in any of its immature early stages and thus susceptible to “become ensnared in the wild tangle of a perversion.” His sexual instincts, Jackson advised, should culminate in “heterosexual love or attraction between the sexes.”3 Jackson relayed not simply a new type of desiring subject but a class of desiring subjects.
When other contemporaneous physicians and mental health experts discussed sexual matters in their syndicated columns, however, they did not necessarily use the words “heterosexual” or “heterosexuality.” More specifically, the politics of respectability complicate any linear narrative of heterosexuality’s emergence and adoption.4 Black writers and the publishers of black-owned periodicals may have been especially keen to distance themselves from heterosexuality’s associations with deviance. For example, during the 1910s and 1920s, the Chicago Defender featured what was reportedly the first newspaper health column in the United States by a doctor of African descent. That doctor, A. Wilberforce Williams (1865–1940), was a leading physician in Chicago, and he did not hesitate to broach intimate matters in print. Williams’s frank discussion of venereal disease even led to his expulsion from a medical society.5 The fact that Williams was willing to address masturbation, that he advocated teaching children “sex hygiene,” that he urged adult men who still had their foreskins to be circumcised, and that he pointedly associated venereal disease with those who had “sow[ed] wild oats” before marriage as well as “male profligates and female prostitutes” raised hackles among some readers of the Defender as well.6 Still, there was a silence of sorts within Williams’s columns: he did not explicitly name different-sex attraction, identity, pairing, or practice as “heterosexual.” In leading black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender—but also the New York Amsterdam News, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Baltimore Afro-American—the word “heterosexual” did not, it seems, appear until after 1930.7 By 1925, Williams had received so many queries about venereal disease and the like that he was keen to “get away from the sex questions,” yet he was either unaware of the term “heterosexuality” or purposefully avoided using it when answering those questions. Why would this prominent black doctor not use a term for sexual desire, practice, and identity that we now accept as commonplace?8
The academic theories of sexual identity that historians often associate with sexual “modernity,” ideas that medical experts like Josephine A. Jackson adopted and taught in syndicated newspaper columns printed throughout the United States, shaped the broader culture gradually and unevenly.9 Indeed, as much as A. Wilberforce Williams prided himself on eschewing “mock modesty” when it came to discussing sexual matters, it is a figure such as Jackson who reveals the intentional efforts through which Americans came to recognize heterosexuality as a name for psychologically “normal” desires.10 Jackson’s story fundamentally disturbs narratives that mark a clean transition from a “Victorian” nineteenth-century sexual regime to a twentieth-century sexual modernity or sexual liberalism as well.11 Those narratives work only if we presume that the white, educated middle classes created a mainstream culture that others had not yet embraced, rather than a particular source of sexual identity making amid a far more varied array of desires, behaviors, and intimate bonds. Jackson’s career serves for us not as evidence of the inevitable ascendancy of a medical model of heterosexuality but rather as a demonstration of the effort required to convince Americans of that model’s existence and importance.
Locating a more complex and critical history of what we now think of as heterosexuality is the aim of this volume of original essays, which investigates what it means to trace a history of heterosexuality in North America across four centuries. Our aim is both historical and historiographical. Each chapter represents an investigation into ideas about gender, sexuality, and difference in North America. Such investigation challenges us to set aside presumptions of heterosexuality’s timelessness or familiarity.12 Instead, we concur with the historian Daniel Wickberg that heterosexuality “has been a historically specific creation,” even as we challenge his assertion that no history of heterosexuality exists prior to the word’s invention.13 Heterosexuality has a history, and that history is intrinsically bound up with the history of the relatively recent idea of the sexually normal. The social conditions of people’s lives, the gendered and raced class relations that determine the opportunities and obstacles for people understood as men and women, and the bodily experiences of sexual desires and fertility’s consequences, among other aspects of human existence, all profoundly shaped what it means to live a gendered life and engage in sundry sexual acts. The essays gathered in this volume seek to explore the history of the idea of heterosexuality as well as the lived experiences of different-sex desires, bodies, practices, reproductive capacities, relationships, and politics.14 We are keen to trouble easy, prevalent assumptions that the story of “heterosexuality” can be reduced to—or solely represented by—the experiences of majority population, suburban, male-female married reproductive couples. Such couples certainly came to embody heteronormativity, yet there are both social and political consequences of privileging narrow conceptions of sexually “normal” people.
We are aware that many readers might already wonder, “Hasn’t heterosexuality always existed in some fashion?” As a partial response, we underscore a question posed by Jeffrey Weeks in Sexuality and Its Discontents: “If the gay identity is of recent provenance, what of the heterosexual identity?”15 Our aim is to trace the emergence of a heterosexual identity as much as we are trying to trace a history of heterosexuality as a concept. We presume that heterosexuality is historical, as are all forms of sexuality, all gender roles, and all hierarchies of power—just as prevailing notions of race are historical and constructed. To be analytically useful, “heterosexuality” must refer not simply to social arrangements that presume women’s economic dependence on men, men’s prerogatives under patriarchy, reproductive sex, or ostensibly universal notions of a gender binary.16 These historical contingencies are why insisting on heterosexuality’s ubiquity can be problematic. The gender theorist Monique Wittig argued against historical nuance when she wrote in the early 1990s that heterosexuality has been embedded within the Western mind since Plato: “to live in society is to live in heterosexuality. . . . Heterosexuality is always already within all mental categories. It has sneaked into dialectical thought (or thought of differences) as its main category.”17 Randolph Trumbach’s study of changing gender norms in eighteenth-century London similarly insists that heterosexuality existed for centuries before it had a name: “How can the human race otherwise have continued to exist?” Trumbach conflates human reproduction with heterosexuality and mistakes gender-based communities (the “exclusive male heterosexual majority”) for heterosexual social or political identification.18 The male-female household unit remained an economic necessity for most people, but that class relation coexisted with an array of relationships among men and women.
Historical work about the newness of the idea of the “normal” further challenges us to revisit the history of “heteronormativity” and of presumptions that heterosexual desires or relationships have deep historical links to ideas of the normal. “Heteronormativity” describes ways of assuming, seeing, and knowing; it articulates
