Sexuality: Midterm Reading Notes

D’Emilio—Capitalism and Gay Identity “So, if we are free to sell our labor power in the positive sense, we are also freed, in the negative sense, from any other alternative. This dialectic-- the constant interplay between exploitation and some measure of autonomy-- informs all the history of those who have lived under capitalism.” (102) “The expansion of capital and the spread of wage labor have effected a profound transformation the structure and functions of the nuclear family, the ideology of family life, and the meaning of heterosexual relations. It is these changes in the family that are most directly linked to the appearance of a collective gay life.” (102) “The family was thus no longer an independent unit of production. But although no longer independent, the family was still interdependent. Because capitalism had not expanded very far, because it had not yet taken over—or socialized—the production of consumer goods, women still performed necessary productive labor in the home.” (103) “By the mid-1800s, capitalism had destroyed the economic self-sufficiency of many families, but not the mutual dependence of the members.” (103) “The meaning of heterosexual relations also changed. In colonial New England, the birthrate averaged over seven children per woman of childbearing age. Men and women needed the labor of children. Producing offspring was as necessary for survival as producing grain. Sex was harnessed to procreation. The Puritans did not celebrate heterosexuality, but rather marriage; they condemned all sexual expression outside the marriage bond and did not differentiate sharply between sodomy and heterosexual fornication.” (104) “Ideologically, heterosexual expression came to be a means of establishing intimacy, promoting happiness, and experiencing pleasure. In divesting the household of its economic independence and fostering the separation of sexuality from procreation, capitalism has created conditions that allow some men and women to organize a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex.” (104) “By the second half of the nineteenth century, this situation was noticeably changing as the capitalist system of free labor took hold. Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a person identity, an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction to one’s own sex.” (104-105) “These new forms of gay identity and patterns of group life also reflect the differentiation of people according to gender, race, and class that is so pervasive in capitalist societies.” (105) “Men could more easily construct a personal life independent of attachments to the opposite sex, whereas women were more likely to remain economically dependent on men.” (106) “How is it that capitalism, whose structure made possible the emergence of a gay identity and the creation of urban gay communities, appears unable to accept gay men and lesbians in its midst? Why do heterosexism and homophobia appear so resistant to assault?” (108) “The answers, I think, can be found in the contradictory relationship of capitalism to the family … capitalism has gradually undermined the material basis of the nuclear family by taking away the economic functions that cemented the ties between family members.” (108) “Ideologically, capitalism drives people into heterosexual families: each generation comes of age having internalized a heterosexist model of intimacy and personal relationships. Materially, capitalism weakens while capitalism has knocked the material the bonds the once kept families together … Thus, foundation away from family life, lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual feminists have become the scapegoats for the social instability of the system. This analysis, if persuasive, has implications for us today. It can affect our perception of our identity, our formulation of political goals, and our decision about strategy.” (109) “Capitalism has created the material conditions for homosexual desire to express itself as a central component of some individuals’ lives; now, our political movements are changing consciousness, creating the ideological conditions that make it easier for people to make that choice.” (109) “... capitalism has led to the separation of sexuality from procreation … the relationship between capitalism and the family is fundamentally contradictory.” (110) “In this way we may prefigure the shape of personal relationships in a society grounded in equality and justice rather than exploitation and oppression, a society where autonomy and security do not preclude each other but coexist.” (111) Brown—The Politics of Sexual Difference in a 17th Century Anglo-American Settlement “Despite the paucity of evidence, Hall’s case presents a nonetheless richly detailed glimpse of an early modern community’s responses to gender transgression, exposing to view a multiplicity of popular beliefs about sexual difference and the variety of uses to which they could be put by groups of people with different stakes in the social order.” (172) “The subsequent need to report their findings to a superior court compelled people who normally did not articulate their views on sexual difference to define the essence of maleness and femaleness … “beliefs- in-action … analyze each group's articulation of sexual difference by comparing it to their investigatory method, their claims (often implicit) to expertise, and their authority in the community.” (173) “The resultant absence of a coherent biological foundation for sex added to the inherent instability of concepts of sexual difference even as it made such concepts more available for local appropriation and adaptation … left the lion’s share of the work of producing gender distinctions to legal and religions institutions, local custom, and daily performance.” (173-174) “Borrowing liberally from religious and medical texts that assumed women’s inferiority, legal interpreters enshrined gender differences in the laws governing marriage, property, and accountability for crime … Law, religion, and custom thus stabilized gender although they did so without access to a stable biological concept of sexual difference.” (174) Manion—Female Husbands “Hamilton, Wilson, and dozens of others like them were designated ‘female husbands’ -- a term that persistently circulated throughout Anglo-American culture for nearly 200 years to describe people who defined categorization … By their very existence, they challenged essentialist understandings of sexual difference. They demonstrated by their actions every day that gender was malleable and not a result of one’s sex.” (1) “Female Husbands: A Trans History follows the category of ‘female husbands’ from its origin in 1746 through its demise just before WWI. The book highlights the very fact that people assigned female at birth chose to trans gender and live fully as men, in small towns and big cities, in the UK and the US … people persisted living as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and punishment … I utilize these accounts to offer a rigorous social history of the lives lived by female husbands as well as a cultural history of the category of ‘female husband’” (2) “Gender conformity itself was the punishment required by authorities and neighbors alike.” (1-2) “Female wives were sometimes portrayed as innocent victims of deception, though they were often active participants who knowingly and happily chose to enter these unconventional partnerships … female wives of female husbands are often overlooked and neglected as queer figures of the past … despite this public erasure, female wives held a tremendous amount of power in their marriages because they could publicly denounce their husband’s gender at any time. Wives were known to do this under two circumstances: when they were surprised to find out their husband was female or when their husband denied them a divorce on favorable terms. There is no denying that female wives gave legitimacy and stability to the gender of female husbands in the eyes of co-workers, friends, and society.” (3) “Even when authorities weren’t clear about the exact wrong committed by a female husband and their wife, they knew it was up to them to get to the bottom of a situation and decide. In this process, they reveal to us how they understood sexual difference and why the social conventions of gender were important to them.” (3) “In the case of female husbands in particular, it is impossible to isolate economic and social power from gender and sexual freedom. Sexual freedom—including the freedom to have sex with women, to not have sex with men, or to not have sex at all—was at the heart of the vast range of social powers that accompanied manhood … female husbands invite us to grapple with what exactly gender is.” (6) “Female Husbands attempts to do just that, exploring the complex role played by the female husband in the changing understanding of sexual difference as well as the emergence of heterosexuality as an ideal relationship form. It principally explores the relationship between sex and gender, while examining sexuality secondarily. Throughout, I show that female husbands belonged to a category that was never simply woman or man. It was effectively a trans position, in one way or another, affirmed through accounts that move back and forth between masculine and feminine descriptors and male and female pronouns. Female husbands were put into a political category when they were outed; they did not control the narratives that were crafted about them. Gender is relational, external, and often out of our control. Female husband narratives attest to the importance of external recognition in defining and stabilizing gender.” (10) Chapter 5: The Workers “Much was made about the efforts of white people presenting themselves as men to secure work that only men were hired to do … the existence of this unique group sparked commentary on a host of issues large and small, from theories of economic transformation and the changing workforce to detailed descriptions of the clothing they wore … News reports focus chiefly on labor and mobility as the motivating forces for transing gender, characterizing female assigned people as autonomous economic actors.” (139) “African Americans who transed gender as a vehicle for freedom. This group was described in runaway ads when slaveholders suspected they used gender as a form of disguise to aid their escape … in the long, slow transition from slavery to freedom, African Americans were criminalized and heavily regulated through loosely defined policing categories such as ‘vagrancy’ and ‘disorderly conduct.’” (140) George Wilson (1836, New York City) “American policing in the North grew exponentially during the antebellum period. This change reflected not only population growth in cities transformed by industrialization but also growing hostility toward the poor, homeless, and unemployed. African Americans were especially vulnerable. Police were principally charged with protecting private property but many spent the bulk of their time patrolling for minor public disturbances, conflicts between people and disorderly conduct … very loosely defined vagrancy laws.” (141) “The transgression of a gender norm always opened the door to the threat of a sexual transgression. By looking at female husbands within the broader context of antebellum laborers who transed genders, we can better unpack the significance of material status and sexual intimacies in shaping dominant attitudes toward those who transed genders.” (152) Female Sailors/Charles Williams (1834, Navy/Boston) “... the ‘female sailor’ was fundamentally, and implicitly a category bounded by whiteness, reserved for and used to describe the kinds of freedom that white people assigned female achieved when they passed as white men.” “Williams served in the US Navy and was later charged and convicted of stealing two hogs in New York City in 1834 when they were 26 years old.” (153) “When black people assigned female at birth presented themselves as men to get away from the violent exploitative system of slavery, they were also in search of the freedom to live and work on their own terms—a transing of gender for freedom.” (156) “The overriding force was the captain’s belief that women were to behave one specific way and in so doing, they earned the protection of men like him … the conflict between what people assigned female at birth could do and what they were allowed to do was again exposed.” (158) Chapter 7: The Criminalized Poor “There was no single principle or law that maintained a gender binary and hierarchy; rather, it was redefined with each challenge and each attempt to suppress that challenge.” (198) “This [anti cross-dressing laws in the 1843 - 1886] intensified the focus of the policing authorities on a wide range of public spaces that supported the intermingling of people across races and class, provocative entertainment, sex work, gambling, illicit sexual intimacies, and expressions of gender nonconformity” (199) “Those who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century experienced a shift in popular attitudes about gender in ways that were not obviously positive or negative. Rather, these new beliefs were tightly bound up in political and scientific discourses of race and class, leading to various outcomes depending on the particulars of one’s existence.” (199) “Libdell’s The Female Hunter was published before they embraced a male gender expression more fully, before they came to love and marry a woman, before they were declared a female husband in the press, and before they were institutionalized for their gender nonconformity and poverty.” (202) TIES BETWEEN POVERTY AND THE IMPACTS OF GENDER NONCONFORMITY “It is somewhat ironic and even a little sad that Lobdell, a person who fought against the tyranny of the gender binary in their own life, was part of the colonizing project that imposed it on other people. Through land theft and municipal expansion, Native American communities -- known for embracing a wider range of gender expressions and identities beyond the binary -- were marginalized, and in some cases destroyed. There is no singular concept for a transgender, third sex, or two spirit person in native American culture. Rather, each nation might have a special word for such a person, often one that did not neatly translate into any modern or Western concept and changed over time.” (211-212) “Lobdell’s poverty and gender -- and eventually their marriage -- were all bound together, making Lobdell a source of mockery and embarrassment. There was one clear upside to Lobdell’s slide into poverty amid the scrutiny of family, neighbors, and even the national press: the love and companionship of a woman.” (218) Conclusion “Female husbands were not simply disruptors of heteronormativity and sexual difference; they were empowered by and helped to stabilize liberalism, including the white supremacy that was embedded in the gender binary.” (258) ECONOMIC ARGUMENT OF FEMALE HUSBANDS “Another explanation is that people wanted to live as men -- or to not live as women -- regardless of the romantic or sexual implications. Financial security, geographic mobility, and/or gender identity were all motivating factors. Gender, not sexuality, was the salient category.” (260) “Just because anyone could, however, does not mean that everyone or even significant numbers of people did. They revealed competing ways of defining sex, when a marriage certificate said one thing and a doctor declared another.” (262) “In the 18th century, female husbands were less threatening because the prospects for widespread gains in women’s education, economic opportunities, and political rights seemed dim. But advances in women’s advocacy, autonomy, and mobility made the prospect of a world without men more imaginable … New concerns about female homosexuality motivated doctors and psychiatrists to protect white women who ascribed to conventional gender norms from the threat of those who transed gender, especially if they were African America. Medicine threatened potential female husbands with a diagnosis of ‘abnormal’ and forced institutionalization. But such policing and stigmatizing efforts themselves never fully deterred people from transing gender.” (263) Week 2 Readings CLASS Social Control all by different names, like the actual result/actions of any of these groups is really all just a guise for different forms of social control. ● “Reflecting English traditions for controlling the sexuality of the poor, Virginia’s county courts treated crimes such as bastardy as consensual sexual acts, even if the father of an illegitimate child was known to be the woman’s master.” (Brown pg. 193) ○ There were concerns because this was class mixing ■ “Servent women accounted for the majority of bastardy cases … between 1640 and 1710.” (Brown 194) ○ “Owing to their growing numbers and their potential to undermine the fragile authority of masters, white servant women became the central focus of the colony’s efforts to regulate sexuality after mid-century” Brown 194 ● “... declared that the children of enslaved women should follow the condition of their mother. This act redefined slave motherhood and vitiated the legal foundation of slave paternity, thereby making distinctions between legitimacy and illegitimacy legally irrelevant for enslaved people.” (Brown 196) ○ Most slave children were born w/ white/master fathers, therefore, by having slave paternity come from the mother’s side, the class structure of a plantation was kept as mixed race children remained slaves ● “In 1691, legislators explicitly addressed the problem presented by these relationships by refashioning older traditions for regulating servant sexuality to fit never concerns with race.” (Brown 197) ● “With their access to white women sanctioned by law and protected from the dual threat of white female sexual autonomy and black male encroachments, moreover, white men could rest easy knowing that their authority over male slaves had been confirmed legally.” (Brown 198) Furthermore, in these situations of race and male punishment in a court, Brown mentions, punishments and accountability for mixed sexual relations was only punished when it appeared “to be part of a pattern of self-assertion and trespass upon white male privilege” (Brown pg 200). “...sexuality could be used to construct and maintain boundaries between colonizer and colonized or, conversely, as the ultimate instrument of assimilation.” (Spear 75) “Influenced by demographic, economic, cultural, and imperial circumstances, authorities sought to legislate sex in attempts to further their colonial goals and to control colonial populations.” (Spear 76( “...how sexual desire is expressed and toward what object it is directed are not historical characteristics but rather shaped and mediated by human intervention.” (Spear 79) LACK OF CONCERN ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS WHEN OF BENEFIT: “In plantation colonies, on the other hand, assimilating enslaved Africans into French society through intimacy served no useful purpose; indeed, it would have been counterproductive,” (Spear 97) “Domingue Code Noir, the article governing intimate relationships between free men (whether black or white) and enslaved women only prohibited nonmarital relationships and even encouraged legitimating such liaisons through marriage by exempting the unmarried free man from punishment if he married “in forms observed by the Church, his said slave, who will be granted freedom in this way, and the slave [children] rendered free and legitimate.” (Spear 97) “... the metropole was apparently more concerned with imposing Roman Catholic mores on and, by implication, royal sovereignty over the colony’s inhabitants, slave and free, African and European, and with suppressing illicit relationships, regardless of race.” (Spear 97) THIS IS OPPOSED TO THE ONE READING THAT SAYS THIS WASN”T ABOUT RELIGION No, USING RELIGION AS A MEANS TO CONTINUE CLASS STRUCTURES “Legislative efforts to regulate racial purity on the North American mainland similarly testify to the insecurity of early American life for white settlers.” (Morgan 71) “Punishing white women for giving birth to black babies renders the apprehensions of the colony’s slave owners transparent, for even as racial categories came into focus for white settlers, interracial sexual and social contact belied the fixity of their own whiteness.” (Morgan 72) “The laws regulating interracial contact are a central index of how the very idea of race came into being for New World settlers … evolved as ideological and emotional individuation gradually replaced the commonality within which most Westerners found themselves enmeshed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” (Morgan 72) “This process of individuation was enmeshed in the intersectionality of discourses about race and gender. As an individuated “American” self came into being, key notions of mastery over property were mobilized that defined both whiteness and masculinity.” (Morgan 73) “The lure of the New World -- with wealth embedded in the landscape -- inscribed masculinity firmly in the act of colonization.” (Morgan 73) “Initially, white women performed fieldwork alongside white indentured and free men, but there was something unsettling to colonial assemblymen about white women in the field … through the tax laws that conveyed its temporary nature. The assumption that white women’s work would eventually move from field to household was the heart of lawmakers’ willingness to overlook white women’s labor as a source of official colonial revenue.” (Morgan 73-74) “In the earliest Carolina inventories, the prices assigned enslaved men and women reflect the clash between received notions of masculine value and the pragmatic realities of a reproductive labor force.” (Morgan 89) “Only the black mother embodied both productive and reproductive potential.” (Morgan 92) Morgan alludes to the work of Brown when related to the development of slave identity with race, “...as Kathleen Brown has argued, women ‘became a means for naturalizing slave status with a concept of race.” (Morgan 93) ● How can we as historians with these works unpack how religion, race, gender, and class impact different situations in different time periods? What common trends such as politics or law can help to understand the role of the state in as _____ puts it, ‘shaping the thoughts of sexuality and sexual relations”? “... what we mainly known about the history of the berdache has them located in warps of masculine power, in warfare, slavery and exploitation, not in worlds of egalitarian possibilities and of gender harmony and accord. The lives of the berdache were lives of humiliation and endless work, not of celebration and veneration.” (Gutiérrez 20) “In the Old World and in the New, there was a rather universal gender representation of conquest: victors on vanquishing their enemies asserted their virility by transforming losers into effeminates.” (Gutiérrez 27) “From men’s perspective, women’s capacity to produce, indeed to overproduce, was the problem that threatened to destory the balance that existed in the cosmos between femininity and masculinity.” (Gutiérrez 28) ● ALL TRUE IN THIS SENSE, BUT THEN HOW THE “MATHEMATICS OF MASTERY” SHAPED AND ENCOURAGED WOMEN TO HAVE CHILDREN FOR ECONOMICS ○ ECONOMICS, FOR THE SLAVE MASTERS IT MADE SENSE FOR THEM TO HAVE MORE CHILDREN, BUT FOR INDIGENOUS GROUPS MORE CHILDREN/PEOPLE WAS AN ECONOMIC BURDEN