Abstract
The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America explores early modern ontologies and epistemologies of ‘human variety’, offering critical historical insight into the understandings of sexual behaviour that circulated before the emergence of the field of sexology. Diverging from the strands of Foucauldian thought that dominate transnational Anglophone gender and sexuality studies knowledge production today, this monograph asks: ‘what is sex before sexuality? Before the subject?’ (p. 60).
To produce this ‘pre-’history of sexuality, Greta LaFleur turns to a broad range of natural historical and popular texts including Barbary captive narratives, execution narratives, cross-dressing narratives and anti-vice narratives within the archive of eighteenth-century Atlantic writing. This material evocatively depicts ‘a moment in British North America that was not without sexuality, but before it’ (p. 10, emphasis in the original). The book’s primary task is to present a radical de/construction of the environmental logic that governed eighteenth-century colonial North America, a mode of thinking that suffused natural history and the emerging human sciences to situate bodies as ‘susceptible’ to their environments. LaFleur argues that environmental logic provided one of the strongest ideological frameworks through which eighteenth-century residents conceptualised race, sex and sexuality—complexly and contingently categorised in the archive as ‘human variety’—in the pre-biopolitical, pre-subjective milieu. Through the archive, LaFleur destabilises contemporary understandings of sexuality as the ‘product and property’ of individual subjects ‘who produce specific forms of sexual desire or identities that exclusively originate in their bodies’ (p. 60). Turning away from sexuality’s more contemporary conflation with interiority, LaFleur explores the archive to animate an environmental theory of early sexuality that instead reflects sexualities’ ‘distance from the subject’ (p 9).
The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America is divided into five substantive chapters. The first chapter lays the theoretical groundwork for LaFleur’s conception of the ‘environmental body’ as one that is steeped in histories of racialisation, or what she calls the ‘sexual politics of racialization’ (p. 25). This chapter constructs a narrative about ‘human susceptibility to or predilection for specific sexual behaviors’ as inherited by and through ‘climatic, humoral or otherwise environmental theories of racial difference’ (p. 33). Seminal natural historical texts—such as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782)—are critically engaged to reveal how ideas of race as environmental, rather than subjective, sustained an understanding of sex and sexuality as produced through natural (environmental) milieus.
Examining the persistent racial dimensions of climatic theory, Chapter 2 develops a geographic etymology of sodomy. LaFleur analyses Barbary captive narratives that document Christian sailors’ sexual, social and political anxieties about their Muslim captors. Through a discussion of climatic quotidian routines (sleep, diet, dress) that marked religious-cum-racial difference, LaFleur demonstrates that ‘the sodomitical is a framework derived from natural history and thus fundamentally animated by questions of human difference’ (p. 67). Building on racial, sexual and behavioural anxieties, Chapter 3 pivots to examine execution narratives (or ‘gallows literature’) as an important site that elucidates the idea of ‘habit’ as environmental, and thus racial and sexual. This chapter tracks the persistent use of what LaFleur calls ‘the figure of habit’ to explain ‘the punitive fact of black criminality’ (p. 30). Further linking the discourses of race and sexual deviance, Chapter 4 explores Herman Mann’s (1797) cross-dressing narrative based on the life of American Revolutionary War soldier Deborah Sampson. This chapter analyses the ways in which Mann used botanical taxonomy to allude to Sampson’s sapphism, situating her (a white settler) as a new species ‘indigenous’ to the newly formed nation. LaFleur offers a highly compelling account of how Mann’s environmental logic brings to bear questions of how ‘epistemological precipitousness also lies at the heart of settler logic’ (p. 162). Expanding upon the consideration of land in the previous chapter, Chapter 5 moves to ‘Negro Hill’, a racially mixed, working-class neighbourhood of Boston known for prostitution, to consider the sexual and racial politics of space more broadly. This chapter examines how the idea of ‘vice’ was understood as a spatial rather than individual problem, that is, the result of contact with one’s physical and social environments; ultimately probing fascinating questions about the ‘vigilance and virulence’ of ‘inanimate elements’ of the neighbourhood itself (p. 182).
Scholars of gender and sexuality studies will find assonance between LaFleur’s exploration of eighteenth-century environmental dispositions towards the body and sexual behaviour, and contemporary turns in the field that question the epistemic utility of the subject. Indeed, LaFleur’s animation of the eighteenth-century archive offers profound insights into the limits of the body, the subject and the human altogether, positioning this monograph as a pressing read for scholars of both feminist history and contemporary sexual politics. In the epilogue, LaFleur offers a prescient caution to those who might be searching this text for a new start in the ‘pre-’history of sexuality: ‘the environmental vision of sexuality was not understood in its time as an iteration of freedom, choice, or enfranchisement and should not be understood as such now’ (p. 205). Environmental conceptualisations of sexuality, as La Fleur deftly exposes, emerge through colonial thought and reflect the stubborn persistence of racism, especially against black and indigenous people. Whilst, in other words, contemporary queer and feminist ‘posthuman’ appeals might present an avenue for a revitalised, justice-oriented feminist politics, LaFleur’s work compellingly demonstrates that escaping the subject does not mean escaping the logics of coloniality.