Editors' Note

Editors' Note In the not-so-distant past, historians of women engaged in a subterranean debate, rarely surfacing in print, on the merits, or at least the political value, of the history of sexuality. On one side, some historians feared that a focus on sexuality would reduce women to the erotic, thus reinscribing longstanding Euroamerican patterns that tainted women as sexual and then excluded them from "respectable" public participation. In this vision, scholarship on sexuality relegated women, once again, to the "private" realm of social history. It seemed to promise only an embarrassing detour into the bedroom, delaying the serious study of women's political and intellectual contributions. On the other side of the debate, historians argued that sexuality could provide a window into the practices of gender relations in everyday life. For these scholars, the prescriptive literatures on sexuality revealed cultural constructions of gender, and the historical evidence of sexual behavior illuminated not only the subordination of women but also the ways in which some women attempted to rework their cultures to their own advantage. Despite the qualms of some historians, the study of sexuality has emerged in the past decade as a thriving, independent field. We no longer subsume the history of sexuality under social history or under the history of women and gender. As Nan Enstad suggests in this issue, the study of sexuality is no longer simply an "exploration of 'private' matters or ... a 'minor' subfield." But the histories of sexuality, women, and gender are still deeply intertwined. Constructions of sexuality signified, legitimated, and constituted various relations of power and hierarchy, including those of gender, and conversely constructions of gender signified, legitimated, and constituted various forms of sexuality. When we agreed to edit this special issue, we hoped to give historical specificity to this nexus of gender and sexuality. To that end, we selected essays from a range of historical eras and geographical regions, and we chose essays that addressed a multiplicity of genders and sexualities. We also looked for works that addressed current theoretical questions. How and why did the regulation of sexuality change over time, and when and how did women and men resist such regulation? When, where, and in what specific forms did sexualized identities emerge? What symbolic functions did various sexual narratives serve? Barbara Watson Andaya's article, "From Temporary Wife to Prostitute ," addresses all of these questions for Southeast Asia in the early modern period. Drawing on writings by Europeans and Chinese who vis- 1998 Editors' Note 7 ited Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Philippines, Siam, the Malay Peninsula, Vietnam, and Cambodia, Andaya describes the custom of temporary marriage between foreign traders and local women, a practice that incorporated the men into local commercial and kinship networks while providing the women and their families with access to resources and prestige. By the eighteenth century, this arrangement had begun to disappear ; in its place, European and Chinese men began to acquire female slaves who provided both sexual services and assistance in trading. No longer entangled with other obligations, female sexual services became increasingly commodified, a development that dovetailed smoothly with European notions of Asian promiscuity. By the nineteenth century, the temporary wife had been absorbed into the category of the prostitute. Andaya's article suggests that incorporation into an expanding European world entailed, and was partly justified by, the refashioning of Asian female sexuality. If Andaya's work shows us women's sexuality at a moment of extraordinary change, Ann Goldberg's "The Eberbach Asylum and the Practice(s) of Nymphomania" suggests the intense efforts of medical authorities to contain women's sexual behavior within particular boundaries. Yet this account of the actions of institutionalized German women in the early nineteenth century is not a simple story of expansive "natural" sexuality versus repressive medical authority. Rather, Goldberg argues that nymphomania was produced by the very system that sought to regulate it. The women labeled as nymphomaniacs, predominantly lower-class patients, communicated their exclusion from (and in some cases resistance to) evolving norms of bourgeois femininity by acts defined as excessive and immodest. Under the neutralizing rubric of science, doctors defined lower-class women as deviant, with that deviance localized in pathologically overstimulated genitalia...