The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 by Susan S. Lanser (review)

The Sexuality of History, like its title, produces that sense of theoretical, critical vertigo that comes every once in a while when a book unsettles a reader’s most comfortable methodological assumptions. The disorientation produced by the title carries into an opening methodological chapter that offers more than some new theoretical tools to add to one’s kit. Rather, it realigns one’s relationship to both “sexuality” and “history” as objects of study. To import Sarah Ahmed’s queer phenomenological retake on Edmund Husserl’s table, my orientation to the “table” of “sexuality studies” has been irrecoverably queered by Lanser’s book, and I do not mean by “queering” the close reading for evidence of lesbianism or “gay” that it so often means. The methodology laid out by this book is rich in its contribution to the field of sexuality studies and, to those who read it carefully, to a lot of other fields that fall within the long time period (1565–1830) and the several European languages and nations that this book encompasses. Because of the importance of Lanser’s methodological as well as historical and literary contribution, this review will be a little lopsided in its attentions to methodology, in hopes of helping readers, not to avoid the vertigo that I experienced, but to reap the rewards of having many of their assumptions about “the Sapphic” and “modernity,” about “sexuality” and “history” turned upside down.

The inversion “sexuality of history” first of all places sexuality in the driver’s seat of social and historical process. Sexual representations, Lanser argues, have social agency; they work to organize larger frameworks for understanding the world and for stabilizing or changing them. As Lanser notes, the field of sexuality studies has long recognized this agency, but if “sexuality” is not the focus of historical work, it is rarely factored into the analysis of other cultural forms. Relegated to the sidelines except by those of us who “do” sexuality studies (which not coincidentally is a lot of women and queers of all genders), its formative role in a wide variety of discourses is overlooked. By placing representations of sexuality into broad, discursive frameworks for how a culture, at a given time and place, understands and explains itself, Lanser dislodges “the Sapphic,” by which she means representations of same-gender eroticism between women, from its isolated and often marginalized role as an object of study separate from and irrelevant to other discursive patterns. Instead of combing the archives for “evidence” of women loving women or creatively close-reading so as to expose the discursive potential of a text as “queer,” Lanser looks to the obvious, “on the surface” representations of female-female eroticism, not as evidence of a history of women loving women, but as part of the process by which cultures came to define themselves as “modern.” The obviousness of these representations, however, depends on one of those perceptual shifts like that of Gestalt psychology’s Rubin’s vase: two faces in profile or a vase, a beautiful young woman or a hag, depending on how the eye focuses. Instead of reading the Sapphic as exception to the dominant narrative of a narrowly defined heteronormative sexuality emerging alongside the “rise” of forms such as the novel, Lanser reads the Sapphic as an ever-present and concurrent condition of possibility for heteronormativity. The figure/ground play between Sapphic and heterosexual representations in turn expresses shifting investments in and anxieties about modern social relations and institutions in all their glittering and frightening newness.

Reading across broad time periods and national and linguistic boundaries, Lanser bases her claims for the Sapphic on reading practices that move between close and distant. While she does not reject the literary logic of influence, her primary method for making sense of six broad historical epistemes and several languages is the logic of confluence, the simultaneous occurrence of similar patterns across unrelated discourses...