One of the consequences of lining up a set of all relevant articles from a single source is that I end up covering articles that are marginal to my personal interests--and keep in mind that this project is largely diven by what I personally find interesting. (If people want me to focus on things I find boring, they'd have to pay me a lot of money to do so.) In the case of the Journal of the History of Sexuality this means a group of articles about the field of sexology, as it developed in the late 19th century. (Once the topics move into the early 20th century, I consider myself authorized to skip them, since that's how I set up the focus of the Project.)
In the next several blogs, expect some of my impatience and frustration with "sexology" to leak out around the edges. Expecially when it comes to the misogyny that was embedded in the history of the field. But even more than impatience with the field of sexology itself, I'm frustrated by how often people today will repeat the myth that the sexologiests "invented" homosexuality. While there are narrow and rigid definitions by which that claim might be considered true, in the popular imagination it gets interpreted as meaning that same-sex love didn't really exist before the late 19th century. That there were no women who loved women or men who loved men, there were just some random physical practices and some conventional social performances that wishful thinking tries to associate with modern homosexual identities.
If there's only one message I hope to spread via this blog, it is that taking that sort of narrow definition requires a fairly willful erasure of the earlier evidence for ways of being that have clear connections to modern queer identities of all types. So bear with me for a few weeks while I tick the sexology articles off the list. Then we can get back to the fun stuff again.
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