Each week a Bowdoin professor will be invited to write a column discussing a current topic in his or her field. The goal of this feature is to give members of the Bowdoin community a glimpse into disciplines that they may not usually encounter.
This semester I'm teaching a course called Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies, and one of the first ideas we'll be grappling with involves what might be called the "invention" of homosexuality and its conceptual twin, heterosexuality, a little more than a century ago. It's a peculiar thought. Classicist scholar David Halperin puts it this way: "This is an event whose impact and whose scope we are only now learning how to measure." He refers here neither to the death of Socrates, nor to the dawning of print technology, nor for that matter to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The "event" he has in mind is something more diffuse but, in its way, no less consequential: it's that invention, or perhaps we should say the slow but decisive emergence, of sexuality as such, of an understanding of "sexuality" as this thing each of us is said to possess, as a mysterious, elusive, deeply embedded aspect of our selves that somehow knits together such seemingly separate characteristics as gender behavior, erotic predelection, sexual object choice, psychological profile, dispositions toward the family, the state, the law, the future and the past.
But this notion?the idea that after, say, the Wilde trials of 1895 a vision of homosexuality, a homosexual type, and a homosexual character came into unprecedentedly broad currency?raises all sorts of questions. If the hetero-/homo- division we continue to live with today was "invented" little more than a hundred years ago, then what did sexuality look like before the hardening of such a distinction into the stuff of present-day common sense? How did earlier authors imagine the parameters of sexuality itself? Was it a circumscribed set of bodily practices? A form of identification? Was sexuality an aspect of one's identity? Or was it even something an individual could be said to possess? And what did this great transformation feel like on the ground, to those who lived through the stages of its unfolding?
In my own work, I think less about what was gained in 1895 (new ways to name, to make publicly legible, same-sex desires, say) than about what might have been lost, about all the errant possibilities for imagining sex that, in the aftermath of the hardening of the new taxonomy of hetero- and homo-, may have sunken into a kind of muteness or illegibility. Some American writers of the 19th century seem to me to provide a fantastic resource for imagining sexuality as something other than we have come to know it: as something less like a private possession each of us can claim?something other than an accoutrement of the liberal self ?and something more like a style of affiliation, a stance toward temporality, even perhaps a blueprint for sociality.
I also think a lot about what we might learn from certain styles of queer imagining, and learn particularly about how to live through passages of history that feel to us especially intractable. For instance, as Christopher Nealon argues in a wonderful book called "Foundlings," many queer writers have been especially adept at fashioning a politics that imagines the difficult (and often violent and phobic) present tense as a kind of anticipatory time, a time of expectancy, one made vibrant by the quality of its yearning toward a future that might offer to the recalcitrant present a retrospective expansiveness it cannot otherwise attain. This seems to me very, very pertinent to us, here in our own difficult passage of history. (I take ours to be a moment in which the geopolitical cataclysm of the present?national and international, involving incompetence as well as avarice, and the steady erosion of principles many of us had thought to be fundamental?feels every day that much more beyond our capacity to grasp, that much more inapprehensible.) To yearn, as have so many queer writers with such articulacy, toward a future that might give sense or even legibility to a painfully unyielding present- who among us couldn't stand, right now, to know a little more about how that works?
So my favorite writers in the field at the moment?Nealon and Halperin, Dana Luciano and Rod Ferguson, Elizabeth Freeman and Kathryn Bond Stockton, as well as the redoubtable Michael Warner?take up a pretty wide range of theorists (Adorno and Benjamin have come into a wonderful new prominence) in the effort to think through these questions and dilemmas. Doing so, they seem to me to give us new purchase on the range, vibrancy, and ongoing consequence of queer life and queer imagining, even for areas of thought not suspected, at first glance, to have much at all to do with sex.
Peter Coviello is an associate professor of English and acting director of the program in Africana studies.