Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America

Notes

Notes no t e s t o i n t roduc t ion 1. Henry James Papers (MS Am 1745.1 [16]), Houghton Library, Harvard University. I offer high thanks to Christoph Irmscher for bringing this letter to my attention. For more on Annie Adams Fields, see Irmscher’s “On Henry James and Annie Fields,” Raritan 26, no. 4 (Spring 2007): 155–79. 2. David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 17. 3. Ed Cohen’s Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1993) offers perhaps the most pointed and concise articulation of this position. Cohen reads the Wilde trials as a kind of capstone event, a mass-mediated spectacle of unprecedented reach that gathered into itself and solidified many of the movements toward the modern, sexologically inspired taxonomies of erotic life whose transforming advent, in the late nineteenth-century, Michel Foucault has theorized in such detail. These movements pointed toward the emergence of the “homosexual” as a new species of being, toward an understanding of sexuality as an aspect of subjectivity that harbors a special secret truth of self, binds together formerly distinct qualities of character and disposition, and requires much in the way of expert intervention to articulate, evaluate, harness, and turn to proper use. Cohen’s work sets itself in dialogue not only with Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1, but also with strong literary and historical scholarship from pioneering critics like (to name only a very few) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jeffrey Weeks, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Lillian Faderman, and David Halperin. See Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Jeffrey Weeks’s Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities (London: Longman, 1980); Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men: Friendship between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981); and Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: The Ancient World and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990). 4. See Foucault’s History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978). For a generous collection of some of sexology’s key documents, 208 Notes see Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See also Bland and Doan’s Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) and, for a broader range of reference, Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 5. For overviews of the question of evidence and the history of sexuality, see, along with those cited above, Halperin’s concluding chapter in How to Do the History of Homosexuality; George Chauncey’s introduction (as well as his “Note on Sources”) to Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 1–29, 365–70; and Leila J. Rupp’s introduction to A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–11. 6. As Eve Sedgwick wrote memorably in the introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, “to identify as must always include multiple processes of identification with” (61). Though the premise here has been the subject of wide-ranging theoretical dispute—the “antisociality ” thesis, identified chiefly with critics like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, might be said to have its roots in a radical skepticism with respect to just this point—still the affiliative affordances of a claimed queer identity, so underscored by Sedgwick, have been at the center of much historical scholarship. For an especially keen account of that scholarly trajectory, and of a queer yearning for forms of affiliation not quite provided by one’s historical circumstances, see Christopher Nealon’s Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), especially 7–13. For a many-voiced consideration of antisociality, see the PMLA forum from 2006 entitled “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” with participants Robert L. Caserio, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 819–28. 7. As Jonathan...