Sexuality in the Americas

Teaching about sex has always been a radical endeavor. From early demands that the personal be recognized as political to more recent proclamations about sexuality's unstable and subversive potential, teaching about sex has offered the chance to blur boundaries and invert paradigms. It has challenged longstanding truisms about causation, inclusion, and benefit. It has redefined what constitutes "politics" and "history" and how they operate. It has made desire and coercion, agency and discipline all part of the same conversation.

The two essays and syllabi included in this section offer two highly original courses on the history of sexuality in the Americas. Part of that originality lies in the fact that both authors--Sharon Block, who teaches American history at the University of California, Irvine, and Pete Sigal, who teaches Latin American history at California State University, Los Angeles--are trained as colonialists and draw much of their materials from early-modern and pre-Columbian histories and primary sources. Block and Sigal both note that university courses on sexuality overwhelmingly deal with the modern period, if not the contemporary present. This has tended to perpetuate myths about sexuality either as a timeless constant or as the end point of a linear progression from the backward and repressed sex of yore to the sexual diversity and freedom of today. Block's course, "Early American Sexuality," and Sigal's course, "To Cross the Sexual Borderlands," both challenge students to consider the great variety of sexual practices and meanings prior to the nineteenth century and, in particular, to rethink notions about evolutionary liberation. Both courses heavily emphasize the way in which European conquest and colonization disciplined sexual bodies, using sex to create new racial and class inequalities. Sigal's course, which includes sections on modern and contemporary history, extends this critique of progress to the alleged benefits of nationalism and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Block and Sigal draw on a rich variety of writings about sex and introduce students to numerous debates, old and new. They revisit and reframe the early radical and psychoanalytic feminist concerns with sexuality's foundational role in constructing gender difference, hierarchy, and subjectivity by assigning more recent scholarship that emphasizes sexuality's importance to constituting race, class, and nationality. Issues raised by queer theory and postmodernism also centrally structure both courses. Block and Sigal problematize distinctions between "gender" as social meaning and "sex" as the physiological body and challenge the naturalness and primacy of heterosexuality. They likewise urge students to consider sexuality not just as something pertaining to individual identities or practices, but as a set of dynamics that structure political relationships more broadly.

Lastly, these two courses are remarkable for their refusal to retell histories of sexuality in terms of discrete nation-states. Both privilege a transnational paradigm, arguing that sexuality needs to be seen not as something that is specifically "already American" or "already Brazilian." Instead, they urge students to understand sexuality as produced and negotiated within the asymmetries of shifting boundaries and points of contact, domination, and resistance: these are, they argue, the very dynamics that constitute nations, citizens, and "others" to begin with. Block's course, which focuses on the territorial region usually understood as "colonial America," pursues these goals by encouraging students to think about how sexuality delineates boundaries between master/servant, freeman/slave, civilized/savage. Sigal's course more explicitly mobilizes a notion of borderlands and sexual/racial mestizaje. Moreover, his course is hugely comparative: it addresses histories of various regions and countries in South, Central, and North America, including numerous sections on the United States or territory that eventually became the United States. Such breadth and boundary crossing are evidently confounding to institutional sensibilities since, as Sigal recounts, his students are only allowed to receive credit for his class as a "Latin American history" course and explicitly disqualified from earning credit in "American history." Such border patrolling of U.S. history in particular further underscores the disruptive radicalism of teaching sex in transnational ways.