Nina Kushner is an associate professor of history at Clark University. She is author of Erotic Exchanges: Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris and coeditor of Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France. Andrew Israel Ross is an associate professor of history at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Their book, Histories of French Sexuality: From the Enlightenment to the Present, was published in May.

Covering the early eighteenth century through the present, the essays in Histories of French Sexuality show how attention to the history of sexuality deepens, changes, challenges, supports, or otherwise complicates the major narratives of French history. This volume makes a set of historical arguments about the nature of the past and a larger historiographical claim about the value and place of the field of the history of sexuality within the broader discipline of history.

Introduction

Sexuality has a history. Although this was once a controversial claim, it is by now clear that as both a subject and a category of analysis, sexuality is central to historical inquiry in all times and places. Even a cursory reflection of the field elucidates how sexuality has shaped relations among almost all human beings and has done so in ways that have changed over time. Sexuality has undergirded politics, for example, through dynastic reproduction, as well as through immigration, citizenship, and healthcare policies, not to mention the role of sex scandals in determining who has held power. Sexuality has been central to the development of religion, through moral strictures and the construction of symbolic meaning. Sexuality is an economic issue at a macro level when we consider the management of populations and at a micro one in the context of family economies. A study of sexuality informs our understanding of war, including policies meant to control military forces and the populations they fight and the places they occupy. Sexuality has been a major theme in various forms of cultural production, from ballet and opera to art and film to literature and poetry. Sexuality is also vital to understanding gender through the emergence of specific rules, hierarchies, constraints, and privileges. Given the importance of sexuality to political, social, military, and cultural histories, among others, it is clear that sexuality has moved beyond being a “useful category of historical analysis,” in the words of Joan W. Scott. Like gender, class, and race, sexuality is an essential category of historical analysis.

French historians were, paradoxically, both early and slow adopters of this idea. Defining texts in the field, not least of which was Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976, trans. 1978), emerged from France. Yet the history of sexuality has not been as integrated into French history— on either side of the Atlantic— as it has been into British and American history, for example. In France the field has struggled against cultural and political headwinds, while in the Anglophone world it has not received much attention from the institutions that structure the field, including leading journals. In the past decade, however, this marginalization has begun to lessen. A number of well-established Anglophone historians have turned their attention to sexuality. French journals have published special issues on sexuality while assessing its historiography. Historians working in both French and English have published groundbreaking research on all facets of sexuality, and younger scholars working in both languages have been encouraged to pursue topics in the field. Yet, overall, historians of France have been slow to reckon with the ways that sexuality informs and enhances our understanding of the French past. The history of sexuality in France is thus at an inflection point.

Our goals in producing this volume, then, are twofold. The first is to showcase current work being produced on the French history of sexuality to demonstrate the vibrancy of the field to historians of France and other geographies. The historians featured in this volume explore a wide range of topics, from colonization to the construction of knowledge to the significance of social media. Many of them situate their work in the nexus of other subfields, like the history of medicine, politics, and religion. They thus demonstrate that there are multiple points of entry to the history of sexuality, as it overlaps and complements other forms of historical inquiry. They also show how the history of sexuality often leads us to consider previously overlooked types of sources and to revise how we read more traditional sources, like police archives. In doing so, the contributors demonstrate that French history contains important lessons for historians of other geographies as well.

The second goal is to make explicit what has usually remained implicit in French history: that attention to sexual matters can transform, reshape, and complicate existing historical narratives. In this volume alone, contributors consider the role of sex in promoting and restricting the autonomy of French colonial subjects, use sex to challenge narratives of a liberal Enlightenment, and enrich our understanding of how sex shaped urban geography in Paris and Bordeaux, among other examples. This work deepens our understanding not only of sex and sexuality, but also of French politics, social order, conflict, and culture. It shows that using sexuality as a category of analysis is essential to understanding French historical narratives both within and outside of the hexagon.

This approach is based on a recognition of just how diverse the history of sexuality is. Much to its detriment, the field has long been perceived narrowly, as being dominated by histories of sexual regulation and sexual minorities (especially female prostitutes and gay men). It is not surprising that early histories of sexuality drew on readily available, though infrequently used, archival sources to document these stories. But the history of sexuality is an extremely broad field, including topics as wide-ranging as sexual identity, behavior, and desire; reproduction, marriage, divorce, and the family; race and interracial relations; gender identity; violence; and scandal, to name just some of the more common subjects of scholarly exploration. The field is so capacious that defining it has proved complicated.

For our purposes, we define the history of sexuality through three expansive and interlocking categories of activity in the past. We start with the supposition that the history of sexuality is the history of how bodies become sexed. We include here the processes by which physical bodies became gendered, sexual difference was defined, and bodies were constructed as sexually desiring entities. We also include how these processes intersected with efforts to understand, control, and otherwise deploy those bodies. Next, we argue that the history of sexuality can be investigated through the history of sexual practices and experiences (including emotion), how they relate to the formation and experience of sexual subjectivities and identities, and how these experiences and feelings sometimes serve as the basis of community formation. Last, the history of sexuality is the history of sexual narratives, representations, and discourses. We are particularly interested in the ways in which sexual meanings— how sexual acts, identities, and communities are understood by both individuals and wider societies— are produced, enacted, and lived at different moments. Ultimately, we argue that a history of sexuality is a history of the relationships among all these categories as they change over time.