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Heterosexual Histories PDF

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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 New York University Press books are printed on acid- free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppli- ers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook 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-

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