5 - The double lives of man: narration and identification in late nineteenth-century representations of ec-centric masculinities

Summary

‘Men had to do fearful things to themselves before the self, the identical, the purposive and virile nature of man was formed.’

(Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment)

citings/sitings

For the last decade or so, one project that has delimited the emerging field of lesbian and gay studies has sought to specify the conditions of possibility within which the category of the ‘homosexual’ emerged into Euro-American cultures and to explore the effects of this emergence. Whether its origins are situated somewhere in the early modern period, the sixteenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, the search for an ur-form of homosexuality has constituted a critical part of a contemporary effort to destabilize the ‘naturalness’ – if not the ‘normalness’ – of what we might now call procreative hetero-sexuality as the unmarked position from which all other forms of sexual practice can be understood as (at best) detours or deviations. Elaborating the crucial disarticulations of sex and gender undertaken by feminist critics and historians on the one hand, and genealogists of sexuality on the other, writings within lesbian and gay studies (including my own) have attempted to examine the multiple determinants which crystallized in and as ‘homosexuality’ in order to illuminate the complex historical processes whereby such categorical denominations are fixed as attributes of persons, acts, and/or bodies.