Abstract
Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (eds.), Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xii + 275 pp (hbk), ISBN 978-0-230-28368-8.
This volume, a collection of papers originally presented at a conference at Exeter University in 2007, offers an intriguingly multipaned window into the state of the history of sexuality in the twenty-first century. The articles, by historians and literary critics working in Britain, Europe, and Australia, address issues of continuity and change, the relation between sex and identity, and the extent to which it is possible to use history to understand present attitudes towards sexuality and the body. Above all, they suggest that there is little theoretical consensus about what the history of sexuality is and what it means to practice it.
The twelve articles range widely over geographical and temporal as well as theoretical ground. Jennifer Jordan, working with British sources, complicates Thomas Laqueur's reading of early modern understandings of physiological sex; Sarah Toulalan builds upon the work of prominent theorists of childhood as she explores early modern ideas about puberty and childhood sexuality. Semiotics and postmodern literary criticism more generally loom large in Andrew Wells' analysis of sex and race in eighteenth-century anatomy and pornography, in Elizabeth Stephens' reading of nineteenth-century visual medical teaching tools, and in Margaretta Jolly's queer-theoretical approach to the life and work of artist Grayson Perry. Several contributors ground their studies in Foucault: Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vásquez García on sexual nonnormativity, biopolitics, and the emergence of a modern state in nineteenth-century Spain; Peter Cryle in his discursive analysis of sexuality in eighteenth-century France; and Lisa Downing, who builds upon Foucault to include the sexualization of death (through avenues such as necrophilia and autoerotic asphyxiation) in a narrative of the history of sexuality as one of regulation and control transitioning from acts to identities. Different still are the approaches of Alison Oram, who here begins to do for the story of transsexuality in twentieth-century Britain what Joanne Meyerowitz has done for that story in the US; Fernanda Alfieri, who offers a historical survey of Catholic views of sex within marriage in early modern Spain and Portugal; Kate Fisher, who takes a social-history approach, grounded in oral testimony, to women's views of marital sexual duty in twentieth-century Britain; and Alison Moore, who presents a compelling intellectual history of attempts to connect Nazism to ‘degenerate' sexualities such as homosexuality or sadism.
Together, these pieces demonstrate a wide range of perspectives on whether the history of sexuality is to be grounded first in theory or in history. Despite strong explicitly historicist studies in this volume—I think particularly of Oram's, Toulalan's, and Fisher's—Bodies, Sex and Desire also illustrates the extent to which, for many scholars, theory remains essential to telling stories about sexualities, in a way that it has not in other fields of history. At times it does seem as if some of the contributors lean on theory in order to sidestep the ways in which historical realities render it difficult and problematic to connect the past and the present. By and large, however, the articles illustrate how difficult it still is to write the history of sexuality without referring to Foucault and other non-historian theoreticians who have come to define the field. In particular, Jordan's rereading of early modern views of the male body, Downing's bold argument about ‘eros and thanatos' in sexology, and Moore's discussion of Nazism and sexuality all benefit greatly from their engagement with and grounding in theory. They are notable for what they do to build on and complicate Laqueur, Foucault, and the Frankfurt School philosophers as much as they are for the explicitly historical ground they tread.
In her introduction to the volume, Toulalan addresses the intellectual history of sexology and genealogies that can be drawn between, for instance, nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of nonnormative sexuality. It seems just as possible, however, to draw genealogies between the theoretical perspectives on display in this book and their antecedents, and to wonder what's next for this still-young field. Given its diversity of approaches, this book in some respects raises more questions than it answers about the nature of the history of sexuality.