Heterosexual Histories

418 Pages·2021·3.667 MB·English

by  Rebecca L. Davis, Michele Mitchell

Heterosexual Histories

Heterosexual Histories
Edited by
Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2021 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the
author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or
changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Davis, Rebecca L., editor. | Mitchell, Michele, 1965– editor.
Title: Heterosexual histories / edited by Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell.
Description: New York: New York University Press, 2021. |
Series: Nyu series in social and cultural analysis |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020015866 (print) | LCCN 2020015867 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781479878079 (cloth) | ISBN 9781479802289 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781479897902 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479852284 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Heterosexuality—History.
Classification: LCC HQ23 .H538 2021 (print) | LCC HQ23 (ebook) | DDC 306.76/609—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015866
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015867
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are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppli-
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Contents
Introduction, or, Why Do the History of Heterosexuality? 1
Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell
Part I: Difference and Desire since the
Seventeenth Century
1. Toward a Cultural Poetics of Desire in a World
before Heterosexuality 37
Richard Godbeer
2. The Strange Career of Interracial Heterosexuality 69
Renee Romano
3. Age Disparity, Marriage, and the Gendering
of Heterosexuality 96
Nicholas L. Syrett
4. “Deviant Heterosexuality” and Model- Minority Families:
Asian American History and Racialized Heteronormativity 120
Judy Tzu- Chun Wu
Part II: Difference, Bodies, and Popular Culture
5. Defining Sexes, Desire, and Heterosexuality in Colonial
British America 145
Sharon Block
6. Spectacles of Restraint: Race, Excess, and Heterosexuality in
Early American Print Culture 169
Rashauna Johnson
7. Heterosexual Inversions: Satire, Parody, and Comedy in the
1950s and 1960s 195
Marc Stein
v
vi | Contents
Part III: Embracing and Contesting Legitimacy
8. Holding the Line: Mexicans and Heterosexuality in the
Nineteenth- Century West 227
Zurisaday Gutiérrez Avila and Pablo Mitchell
9. Suburban Swing: Heterosexual Marriage and Spouse
Swapping in the 1950s and 1960s 251
Carolyn Herbst Lewis
10. Race, Sexual Citizenship, and the Constitution of
Nonmarital Motherhood 274
Serena Mayeri
Part IV: Discourses of Desire
11. Restoring “Virginal Conditions” and Reinstating the
“Normal”: Episiotomy in 1920 303
Sarah Rodriguez
12. How Heterosexuality Became Religious: Judeo- Christian
Morality and the Remaking of Sex in
Twentieth- Century America 331
Heather R. White
13. The Price of Shame: Second- Wave Feminism and the
Lewinsky- Clinton Scandal 358
Andrea Friedman
Acknowledgments 387
About the Contributors 391
Index 397
Introduction, or, Why Do the History of Heterosexuality?
Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell
Josephine A. Jackson (1865– 1945) was an exceptional woman. Born in
the last year of the American Civil War and raised on a farm in Iowa,
she became a medical doctor and nationally renowned health expert.
When Jackson was given a diagnosis of tuberculosis and told she had
three days to live, she later recalled that she took a train from Chicago to
Pasadena and thrived for another forty years. Her first book, Outwitting
Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy (1922), a general interpretation of
psychotherapy for lay readers, was widely praised as “the best book on
psychotherapy.”1 It and her next book, Guiding Your Life with Psychol-
ogy as a Key (1937), went through multiple printings. Jackson’s advice
column ran in local newspapers from Nebraska to Texas during the
1920s and 1930s.
We might also remember Jackson for teaching Americans the mean-
ing of heterosexuality. Loosely translating Freudian psychology for the
masses, she instructed her readers both that different-s ex sexual at-
traction was called “heterosexuality” and that heterosexuality was nor-
mal. This understanding marked a decisive shift; as Jonathan Ned Katz
shows in his book on the origins and history of “heterosexuality,” early
twentieth- century dictionaries defined heterosexuality as a “morbid”
sexual interest in the opposite sex.2 In a column dated April 21, 1930,
which ran adjacent to the comics, Jackson advised a young man who
worried that he was more interested in boys than in girls. Jackson im-
plored him to make sure that the “unfolding of the love instinct” was not
arrested, as Freud would have it, 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.
1
2 | Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell
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 Wil-
liams (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 advo-
cated 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 mar-
riage 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 lead-
ing 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 ques-
tions,” yet he was either unaware of the term “heterosexuality” or pur-
posefully 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 associ-
ate 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 him-
self on eschewing “mock modesty” when it came to discussing sexual
matters, it is a figure such as Jackson who reveals the intentional ef-
Introduction | 3
forts through which Americans came to recognize heterosexuality as a
name for psychologically “normal” desires.10 Jackson’s story fundamen-
tally disturbs narratives that mark a clean transition from a “Victorian”
nineteenth- century sexual regime to a twentieth- century sexual mo-
dernity 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, behav-
iors, 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 histo-
riographical. 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, reproduc-
tive 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-f emale married reproductive couples. Such couples
certainly came to embody heteronormativity, yet there are both social
4 | Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell
and political consequences of privileging narrow conceptions of sexually
“normal” people.
We are aware that many readers might already wonder, “Hasn’t het-
erosexuality always existed in some fashion?” As a partial response, we
underscore a question posed by Jeffrey Weeks in Sexuality and Its Dis-
contents: “If the gay identity is of recent provenance, what of the hetero-
sexual 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—j ust as pre-
vailing 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 preroga-
tives 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 West-
ern 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-c entury 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 identi-
fication.18 The male- female household unit remained an economic ne-
cessity 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 pre-
sumptions that heterosexual desires or relationships have deep histori-
cal links to ideas of the normal. “Heteronormativity” describes ways of
assuming, seeing, and knowing; it articulates something that is both an
ideal and presumed to be natural. Yet heteronormativity is historical: the
privileges of heterosexuality depended on the modern concept of het-