Thesislog

Historians such as Chauncey, et al. tend to date the formation of gay communities in America from the early 20th century—often after WWI—when population drift and the growth of urban population centers, shifting cultural attitudes, changes in the state of women’s roles in society, etc. caused people who understood themselves to have something in common by virtue of their sexual object choice to come together, and in doing so to form new theories about what it meant to be gay in modern America. Without adulterating historical context and going too far in suggesting the existence of homosexuality avant le lettre, however, it is worth tracing back further in time the distinctively American conceptions of both male and female homosexuality. British aestheticism and German psychoanalysis, on one hand, tend to overshadow the male side of the field at the fin-de-siècle; on the other, the question of women’s suffrage and other legal measures of women’s emancipation in the progressive era tend to render too clear-cut less easily-delineated questions about women’s sexual identities and the precise nature of women’s communities at the end of the century. But through the stories and characters of American intellectual history, it may be possible to understand the earliest developments in a theory of homosexuality on this side of the Atlantic: through philosophy, literature, and art; through science; through the social progress of women and other minority communities. I believe that through a careful understanding of these intellectual developments as they manifest themselves from the end of the Civil War into the beginning of the 20th century and the growth of the modern city, it will be possible to understand precisely how the world which Chauncey et al. illuminate so skillfully came to be.

(P.S. And so this is the difference between the social-history approach and the intellectual-history approach which I am taking.)