Modern American celibacies, 1886--1969.

摘要

"Modern American Celibacies, 1886-1969" charts a history and theory of celibacy. Redressing the tendency of scholars of sexuality studies to read celibacy as "closeted" homosexuality, my project disarticulates the history of homosexuality from the history of celibacy. Through a consideration of celibacy in texts by Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Elizabeth Bishop. Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Claude McKay, and Paule Marshall, Modern American Celibacies traces the emergence of celibacy as a crucial social identity in the 1840s and charts the evolution of this social identity into a sexual identity. This movement narrates the transformation of chastity from a traditional gender requirement to a sexual practice which is itself the site of modernist innovation. The importance of this identity for period politics has largely been overlooked because the methodologies of sexuality studies, in their emphasis on absence, inadvertently read celibacy as the sign of another practice: homosexuality as "the love that dare not speak its name" or the "impossibility" of lesbian sex. Mapping celibacy across sexuality studies' major conceptual grids (homo/hetero, active/passive, acts/identities, fantasy/practice, friendship/homosexuality), "Modern American Celibacies" argues that celibacy forces us to reconceive the constitutive elements of "sex" as well as to reconceptualize the American polity in which the meaning of "sex" was undergoing dramatic redefinition.