existence of heteronormativity and the necessity of its undoing, built on the critique of heterosexuality’s toxicity that feminist, gay liberationist, and black lesbian activists and scholars had created. Michael Warner published the first academic article to use the term “heteronormativity” in a now-canonical 1991 article in Social Text. In that article, Warner called on other scholars “to challenge the pervasive and often invisible heteronormativity of modern societies.”68 Warner did not explain whether heteronormativity is transhistorical or whether its contemporary power derives from the presumption that it has always existed among those who receive its benefits. His study nevertheless provides a marvelously illuminating framework for understanding how heterosexual privilege operates: “Heterosexual culture thinks of itself as the elemental form of human association, as the very model of inter-gender relations, as the indivisible basis of all community, and as the means of reproduction without which society wouldn’t exist.”69 Theorists of heteronormativity point to its simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility; in this volume, we argue that the emergence of that powerful norm has a history.
We have challenged each author to define “heterosexuality” as they employ the term in their work. In this way, each author provides a history of heterosexuality as well as a historiographical case for “how to do the history of heterosexuality.” Richard Godbeer even finds heterosexuality inapplicable to the people he studies. In every case, however, this approach moves the history of heterosexuality beyond the presumption that it constitutes a transhistorical yet inchoate norm against which queerness reacts or that queerness attempts to subvert. Our goals for this book are therefore to illuminate heterosexuality’s antecedents, the circumstances of its creation, and its consequent effects—not to vaunt “heterosexual” as concept, practice, or identity.
***
Rather than organize the essays in chronological fashion, we have instead grouped them according to four rubrics: difference and desire; bodies and difference in popular culture; conceptions of marriage, family, and the domestic; and discourses about desire. Arranging essays in loose chronological order would indeed emphasize critical changes over time. Still, we have juxtaposed essays in ways that should create both productive tension and dialogue within each section and that should generate revealing analytical connections across sections regarding the historicity of heterosexuality. In each section, we have collated essays in ways that amplify “difference” across various registers. If the literary scholar Marlon Ross was explicitly interrogating “the closet as a raceless paradigm” when he observed that “racialized minorities may operate under divergent social protocols concerning what it means to be visible and invisible within normative sites like the family, . . . the workplace, . . . the street, and the community more generally,” we hope that these essays will, in concert, profitably highlight a similar dynamic when it comes to a range of intimate, different-sex interactions and practices across four centuries of North American history.70
“Race” is not a primary concern for every author in Heterosexual Histories. Analyses of race constitute a through line in this anthology all the same. Several of the authors locate histories of heterosexuality within racial, gendered, and class-marked systems of power relations in ways that echo pathbreaking work on colonial sexualities by scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler.71 Moreover, scholars in this volume benefit from and build on a raft of significant Americanist gender scholarship about race and sexuality—and on sexuality and religion, for that matter—that has been produced over the past four decades. We do not seek to delve into such scholarship here.72 We do, however, wish to highlight a few salient points as a means of introducing the essays.
We first draw readers’ attention to an observation that the cinema scholar Richard Dyer made in 1997: “All concepts of race are always concepts of the body and also of heterosexuality. Race is a means of categorising different types of human body which reproduce themselves. It seeks to systematise differences and to relate them to differences of character and worth. Heterosexuality is the means of ensuring, but also the site of endangering, the reproduction of these differences.”73 To be sure, Dyer’s project was not to historicize heterosexuality. Authors featured within this collection, though, do rigorously consider how race has suffused what we now think of as “heterosexuality,” not to mention how different-sex sexuality has undergirded notions about “race.” Taken together, their essays reveal the persistence of these interlocking dynamics over time, how arguments regarding “race” and different-sex sexuality have changed, and how “race” can result in certain different-sex intimacies being deemed as deviant. We nonetheless join a long line of scholars who roundly reject arguments that race is a biological reality.
It seems especially pertinent and productive to turn to Karen Fields and Barbara Fields at this juncture. They rightly assert that the term “race” is actually a “shorthand,” one that “stands for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups . . . of unequal rank.”74 Emphasizing that race is a conception, a doctrine, or a construction hardly means that race had—and has—no actual impact on the quotidian realities and lived experience of people. Quite critically, concepts of racial difference have profoundly informed notions about human worth and labor value, as have conceptions about sexed or gendered difference.75 If the essays herein are not necessarily in conversation with scholarship on labor, the authors are attentive to matters of class. And many of the authors also speak to work that theorizes racialized gender, including studies of unfree as well as paid labor.76
As much as the essays in Heterosexual Histories are disciplinarily bound, they have interdisciplinary reach. That said, it is our aim and hope that these essays clearly establish what Jennifer Spear and Kevin Murphy have argued in another anthology of historical work on sexuality, that “careful and contextualised analysis of the shifting relationship of gender and sexuality across space and time illuminates broader historical processes.”77
The essays in part 1, “Difference and Desire since the Seventeenth Century,” offer sweeping discussions of the creation and effects of different-sex desires. They show how gender, race, religion, and nation coconstituted ideas about “normal” or “moral” sexuality at various moments in the American past. Richard Godbeer finds that “heterosexuality” is a form of sexuality unknown to his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects, whose sex/gender system operated according to a distinct “poetics of desire.” This poetics could, as Godbeer compellingly demonstrates, include desire for connection with the divine and be more expansive than modern understandings of erotic, different-sex interaction. In an essay that covers several centuries, Renee Romano asserts that when we consider histories of heterosexuality, we must reckon with the fact that it is bound up with interraciality, that racial difference is intrinsic to the construction of different-sex desires and to associations with sexual deviance. Nicholas L. Syrett’s essay places age difference at the center of heterosexuality’s history. As Syrett contends that age asymmetry has been a critical means of instantiating heterosexuality, he demonstrates how gendered ideals of age shaped desires for different-sex partners. His chapter additionally shows how the historical shift in Americans’ awareness of their numerical ages led to a diminishment in age disparity in marriage, even as most American women—across ethnicity, race, religion, and region—continue to marry somewhat-older men. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu examines the history of Asian Americans through the lens of heterosexuality, finding that it served
