Syncopated Sex: Transforming European Sexual Cultures

Abstract

THREE FUNDAMENTAL IMPULSES HAVE NOURISHED the field of the history of sexuality in modern Europe over the last thirty years. The original and most powerful of these was, in a sense, archaeological: the effort to excavate the material and imaginative universe of a past moment and reconstruct how human beings in a particular time and location experienced and made sense of sexual matters. The second major impulse, which began to gather force in the mid-1990s even as the archaeological impulse continued apace, could perhaps best be called integrationist (in the most positive sense of that word). This impulse took as axiomatic that there was no major phenomenon in modern European history that could not be more fully and deeply understood if attention to the history of sexuality was brought to bear on the study, from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to industrialization and European imperialism in Africa and Asia, to tsarism and Nazism, to post-World War II "Americanization" and the aftermath of communism. The third impulse has developed even more recently, as the density of information and conceptual insights accumulated over the years by the archaeologists and integrationists is finally making it possible for scholars to pursue projects that are comparativist. Having studied an ever wider array of national cultures-from the initial core of British and French and then also German and Swiss history to the histories of Italy, the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and Ireland, along with occasional, albeit still tentative, forays into Belgium, -historians of sexuality now find it feasible to use cross-cultural comparisons and connections within Europe, including transnational flows of individuals, ideas, and movements, as a tool for challenging facile presumptions about causation and for thinking through more clearly than before the combinations of factors that determine changes in sexual cultures.The archaeological impulse was unquestionably inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, and it often remained deliberately agnostic about the causes of change. Nonetheless, the archaeologists were all the more profoundly historical for precisely that reason. They began from the idea that one purpose of history was to denaturalize the present, that sexuality itself had a history, and that all prior assumptions about I thank the anonymous readers for the AHR , audiences at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania (with special thanks to George Chauncey, Joanne Meyerowitz, Kathleen Brown, and Benjamin Nathans), as well as the following, who brought their critical expertise and sharp eyes to bear:

Building Realist Program Theory for Large Complex and Messy Interventions

“…Given the evolution of cultural attitudes toward sexual health and the influence these have on services design (Herzog, 2009), the conceptual framework was also designed to support theorizing about changes over time.…”

“…In line with Westhorp (2012Westhorp ( , 2013, the conceptual framework was intended to support the consideration of social structure and the multiple layers of overlapping context (as mentioned earlier: individual, interpersonal, institutional, infrastructural, and cultural; Pawson, 2006) by looking for micro-, meso-, and macrolevel theories. Given the evolution of cultural attitudes toward sexual health and the influence these have on services design (Herzog, 2009), the conceptual framework was also designed to support theorizing about changes over time.…”

Sexo y Razón (1997), diecisiete años después

“…En el mundo del hispanismo francés o anglosajón, Sexo y Razón ha tenido una buena acogida, pero no sucede lo mismo entre aquellos que se han ocupado de la historia de la sexualidad en Europa o en el conjunto del mundo occidental. Los historiadores que frecuentan casi en exclusiva la abundante bibliografía anglófona sobre el asunto (un ejemplo característico de esto lo constituyen los trabajos de síntesis y estado de la cuestión publicados por Dagmar Herzog en 2009 y 2011), 15 desconocen el libro. Sin embargo, un investigador tan reconocido como Alain Corbin, 16 ponderando precisamente la necesidad de leer los trabajos editados en otras lenguas, le concede a Sexo y Razón mucho valor.…”

Defining desire: (Re)storying a “fraudulent” marriage in 1901 Spain

“…The limited development of Spanish lesbian history 6 pales by comparison with that achieved in other European countries, such as France, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria (Herzog, 2009), and even more so with the flourishing field in Great Britain and the USA, where various analytical paradigms have emerged over the past 40 years (Vicinus, 2012).…”