definition and their temporal appearance as cycles of salience, and which is in pursuit of the explanatory metalogics that such definitions manifest. Many of the issues in gay/lesbian/queer history that have structured the asking of questions and the seeking of answers traverse historical domains. Whereas these issues may not all function as axes of social definition, they provide one means of access to them as well as to a better understanding of the moments when they accrue social significance. Presented as a large set of substantive themes, they include:
• the relationship between erotic acts and erotic identities;
• the quest for the etiology of erotic desire in the physical body, including the role of anatomy;
• the status accorded to the genitals in defining sexual acts;
• the relations of love, intimacy, and friendship to eroticism, including the defensive separation of sex from friendship;
• the fine line between virtue and transgression, orderly and disorderly homoeroticism;
• the relationship of eroticism to gender deviance and conformity;
• the symbolic and social functions of gendered clothing;
• the relevance of age, class/status, and ethnic/racial hierarchies to erotic relations;
• the composition and effects of familial, marital, and household arrangements;
• the role of voluntary kinship and familial nomenclatures in mediating and expressing erotic bonds;
• the relationship of homoeroticism to homosociality;
• the role of gender-segregated spaces, including religious, educational, criminal, and medical institutions;
• the existence of communities and subcultures, including public sexual cultures and spaces;
• the division between public and private sexualities;
• the effects of racial, geographical, religious, and national othering;
• the effects of social and geographical mobility;
• assessments of appropriate erotic knowledge, including the ambiguous line separating medicine from obscenity;
• the credibility of religious, medical, scientific, and legal discourses in the production of sexual categories, including definitions of nature, the unnatural, normality, and the abnormal;
• the differences between concepts of erotic identity, predisposition, and habitual behaviors;
• the dynamic of secrecy and disclosure, including covert signs, coding, and open secrets;
• the efficacy of representations of (homo)sexual contamination and/or predation to the body politic;
• the impact of sexually transmitted diseases on fears of mortality and social catastrophe;
• the interdiction against and circulation of sexual prostheses and supplemental technologies of sex;
• the relationship of hermaphrodites and the intersexed to same-sex desires and practices;
• the attractions of aesthetic conventions of erotic similitude versus erotic difference and/or hierarchy;
• the effects of narrative, poetic, and visual form on representations of homoeroticism.
Because of pervasive gender asymmetries, additional themes have had more consequence for the history of female bodies, experiences, and representations:
• the misogynist logic of female imperfection, excessive appetite, susceptibility to seduction, and inconstancy;
• the role of female anatomy, especially the clitoris, in cultural representations;
• the import of chastity, reproductive marriage, and the sexual double standard on women’s erotic options;
• women’s unequal access to sex education and sexual knowledge, including sexual language, anatomical definitions, and medical taxonomies;
• the effects of reproductive choice and constraint on women’s erotic welfare;
• the gendering of propriety, emotion, and sensibility;
• the derivative, secondary order of lesbian visibility, which underpins conceptual misrecognitions such as lesbian “impossibility” and “imitation”;
• the social power of lesbians (and representations of female homoeroticism) relative to that of men;
• the relation of women’s erotic ties to their political subjectivity—that is, to feminism;
• the potential threat that female-female eroticism poses to patriarchal relations and male dominance.
This list is unwieldy, but even so, it is not comprehensive. Each of these themes assumes different contours, contents, and emphases when examined from historically specific locations.60 Some of them have been discussed at length in queer scholarship; others hardly have been raised. Some have settled in one or another historical location; others have been assumed to possess no past. Not only does each one provide a specific angle for investigating how subjects might have understood—or not understood—themselves, but in the aggregate they allow us to appreciate the extent to which their powers of definition extend across discrete historical moments and, thus, beyond the subjects so defined by them. They are substantive and constitutive: organizing the self-perceptions and contributing to the intelligibility of same-sex desire (as both representation and lived experience) for people in the past, while also providing the terms by which we have identified those subjects and made the past intelligible to ourselves. To the extent that they precipitate the establishment of temporal patterns of meaning making, they have been complicit in framing queer historical investigation as an inquiry into an already constituted object: as Laura Doan has put it, “identity history” as “a hunt for x.”61
At the same time, the range and diversity of these themes enable us to see that social constructivist claims regarding the emergence of modern homosexuality—whatever the date proposed—have been founded on the basis of a relatively limited set of preoccupations (e.g., identity, subcultures, medical concepts, and legal codes), which have been used to stand in, metonymically, as evidence of homosexuality tout court. In the aggregate, these themes prod us to query whether the different dates that have been proposed for the “birth” of the modern homosexual may not result from their separate temporal arcs. Upsetting the premises of identity history by proliferating the range of relevant issues, they urge us to ask whether what is sometimes presented as whole-scale diachronic change (before and after sexuality, before and after identity, before and after modernity) might rather be a manifestation of ongoing synchronic tensions in conceptualizations about bodies and desires (and their relations to the gender system). As these tensions are confronted with the material realities of new social formations—attacks on monastic culture, the rise of empirical science, the emergence of print and media technologies, the public sphere, political satire and pornography, secularism, mandatory schooling, scientific racism, transnational gay and lesbian movements, the resurgence of religious fundamentalisms—they are played out, differently, yet again.
