No heteronormativity in the past

In the early twentieth century, marriage manuals sought to link marital sex to the progress of civilization, searching for the history of what they considered to be normal sexuality. In Heterosyncrasies, Karma Lochrie looks to the foundation of modern society in the Middle Ages to undertake a profound questioning of the heterosexuality of that history. Lochrie begins this provocative rethinking of sexuality by dismantling the very idea of normal through a study of the development of statistics in the nineteenth century. She then intervenes in contemporary debates about queer versus ostensibly stable heterosexual social and sexual categories by exposing the "heterosyncratic" organization of sexuality in the Middle Ages and by clarifying the dubious contribution that the concept of normality has made to the construction of sexuality. In medieval texts from the letters of Heloise to Lollard heretical attacks on the Church, to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, medical discourse surrounding the clitoris, and finally the Amazons of medieval myth, Lochrie focuses on female sexuality in the Middle Ages in an effort to discern a less binary, more diversified understanding of it. Lochrie demonstrates how the medieval categories of natural and unnatural were distinctly different from our modern categories of normal and abnormal. In her work we see how abandoning heteronormativity as a medieval organizer of sexualities profoundly changes the way we understand all sexualities - past, present, and possibly even future. Heterosyncrasies is a milestone in the study of sexual identity politics, revealing not only how presumptions of normality obscure our understanding of the past, but also how these beliefs affect our present-day laws, society, and daily life.

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Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality when Normal Wasn't
By Karma Lochrie
Edition: illustrated
Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 0816645981, 9780816645985
178 pages

It is invalid to study past sexualities through the concept of 'sexual orientation'

Medieval scholars who abandon the idea of premodern heteronormativity will find themselves in good company. Early modernists have already abandoned it. Mario di Gangi, Jonathan goldberg, and Valerie Traub, among others, have long since retired that "aegis of the homo/hetero divide" from their period for its warping and presentist tendencies. Instead of reconstituting that aegis, early modern scholars have begun to map the multiform ways that heterosexuality was and was not in the Renaissance. Rebecca Bach, for example, baldly states that early modern England had "lots of marriage but no heterosexuality," thereby driving a historical wedge in modern presumptive heterosexuality. catherine belsey tracks the new taxonomy of heterosexual desire that became identified with marriage in the sixteenth century, thereby wedding for the first time the erotic with companionate marriage. Finally, Valerie Traub argues for the development in the early modern period of "domestic heterosexuality," a "new marital" regime in which erotic desire became the sine quo non of conjugal life." If heterosexuality assumed many forms during the early modern period, and if even those forms it did assume require names to distinguish them from past and present forms of heterosexuality, it seems reckless, to say the least, for medievalists to continue to use the crude, ham-fisted concept of heteronomativity to describe medieval sexualities and desires.
A measure of epistemological humility would go a long way toward correcting the tendencies of medieval scholars to assume heteronormativity of the past based on the presumption of widespread agreement about what heterosexuality means in the present.

Excerpted from:
Page: xvii
Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality when Normal Wasn't
By Karma Lochrie
Edition: illustrated
Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 0816645981, 9780816645985
178 pages

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The third gender in twentieth-century America

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1996 by Randolph Trumbach

George Chauncey's brilliant and often persuasive study of male homosexual relations in early twentieth-century New York was published two years ago on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riot that inaugurated the recent gay liberation movement. The world that he describes was the product of a major shift in western sexual behavior that had begun two hundred years before, around 1700. And his book is in dialogue with the scholars who over the past twenty-five years have tried to analyze that shift. The nature of the problem to be discussed can be indicated by asking whether homosexuality and heterosexuality are biological categories that divide the world into a majority and a minority that can be found in all times and places. To such a question most western people today would reply yes. And while they would probably wonder why a minority should be homosexual, they would simply accept without question that most people are heterosexual. Since the 1970s, however, the work of some historians and sociologists has radically challenged these presumptions. Mary McIntosh in a classic article in 1968 began the discussion by proposing that homosexuality in modern society was a deviant role into which some men were socialized beginning around 1700. Nine years later in 1977 Jeffrey Weeks and myself, under McIntosh's influence but independently of each other, rephrased McIntosh's proposal. Weeks maintained that the modern homosexual role emerged in the late nineteenth century when the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality were invented.(1)..... click here to read more.

Review of the book "A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages"

Authors of the book: Matt Cook (Author), H. G. Cocks (Author), Robert Mills (Author)

Review:
“The authors are professors of history and English at Birbeck and Kings Colleges in London and Baruch College in New York. In chapters focusing on six British eras from the Middle Ages to the present, they examine through literature and other primary documents how intimate emotional and/or sexual relationships between men were understood and defined by those involved and their societies. Among other things, they demonstrate that it was not until the 1700s that the notion of a "gay" identifying minority of men existed and separated them from the rest. The final chapter catalogs gay reform in Britain and its modern legacy.”–Reference & Research Book News

Studies in Early Modern Sexuality

Citation
Huntington Library Quarterly
September 2004, Vol. 67, No. 3, Pages 481–487
Posted online on December 3, 2004.
(doi:10.1525/hlq.2004.67.3.481)

Studies in Early Modern Sexuality
Ian Frederick Moulton‌
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY WEST

Katherine O'Donnell and Michael O'Rourke, editors
Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, 1550-1800
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. XIV = 206 pages

Margaret A. Gallucci
Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. XVI = 214 pages

Jim Ellis
Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse
Toronto: University of Toronto press, 2003, VII + 272 pages

Few books have opened a field of study as definitively as did Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England, published by Gay Men's Press in 1982. Along with the first volume of Michel Foucalt's History of Sexuality, Bray's work historicized same-sex desire, demonstrating that the seemingly immutable categories of sexual orientation, homo/hetero/bi, were in fact culturally constructed, and of fairly recent vintage. Bray and Foucault separated sexual activity from identity, asserting that before the nineteenth century, homoerotic activity was just that: activity. A man might have sex with other males, but this did not define who and what he was.

The legacy of this insight has been complex and conflicted, both within queer studies, for which Bray's book is a founding text, and for early modern cultural history more generally. It was a godsend to those historians who tend to see social and sexual identities as culturally constructed rather than biologically determined.