Sexualities in Research (2/2) - A discussion following reading Plantes Sexualites in Context

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 homosexual. What they might instead focus on is who gets penetrated (being passive) and who penetrates (being active), as this would illustrate, for instance, domination and social status.

According to Plante, heterosexuality was mainly invented as a social category in the mid-19th century. One of the key contributors to this label was Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who wrote the classic work Psychopathia Sexualis, which would later become the standard textbook on the psychiatric study of sexual disorders. In this work, von Krafft-Ebing used the word “heterosexual” to describe someone who was “morbidly obsessed with sex with the other gender.” It was not until the mid-20th century that the word “heterosexual” came to signify an identity.

                                          Richard von Krafft-Ebing - inventor of heterosexuality?

Similar things can be said about homosexuality. There didn’t really exist a word that functioned as an identity marker in the same way it does today. Historically, words like “sodomites” existed, but that term primarily referred to the act of committing sodomy rather than the identity of a man who has sex with men (or women with women). One interpretation of Plante’s writing is that this might be because heterosexual behavior is such a strong norm that it doesn’t need a name. Humanity rarely investigates what is simply assumed to be “natural.”

This actually presents a difficult theoretical implication for studying the history of sexuality. The problem can be summarized like this:

If heterosexual sex is the norm, and there didn’t exist a word for it, how do I—as a historian—critically examine the dominant status of heterosexuality described in the previous entry?

Plante herself resolves this issue in contemporary contexts by consistently using the term “heterosexual sex” or the abbreviation “PIV” (penis in vagina). Historians, however, tend to work with quotes and primary sources. It would be unfair—and highly confusing—for readers if I were to insert the word “heterosexual” into every quote. But by not doing so, there’s also a risk that the research automatically treats heterosexual sex as the default, and in doing so reinforces the social claim of a one-sexuality-fits-all model. In the end, I actually think I will include a section in my upcoming paper that explicitly addresses this issue.

Because if nothing else, history deserves more than just repeating its dominant scripts—we should also ask why they became dominant in the first place. And maybe, that starts with noticing what we until recently did not had words for.

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