The History of x in Early America

In 2001, I served on the steering committee for the conference Sexuality in Early America, 1500–1820. Co-sponsored by two major institutional forces in the study of early American history and culture, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, this conference was designed to address the general neglect of the history of sexuality in the field of early American studies. Here is how the original call for papers set the stage:

In the last two decades, the history of sexuality has emerged as an important and dynamic field of inquiry. By historicizing matters once understood as universal and eternal, scholars have connected sexual behaviors and desires to specific political, social, and economic contexts. Many have discovered links between this seemingly private realm of human experience and broader structures of power. Still others have questioned the coherence of the category of sexuality itself. With few exceptions, early American scholars have remained on the margins of this new field. Mindful of this omission, the . . . conference aims to examine the relationship between sexuality (defined broadly to include desire, behavior, and attitudes) and the conditions and institutions of early American society (also defined broadly to include New France, the Caribbean, and the Spanish borderlands).

Notable here are several now familiar overarching motifs: the naming of the history of sexuality as a new and important academic field; the insistence on a historical approach to the study of matters once considered universal and private; the gesture toward linkages between those intimate matters and macro-level analyses of power; the positioning of the research to be presented at the conference as a corrective to previous omissions; the somewhat uneasy assertion of a temporal range contained by the years 1500–1820 and informed by present-day concerns, as well as a geographical scope that is American in both the national and the transnational senses of the term.

These stage directions also reflect some interesting negotiations that had taken place behind the scenes. When the original call for papers was circulated among the members of the conference steering committee, I had responded by suggesting that we might want to include a solicitation for research that called into question the utility of the categories of “sex” and “sexuality” for research conducted on historical materials that did not deploy those terms as we do today. This suggestion struck me as uncontroversial at the time, as I was drawing not only on the insights of Michel Foucault and his many commentators but also on research clustered around the rubric of queer theory which had suggested, throughout the 1990s, that we need to think carefully and politically about the instability of those categories as we investigate bodily and intimate practices that travel across geographic regions and historical periods. Yet my suggestion created a flurry of email. Some steering committee members worried that the inclusion of this emphasis in the call for papers would move the conference in a less historical direction; others were concerned that questioning the heuristic value of the concepts organizing the conference would undercut its coherence and focus, and could even return the emergent field of the history of sexuality to the margins of academic study. The result was an inclusion in the call for papers of the short sentence, “Still others have questioned the coherence of the category of sexuality itself.”

At the conference, the tension between these two different, though not necessarily opposed, approaches to the history of sex and sexuality created some interesting effects. The conference papers ranged over a wide array of topics that could be generally categorized as sexual, while the responses to those papers consistently raised the question of what was gained and lost by the deployment of sexuality as an organizing category. In part, I...