LEDDY LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR, PRESENTED TO THE LEDDY LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR BY DR. RON W. IANNI PRESIDENT& VICE-CHANCELLOR AUGUST 1997 CONSTRUCTING SEXUALITIES Edited by Jacqueline Murray Working Papers in the Humanities I Humanities Research Group University of Windsor Windsor, Ontario, Canada N9B 3P4 1993 © 1993 by the Humanities Research Group, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, N98 3P4 L._E.D L C.,tRe HQ 1a ,CJo5 l CfCf 3 Data Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Main entry under title: Constructing sexualities (Working papers in the humanities 1) Lectures given 1 992-93 as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series II Constructing Sexualities II sponsored by the Humanities Research Group, University of Windsor. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-9697776-0-4 1. Sex - History. L Murray, Jacqueline, 1953 II. University of Windsor. Humanities Research Group. Ill. Title. IV. Series. HO12.C65 1993 306.7 C93-095597-8 CONTENTS PREFACE V INTRODUCTION vii JANE ABRAY Holy Chastity: Sexual Morality in Sixteenth Century Western Europe 1 Colloquium Report 21 MARTHA VICINUS Turn of the Century Male Impersonation: Women as Sexual Actors 25 Colloquium Report 57 THOMAS WAUGH Knowledge and Desire: Dr. Kinsey as Arbiter· of the Homoerotic Imaginary 63 Colloquium Report 89 JEFFREY WEEKS Necessary Fictions 93 Living with Uncertainty 123 Colloquium Report 147 CONTRIBUTORS 151 SUGGESTED FURTHER READINGS 153 . ' I PREFACE This volume is the first of a series of Working Papers to be published by the Humanities Research Group at the University of Windsor. The HRG is dedicated to encouraging research in the humanities and especially to promoting dialogue between and across disciplines. This principle is epitomized in the HRG's annual Distinguished Speaker Series which centres on a theme of contemporary interest which is investigated from a variety of disciplinary and historical perspectives. The papers at hand, the first to be published, are in fact the fruits of the fourth series which brought leading scholars to the University of Windsor campus. "Constructing Sexualities" proved to be at once a popular and controversial theme. Even in the academy traditional values exercise a kind of social and intellectual control over not only how people live but also what they think about or choose as a topic for research. Yet the growing importance of this discursive field is reflected in the richness of the Suggested Further Readings found at• the end of this volume. "Constructing Sexualities" is a theme that crosses faculty and departmental and disciplinary boundaries. It is truly a topic best approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. Each of the scholars presented here, brings a unique perspective and illuminates a different facet of this complex topic. In addition to the public addresses and bibliography, we include reports on each Distinguished Speaker's colloquium. These reports are more than a summary of discussion or a set of minutes irrelevant to any but the participants. Rather, the reports illustrate the problems which arise from each topic when examined from a variety of perspectives. Each colloquium attracted participants from a variety of fields not only from the V vi Preface humanities and social sciences but also from law, business, and science. The issues arise from the cross-fertilization made possible only when a inter-disciplinary group works through a common problem together. The colloquia reports, then, both draw the reader's attention to questions and serve as a starting point for further discussion. These Working Papers provide no definitive answers but rather encourage further reflection and research. Inaugurating a new venture takes time, patience, and cooperation. There were numerous people who assisted in some aspect of the process by which this volume came into being. Barry Adam was unfailing in his support and encouragement. Dawn Smith, Jodi Skeates, and Rosemary Halford struggled with computer programmes, some more cooperative than others, and prepared the camera-ready copy. The Office of Community Relations and Publications was generous in its help and advice. Thanks to them, and especially to Steve Daigle for the distinctive design which will grace the series. To all of those involved in preparation of the volume, to the gracious and generous scholars whose research as presented, to all of the faculty at the University of Windsor who showed their intellectual intrepidness by their willingness to work through issues with their colleagues in the colloquia, thank you. You made this publication series possible. Jacqueline Murray Director Humanities Research Group INTRODUCTION These essays, by some of the leading scholars in the study of sexuality today, show some of the diversity of critical questions, concerns, and methodologies which characterize sexology in the late twentieth century. The authors offer "snapshots" of four different periods in the history of sexuality and draw upon such disciplines in the humanities and social sciences as literature, women's studies, film studies, history, and sociology in making sense of their topics. Amidst this variety of disciplines and themes, however, are some commonalities. Contemporary sexual studies typically reverse the premise which launched Freudian theory. While Freud often found sex to be the hidden first cause of a range of human practices and pathologies, scholars today more often find sexuality to be an index or outcome of a complex interplay of factors embedded in political economy, kinship, gender, cultural codes, and state regulation. Far from being the hidden text of modern society, sexuality is more often seen as a medium through which a wide range of social factors are expressed and as a site where social codes can be played out, subverted, or resisted. The modern study of sexuality is at least as old as the social sciences, with common nineteenth-century origins, but unlike those disciplines, has been subject to a history of restriction and moral orthodoxy which limited its development. These essays partake in the contemporary boom in sex-related research made possible by the second-wave feminist and gay liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s. They demonstrate the distance this research area has come from its pre-war legacy which believed sexuality to be an inherent human characteristic fully explicable in terms of biology and physiology. While naturalistic and positivist accounts continue vii viii Introduction to abound, especially in folk versions and even in introductory textbooks, these essays show their inadequacy for making sense of sex. While the mass media promote claims about "gay brains" or genes which fit with biological precepts, contemporary research demonstrates that the complex variety of human sexuality can never be reduced to such simple causes and that even our ideas about nature show our ethnocentrism and provincialism. Jane Abray draws our attention to the fall of the norm of priestly celibacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, cautioning us that clerical marriage can scarcely be considered a "liberalization" in the context of the times, but is better thought of as a re-disciplining of sexuality. Abray offers glimpses into the extensive' considerations which go into sorting through historical transitions of this kind. The "context of the times" includes-what to us-is a remarkably rigid standard of sexual conduct propounded by church authorities. This leads to consideration of the processes of generation and institutionalization of what are now regarded as "traditional" Christian interpretations of sexuality, founded as they were in a theology developed and encoded at the height of the feudal era. Settled_ agrarian societies such as this are noted for their preoccupations with property and accumulation, the importance of family and kinship as a way of distributing and inheriting property, an associated concern with male supervis�on over female reproductive potential in order conserve kin lines, and concomitant limitations placed upon women's mobility. Rigid sexual standards begin to "make sense" in this context; marriage and celibacy have extensive and unavoidable implications which exceed sex per se. Research of this kind allows us to begin thinking about how social expectations around sexuality may vary a great deal in societies with little concern about property and inheritance or about how historical changes in sexual morality can be effected by social arrangements of production. Martha Vicinus shows how much the cross-dressing stage actress, now largely forgotten, has to tell about the interplay of desire and social codes in her apparent capture of erotic potentialities never quite . contained by the social orthodoxies of her day. The stage presentation of a woman in male dress offers a polysemic text subverting the boundaries ix Introduction of respectable and authoritative codes of gender and sex, opening possibilities for identification and (covert) expressions of homosexual and heterosexual desire among female and male audiences. Part of the popularity of the thespian woman as man may indeed have lain in her offering something to everyone. Official readings placed her into a socially acceptable heterosexual script, or perhaps one might say, a script made even more acceptable than the potentially over-charged male­ female romantic narrative, by de-fusing its eroticism as a female-female romance read as "innocent" by Victorian and Edwardian audiences. This goes by the name of "family entertainment"