking countries, occurred relatively gradually. Indeed, it reflected as much
stable "social prejudices" as any radical conceptual propositions or discoveries
of the time: the long-standing image and stereotype of the "pederast" was
converted into the new but fundamentally reactionary type of the "invert." This
development reflected professional competition (in a marketplace increasingly including
well-off middle-class clients seeking the amelioration of sexual dysfunctions) and other
ideological struggles as much as the direct contribution of putatively direct or original
observations. In all of this, the fundamental intellectual distinction of an
"interior [sexual or erotic] being" from its "superficial appearance"
(p. 148) remains to be fully clarified in relation to wider conceptions of the self and
consciousness, some of which date to the seventeenth century and before and in my view
responded to contemporary developments in nineteenth-century philosophy as well. But
Rosario’s fine-tuned study of certain specific forensic, psychiatric, and related
practices will contribute substantially to this broader analysis.
If male pederasty and inversion attracted, by the 1880s, a whole series of interpretive
representations in the legal, medical, psychiatric, and philosophical arenas, each text
attempting to stake out its own intellectual position even if it strongly reflected
"social prejudices," writers on female homosexuality, as Francesca Canade
Sautman notes in "Invisible Women: Lesbian Working-Class Culture in France,
1880-1930" (Chapter 8), "for the most part . . . perpetuated stereotypes that
did not reflect changing social conditions" (p. 186). Male audiences "fantasized
or even invented" a lesbianism they wanted to see among prostitutes (p. 187), and
though Sautman documents the "existence of lesbian relationships among sex
workers" (p. 188)--for example, citing letters from sex workers to their female
lovers--and recounts their several notable organized attempts to resist exploitation, it
is difficult to see beyond the novelistic or journalistic portrayals by the male outsiders
who collected these documents. Still, in these narratives Sautman identifies "a
cultural message that is truly ‘lesbian’," namely, the struggle for a
"lesbian" partner to keep her more "bisexual" friend "from being
‘corrupted’ by the sales hommes" (p. 190). In general, "lower
class origins, femaleness, and sexual ambiguity constituted a heavy weight to bear"
(p. 197). Sautman’s chapter is a forceful reminder that when historical subjects were
constrained to "invisibility" or lacked a "voice," at least in the
written or printed record, "every shred of this memory, the very process of gathering
it, takes on, for lesbian and gay historians, special meaning" (p. 197). If I take
her point, historians must combine the most rigorous approach to fragmentary sources with
an almost preternatural empathy for the lives represented there.
No volume on "homosexuality in modern France" would be complete without a
consideration of André Gide; both the composition and the reception of his Corydon (begun in 1907 "in defense of pederasty" in the Greek sense and commercially
published in final form in 1924) reflected many of the long-term historical processes
considered in other chapters. In "Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Corydon"
(Chapter 9), Martha Hanna considers Gide’s situation within, response to, and
reception by a readership and a wider culture that remained "homophobic" despite
the existence of a thriving homosexual subculture. Like the turmoils of 1848, the First
World War importantly changed the existing equation, in this case by provoking a national
desire to reaffirm the "heterosexual ethos" in light of the war’s creation,
and even promotion, of erotically significant male friendships (p. 203). In this context,
to defend pederasty, Hanna argues, Gide stressed the connections between homosexuality and
"martial valor, classical culture, and familial reproduction" (p. 205). She sees
this as a "subversive strategy of appropriation and transformation" designed to
render inversion palatable within post-war France, though one must acknowledge the rather
reactionary tenor of a part of Gide’s reasoning and Hanna rightly emphasizes the
anachronism and internal inconsistencies of his neoclassicism. At any rate, Gide’s
"defense" was unsuccessful. Shortly after Corydon appeared, several
violent repudiations were published affirming, though somewhat recasting, the supposed
medical—and demographic--pathology of homosexuality. For these writers, Hanna
concludes, non-reproductive sexuality was a "threat to the future of France" (p.
221). It is difficult to pinpoint the causes of Gide’s failure to convince his
readers; perhaps no "defense" of pederasty could ever have convinced them. But
Hanna’s chapter leads to the suspicion that Gide had not quite accurately anticipated
his opponents’ objections and marshaled his historical, cultural, and ethical
arguments in relation to them. For example, and probably most important, he failed to find
a way fully to engage and displace the emerging stereotype of homosexual men as
fundamentally narcissistic or as what Hanna calls "self-indulgent egoists" (p.
221). Here, by the 1920s he would have had systematically to address Freudian
psychoanalysis--both assimilating and correcting it--as decisively different from the
sexology of the nineteenth century. But he only began to read Freud in 1921 and rather
naively saw his own book as potentially buttressed by Freudian thought.
In France, then, it fell to Michel Foucault to reconceive the ethics, the ascetics, and
the aesthetics of homosexuality in relation both to its ancient manifestations and to its
modern history and subcultures. In the first and introductory volume of the History of
Sexuality, Foucault’s approach was simultaneously classical (he stressed the
ethical-political constitution of sexuality, that is to say, "erotics"—the
interrelation of pleasures and responsibilities in sexual and affective relations--in the
broad sense) and anti-psychoanalytic (he stressed the social-discursive, and even the
‘cultural," over the psychic-fantasmatic, and even the "biological,"
construction of a "sexuality"). Why it was Foucault who produced the most
influential single text in and for contemporary gay and lesbian theory--rather than
certain British, American, or German gay intellectuals equally steeped in the radical
reading of Freud, the history of modern nation-states, and the politics of contemporary
emancipation--remains an open question. Indeed, as Foucault’s own work begins to be
placed in historical perspective as a symptom of its, or his, times, one can now
appreciate the independent originality of several writers on (homo)sexuality before and
during his career, such as Rüdiger Lautmann, not to speak of Herbert Marcuse or Gilles
Deleuze, some of whom Foucault, of course, explicitly acknowledged.
For Robert A. Nye, in his provocative final chapter (Chapter 10) on "Michel
Foucault’s Sexuality and the History of Homosexuality in France,"
Foucault’s "quest for a hermeneutics of self-constitution . . . arose from his
experience as a gay man at the beginning of our era of modern sexual politics" (p.
236), a distinctive history of the continuous "normalization" of sexual
relations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France—its creation and imposition of
a specific "sexual self," preferably heterosexual but structurally permitting
(perhaps even constituting) a "homosexual" pathology (pp. 232-33), supposedly
passive, effeminate, and enervated.
As a collection of historical studies of just this topic, Homosexuality in Modern
France goes a long way toward warranting Nye’s judgment. As I have tried to
suggest, the volume as a whole documents the trends Foucault is thought to have inherited
or encountered and to have historicized, theorized, and criticized in his published work.
Still, it is not wholly clear exactly how much of Foucault’s practice or theory Nye
wants to attribute to his history and situation as a "French" homosexual or a
homosexual "in France": the record of Foucault’s very extensive
international experience and multinational relationships, which Nye briefly describes,
"beyond the borders of its panoptic gaze" (p. 232). Despite the burgeoning
secondary literature on Foucault, further study of his personal and intellectual genealogy
is clearly needed--for example, to unravel not just the classical-Christian but also the
specifically modern imaginative erotic self-transformation, not at all derived
from--though it might now be useful for--late twentieth-century anti-essentialist or
"queer" theories of subjectivity, politics, or cultural production. Nye’s
chapter helps point a way by taking a more broadly historical or historicist approach to
Foucault than has been typical.
In the end, perhaps there is a deep and interesting tension between the
historians’ emphasis on the construction of roles and identities in
"subcultures" and Foucault’s philosophical insistence on the eroticized
ascetics of self-transformation, which might discover the subculture, regulated both from
the inside and the outside, to be the very alienation of its desire rather than the
fulfillment of its otherwise merely immanent or even nonexistent sociabilities. But Homosexuality
in Modern France will help us to refine such questions in ways that Foucault himself
could not.
Source.
© The Committee for Lesbian and Gay History [CLGH] is an affiliated organization of the American Historical Association devoted to
promoting the study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans* history, and the interaction of
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