I've had several long-weekend events lately that have interfered with getting blogs up, but in this case it gave me enough slack time to get the rest of Mill's book written up. There are three more chapters in the can after this one, although some of them are rather thin and I may accelerate the posting schedule if I get more material written up to follow.
I love how Mills brings together a number of themes regarding the connections that can and cannot be made between modern understandings of gender and sexuality and historical ones. As with many sociological fields, there's too much of a temptation to believe we make regular linear progress in our understanding of gender and sexuality. That the understanding-of-the-moment is inherently "better" somehow than all previous understandings. Much harder to accept--even when it's part of the theoretical underpinnings--that all understandings are subjective and both enabled and constrained by the models and stories available to us.
A search for clear mappings and connections in history may feel validating, but it can erase the lived experience of people in the past, whose understanding of their own lives should be respected--even if that understanding includes what we consider a false belief in the sinfulness of their actions. Who are we to decide that historic person X was "really a closted homosexual" if their worldview didn't include such concepts? But I always feel deeply uncomfortable with the "strong Foucaultian" position that there are no conceptual connections between modern people's understanding of their genders and sexualities and those of people in history. And I'm especially uncomfortable with the way the Foucaultian position feels like it targets non-normative genders and sexualities exclusively. One may pay lip service to "well, after all, heterosexuality is a modern invention too" but the consequences of such an acknowledgement (and its potential to affect modern people's lives and self-images) are much smaller.
I'm comforted by seeing historians like Mills find a messier, more nuanced path through the tangle.
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