LHMP #490 LaFleur 2014 Sex and ‘Unsex’

This article challenges the strict version of “social construction” of sexuality by reviewing the evidence that 18th century Americans had an extensive vocabulary for identifiable and categorizable variations in sexual behavior and gender presentation. At the same time, the author does not claim a multi-century continuity of certain gender/sexuality concepts, rather than certain concepts have recurred at different times. [Note: compare Valerie Traub’s “cycles of salience.”]

One question she examines is whether “gender” (as a concept of performative presentation distinct from anatomy) existed as a concept in 18th century America. A relevant context is that scientific advances at that time had developed an elaborate vocabulary for describing sexual and gender differences among plants and animals, that could be available for applying to humans. (Note: the gender theories of Joan Scott, Judith Butler, and Denise Riley are credited as background for the discussion.) This article is not a study of specific texts, but rather a higher-level consideration of 18th century gender concepts as a whole.

Changes to traditional ideas about gender and sexuality occurring in the 1790s shook up social attitudes, but this was part of a larger shakeup that considered class inequities, colonial dynamics, religious attitudes especially concerning Christianity vs. Islam, and differing governmental structures. Many issues were being re-examined and gendered norms and expectations were shifting drastically. (As background, the author notes the work of Laqueur and Trumbach.)

An example is given from an English conduct manual republished in America in 1791 that inveighs against behaviors framed as crossing gender lines, such as make-up on men and male-coded dress styles on women (such as tailored riding habits). Also relevant is the popularity of cross-dressing narratives involving women such as Hannah Snell (British) and Deborah Sampson (American) who demonstrated a cultural category that was understood to have certain characteristics and scripts. When race intersected gender, popular opinion distinguished degrees of “womanliness” that were not available to racialized women, essentially creating alternate gender categories.

The “legibility” of gender was a concern—that is, the ability to identify what gender category someone belonged to based on consistent and universal cues. Ways in which women were labeled as being “masculine” were evaluated in inconsistent ways, with arguments for women’s education and political participating praising “manliness” in women, while in other behavioral fields even feminists decried male-coded activities such as sport and hunting. Satire and caricature used masculinity to attack women in certain fields, such as writing. Individuals who failed to fit neatly into binary gender categories (most notably the Chevalier d’Eon) became celebrities, indicating a fascination with a pluralistic understanding of gender.

Conduct literature pushed the idea that men and women should stick to their “natural state” but there was no clear consensus as to exactly what those states were. Feminists such as Wollstonecraft argued that a woman’s state could hardly be “natural” if society had to work so hard to keep her in it.

The existence of an elaborate vocabulary for gender/sexuality argued for the existence of conceptual categories matching that vocabulary, for women, such as: sapphists, tribades, amazons, female husbands, viragos, tommies, and “unsexed females.”

The article’s conclusion returns to Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performance, noting that the development of gender theorizing in the later 20th century has misled historians to dismiss the possibility that similar concepts could have existed earlier. Instead, LaFleur argues that cycles of “gender trouble” have recurred, with societies experiencing parallel periods of gender disruption without the existence of a continuous through-line connecting those periods.