CELIBACIES: American Modernism and Sexual Life by Benjamin Kahan (review)

Benjamin Kahan’s book, Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life, is an original study that views celibacy no longer as the absence of sex but as a full-fledged sexual category which acquires its letters of nobility not only in our over-sexualized times, but also in retrospect as Kahan harks backs to the mid-nineteenth century, arguing that celibacy was a key political and social strategy in US culture from 1840 to the 1960s. Kahn’s somewhat paradoxical thesis forces the reader to re-conceptualize celibacy as a different organization of pleasure whose practice turned out to be a weapon of subversion and created a distinct sexual identity.

At the intersection of sexuality, feminist, queer, and Black studies but also literary criticism, Kahan’s study pores over diversified texts from Henry James’s novel The Bostonians (1886); and W.H. Auden’s poem “The Sea and the Mirror” (1944); to Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967); and brings together disparate figures such as the “maidenly” Marianne Moore; the Harlem Renaissance religious leader Father Divine (with his celibate interracial communities countering the racist eroticization of black bodies); and Andy Warhol and his Factory (with its “alloerotic” kind of governance and “celibate mode of collaboration”) to consider “celibacy’s relation to Boston marriage, temporality, racialization, queer citizenship and sociality” (27). Likewise, initially building on the work of scholars such as Leo Bersani or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kahan uses an eclectic theoretical apparatus that combines sociology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

In addition to liberating celibacy from its association with homosexual repression or closetedness, Celibacies in a truly innovating way expands the concept rendering it positively connoted and giving it a new lease on life. Celibacies could, indeed, be an interesting follow-up reading to Elisabeth Abbott’s A History of Celibacy (2001), as Kahan is one of those creative contemporaries who, as Abbott predicted at the end of her book, does reclaim and redefine the phenomenon in a unique way (albeit a scholarly one). However, his final endorsement of Laurent Berlant’s hyperbolic statement, that celibacy “describes an important structure of feeling in our time,” may not convince readers (142). More convincing though is his determination to “wrestle celibacy back from the political Right,” thus further politicizing the concept (143).

It is precisely this concern that justifies Kahan’s discussion of asexuality and the Asexuality Movement as “the most important heir to the leftist progressive impulses pioneered by celibacy” in his conclusion which appears a bit confusing, for the difference between celibacy and asexuality remains blurred (143). However, the author has managed to aggrandize the concept giving it breadth and depth, a past and a future.