Bauer's History

In the previous entry, I discussed parts of Rebecca F. Plante's book Sexualities in Context . What this book actually did for me was to provide a brief overview—one that then echoed throughout the text—of how dominant the idea of heterosexuality is in both society and research. This did not come as a surprise to me, since these issues have been part of mainstream discussion since at least my undergraduate years. However, Plante’s argumentation made me reflect on certain problems in dealing with heterosexuality, given that it is such a persuasive norm that it renders itself invisible. Starting with a rather short introduction, Plante argues that the categories of “hetero-” and “homosexual” are not essential identites. Instead, they are cultural constructs that can be more precisely traced to the mid-19th century. If we were to travel back to ancient Greece and apply the same categories to their much-rumored sexual behaviors, they would not make a distinction between hetero- and hom...

Right now, I am in one of those wonderful stages of a project: the early phase in which everything (almost) seems possible. The project is a newspaper study on sexuality, and apart from some material and previous research, I can still choose quite freely among different methods and theories thanks to the way the funding is structured. As part of this stage, I am currently reading quite a lot — from older research on sexual politics in early 20th-century Sweden to Rebecca F. Plante’s semi-classical Sexualities in Context: A Social Perspective from 2015. all projects start with a blanc page This book might be a bit too simplistic to read as a researcher, as it feels mainly aimed at undergraduate students in sociology or gender studies. However, this kind of work is often quite good for gaining insight into perspectives you’re not primarily working with. Plante’s book is actually a very good introduction to the field of sexuality studies, as it offers different ways of thinking about sex...

As a scholar currently working with issues of sexualities of the past and sex in the early 20th century, I often get peculiar questions. Among the most frequently asked is whether society really dealt with sexuality "back then"—a temporality that most often refers to Victorian times or, in Sweden, the late 19th century. People are often shocked to hear that sexuality back then was, just like in contemporary times, the talk of the town. What many people are particularly surprised to learn is that there were actually discussions on sexual education as early as the 1890s in Sweden—or perhaps even earlier, depending on how we define sexual education. If we take our departure from the writings of historian of ideas Lena Lennerhed, sexual education or sexual enlightenment (in Swedish: sexualupplysning) is actually a very old phenomenon. If we believe that sexual education is about teaching people about the consequences and practices of sexuality from a matter-of-fact approach, we c...

In last week’s post, I highlighted how there are both conscious (in autocratic states) and unconscious efforts to regulate sexuality in contemporary society. Following Foucault’s notion that such efforts constitute an exercise of power, it is also evident that these efforts encounter resistance. Foucault himself famously stated: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (Foucault 1976, 95). One interpretation of this is that certain forms of power inevitably give rise to specific forms of resistance—which remains true in Sweden today. In my own research, I have seen that sexuality was regulated in a repressive manner during the first three decades of the 20th century. At that time, contraceptives were considered a threat both to public morality and to the perceived need to increase Sweden’s population—both in quantitative and qualitative terms. This eventually led to the crim...

Following up on last week’s post, we can ask ourselves where questions of sexuality are being challenged in politics. From a contemporary perspective, I would argue that we are currently witnessing global attempts—particularly from conservative actors—to banish issues of sexuality from public discourse. In Foucauldian theory, we can speak of several forms of the exercise of power. Foucault uses the concept of biopower to analyze social views on sex, capitalism, and power. One of the central aspects of biopower is that it often operates through the individual, who is expected to internalize social norms rather than be externally forced to accept them. Yet, in the case of sexuality, we have over the past decades witnessed rather forceful attempts to silence it, thereby making people unaware of important aspects of their own sexuality. In such cases, the effort seems to lie in banishing "unwanted" expressions from public discourse, thereby limiting the individual’s scope for a...

This is the first part in a series of three posts in which I aim to discuss contemporary sexual politics from a more theoretical and research-based perspective than in my other posts. It forms part of a broader discussion on how sexuality can—and perhaps should—be understood as constituted by a multitude of actors. Therefore, we might not be able to speak of a single contemporary politics of sexuality, but rather of a range of political positions. During the 20th century, numerous philosophers and researchers attempted to write “the history of sexuality,” but the one who has influenced me the most is the French philosopher Michel Foucault. I have actually read all three of his original works on sexuality, but I believe the first book covers the essential foundations for discussing and understanding sexuality. Broadly, this can be said to consist of two levels of particular interest to this series of posts: a) the repressive hypothesis b) the discussion on power/knowledge and the multi...