A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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heirs and transmitting property to the next generation of patriarchs.
In ancient Greece and republican and imperial Rome, remarkably similar sex and gender systems set the foundations for all later developments in the West. The Greek and Roman male citizen exercised complete legal and material dominion over everyone else in society: women, slaves, and minors. Women were regarded as inferior beings and enjoyed little autonomy and few rights. Rigid codes of sexual conduct based on concepts of penetration and “active” or “passive” sexual practices paralleled this hierarchical gender system. An adult male was permitted to penetrate but he risked losing his personal honor if he either allowed himself to be penetrated orally or anally, or willingly assumed the passive, inferior position in intercourse. In ancient Greece an adult male could exercise his right as penetrator on slaves and with boys who did not yet possess their manly honor, especially if the man was a distinguished citizen and the boy from a good family. Scholars have argued that ancient pederasty shared nothing with our modern concept of homosexuality, in which reciprocal penetration occurs between peers, a notion that would have been unthinkable to a Roman vir or a citizen of a Greek city‐state.
The concept of ancient pederasty and its putative difference with modern homosexuality spawned an important epistemological debate in the 1970s about the meaning and historicity of same‐sex love. Historians who favored a social constructionist position, in which the meaning of sexual experience derives from the historical situation, argued it is misleading to apply the word “homosexual” to same‐sex sexual relations before the nineteenth‐century invention of the term (Halperin, 1990: 29–33). Men or women in such relationships would not have understood the pleasures, the dangers, or the sense of identity of modern homosexuals. “Essentialists,” though they concede a host of historical variations, were willing to assume that homosexuals and homosexual love has always been pretty much the same. This debate has now moved into more subtle terrain, but it continues to inform the field by requiring historians to probe beneath the linguistic conventions of sex and situate sexual experience in historical context. This debate is different from, but often conflated with, the debate about whether individuals are genetically or otherwise predisposed to a particular sexual nature. Here the issue is the degree of determinism in biological or environmental influences that confers a sexual identity on individuals which then carries corresponding rights or legal sanctions. The philosopher Ian Hacking has tried to bridge both these debates by proposing a way of thinking about individual actions, identity, and linguistic classifications that stresses reciprocal interaction and rejects purely voluntarist or determinist explanations (Hacking, 1995: 239).
Sexuality in the ancient world was constrained and sanctioned by social expectations and legal codes, but religion did not play an important role in shaping sexual beliefs or practices. The period in world history that followed the flowering of classical antiquity was dominated by the rise of the great world religions: Islam, Buddism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity. In varying degrees, and often in the absence of strong central governments, religious elites intervened forcefully to regulate sexual behavior, particularly as this related to marriage and legitimacy, but also to acceptable norms of sexual activity. On the whole the great religions undergirded patriarchal gender orders, subordinated or segregated women, devised rituals of purification surrounding menses, and proscribed sexual deviations, especially same‐sex sexuality and adultery. From the millennium through the fifteenth century, in both Chinese and Western medicine, special attention was given to women’s reproductive disorders in deference to their special status as progenitors.
Holy orders in all religions attempted to seal off devotees to sexual temptation, but Latin Christianity in particular drew on classical ascetic philosophy and the Pauline tradition to nourish an ideal of sexual renunciation that sought to extinguish desire altogether and prepare the body for spiritual salvation (Brown, 1988: 54–5). Marriage and procreation, in this perspective, were a reluctant concession to the laity, a way of confining and channeling sexuality so that neither the clerical nor the secular hierarchy was threatened. Ecclesiastical courts in Islam and in Latin and Byzantine Christianity accused and punished sinners, judging adulterers, fornicators, and sodomites according to the rigorous standards of Qur’an or canon law. Religious and medical authorities also attempted to specify orthodox forms of sexual intercourse that were healthful and procreative, and that positioned women on the bottom. It was not doubted that women experienced sexual pleasure, even orgasm, but medical authorities preferred to think this was not necessary for the release of “seed” and therefore for fertilization. Notwithstanding the necessary cooperation of sinful men, womenfolk were regarded as the gravest threat to the sexual order of the medieval era, tempting husbands and engaging in prostitution. Though we have evidence that non‐marital sex occurred with some regularity, even in the confessional, marriage became an increasingly popular institution in the course of the Middle Ages, serving as a growing bulwark against sexual disorder.
The period from 1500 to 1800 was a great period of dynastic state building in world society. With respect to matters of sexuality, the rise of secular authority did not free sexual regulation from the thrall of religion so much as intensify it in the interest of state authority. In the new Western monarchies and in the Chinese and Ottoman empires, ruling patriarchs exercised absolute sway. Family patriarchs were regarded as virtual extensions of royal power and were given new legal instruments to control their women and children. Rebellious Protestants, meanwhile, went further still in the European and North American domains they controlled, trying and imprisoning adulterers, prostitutes, and (unmarried) fornicators, and burning sodomites at the stake for their crimes. Sodomy was a catch‐all term that covered all forms of non‐vaginally intromissive sex, including masturbation, bestiality, and especially anal intercourse. Hundreds of putative sodomites were executed in this way during moral panics in the Netherlands between 1690 and 1711. That this absurd word survives today in criminal indictments is testimony to the timorous reluctance of legal officers actually to specify the sex act of which defendants are accused.
The Spanish and Roman branches of the Catholic Inquisition, with the support of Catholic monarchs, were scarcely less harsh in the policing of their own congregants. In the midst of the profound political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sexual deviance became a symptom of social rebellion. The long‐term effect of these attempts to purify sexual morality in the early modern West was a deeper reinforcement of the only permissible form of sexual expression – marital, procreative intercourse – and a new interest in populations and families by nation‐building political elites as key elements in the expansion of state power.
Until about the eighteenth century it could be argued that the factors that shaped human sexuality were similar in most human civilizations. Governments were mostly too weak to influence behavior or attitudes effectively. Marriage and sexual relations were still closely linked to the business of making heirs and having children, to economic conditions and family survival, and the transmission of property. Love in its modern, companionate form did not yet exist; indeed, strong expressions of physical or emotional passion were regarded in all cultures as debilitating and disruptive forms of madness or love‐sickness. In effect, sexuality was more a public than a private matter, policed by communities and kin, governed by an economic logic, and divided everywhere into two great categories: procreative and non‐procreative.
At some point during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a schism appeared that would separate Western and Eastern sexualities for much of the next two centuries. In Europe and North America rapid economic development expanded and diversified prosperous elites, particularly the urban middle classes, causing rapid population growth and improved prospects throughout all levels of society. With sufficient assets, couples could choose careers, marry, and plan families with greater certainty. As child and maternal mortality rates finally began to decline, couples were able to make emotional investments in one another and in their children which strengthened the affective bonds of family life. Romantic love took flower from this more stable soil, and new forms of individualism emerged that encouraged people to cultivate personal distinctiveness in feelings and attachments.
Ironically, as varied individual and private selves, including sexual selves, became more common, scientists and doctors were busy discovering universal laws that ordered and regulated sexual bodies. In this way, too, Western and Eastern societies