Heterosexual Histories. Группа авторов
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literature, and in mid-twentieth-century gay camp and parody—to locate the emergence of different-sex desire as a site of gendered, raced, and embodied concern for a reading (and, in Stein’s essay, theatergoing) public.
Each essay in part 3, “Embracing and Contesting Legitimacy,” considers the project of defining and shoring up heteronormativity as a moral, legal, and cultural basis for American family life. Zurisaday Gutiérrez Avila and Pablo Mitchell show how, during a period of profound upheaval and dislocation, heterosexual family life factored in the experiences of Mexicans in the US Southwest between 1848 and 1900. Settler colonialism not only had profoundly negative impacts on both distinct and intermingled communities of indigenous and Mexican people but also imposed expectations of heterosexual morality on Mexicans who became Americans. Gutiérrez Avila and Mitchell find that heterosexual family life enabled Mexican women and men to counter negative Anglo assessments of their sexuality and thus became a resource for Mexican people during a traumatic period in their history. A far different picture of heterosexuality emerges from Carolyn Herbst Lewis’s chapter about white, middle-class suburban “swingers” during the 1960s and 1970s. Lewis locates these enthusiastic spouse swappers at the leading edge of the sexual revolution and considers what the movement’s gender conservatism might say about women’s desires within (hetero)sexual liberation.78 Indeed, Lewis reveals that swinging did not necessarily reflect egalitarian partnerships but could buttress male dominance among married couples. The third and final essay in this section turns to the legal history and rights claims of black mothers following the highly charged claims about female-headed households and “matriarchy” advanced in the 1965 publication The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which was authored by then–Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan and is perhaps better known as “The Moynihan Report.” The legal historian Serena Mayeri looks at lawsuits brought by African-descended women between 1967 and 1978 that challenged “illegitimacy penalties” in US employment law and public welfare policy. Together, these essays provide illuminating assessments of how gender, race, class, and sexual norms infused understandings of heterosexuality during a critical period of US state consolidation.
Part 4, “Discourses of Desire,” includes three essays that reflect on how ways of naming and discussing heterosexuality—in medical literature, in religious language about “Judeo-Christian morality,” and in a political scandal—emerged and evolved over time. Sarah Rodriguez, a historian of medicine, explains how the episiotomy, a foundational practice in obstetrics, was developed in the 1920s by the physician Joseph DeLee, in part as a way to “restore virginal conditions” (tighten the opening of the vagina) following childbirth. This physical association between women’s anatomy and heterosexuality defined “normal” sexual function in terms of a male penetrative partner’s satisfaction while making the episiotomy a “normal” clinical practice in obstetrical care. Heather R. White, a scholar of religion, asks how the terms “Judeo-Christian” and “heterosexuality” came to be associated in American religious discourse. She finds that religious conservatives linked their definitions of “Judeo-Christian morality” to their vision of a sexually moral, religiously guided, and heteronormative past. Andrea Friedman’s essay on the politics of sexual humiliation and feminism in the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal concludes this section and rounds out our book. The scandal all at once revealed the reach, limitations, and contradictions of late second-wave feminist critiques of the sexual economy of heterosexuality. Friedman’s essay illuminates how much controversy remained about the contours and content of heterosexual desire even into the early twenty-first century. Lewinsky refuted the associations with sexual humiliation that many feminists assigned to her trysts with President Bill Clinton in 1998, yet more recently she has reconsidered the relationship between power and desire in light of the #MeToo movement, which originated in 2006 with the civil rights activist and women’s advocate Tarana Burke.
Together, these original essays offer myriad ways to reconsider what different-sex desire and erotic activity have meant in specific contexts and across time—not to mention what it means to write a history of heterosexuality itself. They call attention to the relationship between desire and differences of gender, race, and class. As histories of ideas and of experiences, these essays consider the relationship between differences, desires, politics, and cultures. Rather than unseen, fixed, or predetermined, heterosexuality has a complicated history. We hope this volume of essays will inspire others to continue to investigate its complex and even vexed past and present.
Notes
1. “Shaws Visits Dr. Josephine Jackson, a Noted Authority on Psychology,” Bloomington (IL) Pantagraph, March 26, 1924, 16.
2. Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 92. See also Mason Stokes, “There Is Heterosexuality: Jessie Fauset, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Problem of Desire,” African American Review 44, nos. 1–2 (2011): 69–70.
3. Josephine Jackson, “Outwitting Your Nerves: The New Psychology in Action,” Corsicana (TX) Daily Sun, April 21, 1930, 14.
4. Wide-ranging scholars have considered imperatives surrounding sexual respectability on various populations. One of the most influential explorations of the “politics of respectability” and race remains Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 185–229. For work that analyzes the significance of class and respectability, see Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. 105–74. In Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), Victoria W. Wolcott considers both race and class in tandem. For analysis of how respectability politics could both cause and reflect tensions among African-descended Americans, see Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). For analysis of respectability and homosexuality, see Martin Meeker, “Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, no. 1 (2001): 78–116.
5. “A. Wilberforce Williams,” Journal of Negro History 25, no. 2 (April 1940): 262–63; Lucius C. Harper, “Dustin’ Off the News,” Defender, May 29, 1943, 1, 4. For examples of Williams’s columns about venereal disease, see Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, “Keep Healthy,” Chicago Defender, October 25, 1913, 4; “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, January 22, 1916, 6; “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, September 21, 1918, 16; “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, April 7, 1923, 12. Significantly, Williams published occasional articles on health—including ones about venereal disease—into the 1930s. See, for example, Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, “The Way to Health,” Chicago Defender, February 16, 1935, 12.
6. See, for example, the following columns: Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, “Keep Healthy,” Chicago Defender, November 8, 1913, 4; “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, November 20, 1915, 8; “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, September 25, 1920, 12; Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, “Keep Healthy,” Chicago Defender, October 4, 1913, 7.