Desire: A History of European Sexuality (review)

Anna Clark's Desire: A History of European Sexuality traces the changing ways sexuality has been understood, experienced, and regulated in European societies. Ranging from Ancient Greece to contemporary Sweden, it interweaves ambitious panorama with a keen eye for the telling vignette. In so doing, Clark builds upon an increasingly vibrant historiography in sexuality studies. Going where most historians would not dare, Desire collapses boundaries between national histories, focused chronologies, and narrow case studies—synthesizing, reflecting, and ultimately producing a groundbreaking intervention in the history of sexuality. It is a mark of Clark's scholarship that she integrates notoriously difficult theory into an absorbing narrative that will engage academics, undergraduates, and general readers.

Clark's central premise is simple: "sexual desire and behavior are constructed" (3). In early Christian thought desire was considered diabolical temptation; for Victorian scientists it represented a "biological urge to procreate and further evolution" (4). Desire thus provides a sustained meditation on the importance of historicizing sex. In discussing female same-sex intimacies, Clark (perhaps influenced by Laura Doan or Sharon Marcus) suggests that "rather than investigate the 'truth' of what these women actually did, it would be more productive to explore how people articulated their desire" (4). Clark repeatedly confronts the reader with the particular nature of their own sexual practices and subjectivities. Unlike other general histories of sexuality, Desire moves beyond comforting and congratulatory narratives of liberation. Considering the transformative interrelationship between state, market, and sexuality in the twentieth century, Clark concludes: "sexual desire cannot be liberated, because there is no 'authentic' natural desire to be freed; rather, sexual desire is now just constructed in different ways" (220).

There are two features of Desire worth stressing. First is Clark's insistence on understanding sexuality in a European context. Despite important national differences, there are common themes—for example, the association between state formation and the management of desires and bodies from the nineteenth century. Desire is thus an effective exercise in transnational history. Understandings of sex were shaped by the flow of ideas and populations across borders. Sexology developed in the nineteenth century through dialogues between scholars in France, Austria, Germany, and Britain. Eastern European migrations in the late twentieth century reinvigorated older narratives of sexual danger and national purity. Europe, moreover, is never a discrete entity: a chapter on early modern Spain affords a suggestive perspective on links between sexuality, conquest, and colonization. Spanish depictions of Indian peoples as "sodomitic cannibals" (100)—like Britain's suppression of early marriage and purdah in India—demonstrate how European sexualities were produced through encounters with colonial Others.

The second factor that makes Desire more than historiographical synthesis is Clark's ability to tease a genuinely challenging argument out of such diverse material, providing an alternative framework for thinking about the historical formation of sexualities. Clark sees two "competing concepts of sexual desire": "polluting and dangerous" versus "creative, transcendent and transformative" (1). These recurring tensions were manifested in different ways and with different social, political, and cultural effects. The "Church denigrated sexual desire except in tightly controlled situations in marriage" in the twelfth century; "religious and secular authorities tried to control sex outside marriage" while female mystics articulated a transcendental desire and spirituality (64-65). In the nineteenth century social purity activists "spread moral purity pamphlets to young people, arguing that they must have sexual education to remain unpolluted" while radicals deemed "sexual freedom . . . essential to creativity" (142). Behind this narrative, church gave way to state, market, and scientific expertise in managing desire's disorderly power.

Clark's most bracing intervention lies in what she terms the "twilight moment" (7), which offers ways beyond the fixation on the supposedly rigid boundaries between deviant and "normal" that often characterizes histories of sexuality. It denotes

sexual activities or desire which people are not supposed to engage in, but they do. The twilight fades into deepest darkness, and then the light returns at dawn . . . twilight moments were those...