Early American Sexuality: Race, Colonialism, Power, and Culture

My class explores the relationship of sexuality to the process of colonization in early North America. While traditional colonial American history courses establish the British colonies as precursors to a Great American Nation, and history of sexuality courses in the United States often emphasize the twentieth century, I focus on sexuality as part of the creation of multiple North American societies from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Throughout the course, I ask students to trace the ways in which cultural ideologies about religion, race, class, gender, and culture related to sexual beliefs and practices. My goals are to have students think both about the modern political and social implications of the history of sexuality and about the ways in which the study of sexuality reshapes our image of a given historical time and place.

I have taught versions of "History of Sexuality in the United States to 1860," cross-listed in History and Women's Studies at the University of California, Irvine in 2000 and 2001, and cross-listed in History and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa in 1998. It is an upper-level lecture course with between forty and fifty students. I teach the class in two weekly sessions of eighty minutes each, where I give interactive lectures for about fifty minutes and spend the remaining thirty minutes discussing that day's readings with the class. I use a course pack with a wide array of primary and secondary sources. In the past few years, multiple anthologies that address sexuality in early America have hit the shelves (Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race [1998]; Kathy Peiss, ed., Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality [forthcoming]; Elizabeth Reis, ed. American Sexual Histories [2001]); they could also be used. Most of the assignments focus on the analysis of source material--in other words, doing history rather than just learning it. We repeatedly discuss how availability of sources affects the kinds of history we write (i.e., how might legal or religious records each skew our image of early American sexual beliefs?). Because some of the primary sources have been gathered from my own research, they are not easily available. I have made some alternative suggestions, and readers may also contact me (sblock@uci.edu) if they would like to be e-mailed any of the transcribed texts I use. Because I teach this course for a ten-week quarter, I have also added alternative readings designated as [Optional], so that the syllabus can be more easily expanded to a semester system. I taught the course with a website (http://e3.uci.edu/01w/28270) that includes outlines of each lecture with supplemental reading suggestions, images, links to other sites, assignments, and writing exercises.

I begin the class by asking students, "What is sex?" After a bit of giggling, I usually get some answer involving (heterosexual) intercourse, and I pose further questions that show the limitations of this answer: Does a penis need to be involved for something to count as sex? What about kissing, hugging, or masturbating? Does sex require more than one person? Can something be sexual without any physical contact--is getting turned-on sexual? Is a kiss from your grandmother sexual? Basically, we spend about fifteen minutes coming to the conclusion that there is no easy way to draw a line between that which is sexual and that which is not. This provides an entry into why we need to study the history of sex: beliefs about what sex is, what sex should be, and what sex means vary over time, place, and person. The exercise also provides a nice way for students to get used to talking about sex and underscores that students might need to think more carefully about their ideas of sexual categories.

I also find it useful to lay some ground rules for our class discussions. In the first class, I jokingly tell the students that none of...