To think historically about something involves thinking about how it manifests over time – the various ways that something appears at different moments, in different places, and the relationships among those patterns. To think historically, though, is also to mark conceptual and empirical discontinuities, attending to how the categories used now do not readily map onto the dynamics of past periods or the ways the kinds of identities or phenomena present in the present do not really line up with those of other times. That complex movement between continuity and discontinuity is particularly pressing and vexed for queer and trans studies because of the simultaneous need to insist that forms of desire and embodiment seen as new and strange aren’t either of those things while also challenging assumptions about the ahistorical naturalness of heteronormative and cisnormative ideas and ideals. How do you both draw on contemporary concepts, categories, and identities to make sense of the past in ways that are meaningful for the present and challenge their apparent obviousness? How do you both trace the structural continuities of forms of power and privilege across time and draw attention to other ways of being that have been effaced or supplanted by newer configurations of sexual and gender identity? Furthermore, how do we understand the central role in these processes of forms of identity, power, and privilege that, at first glance, do not seem to be about sexuality and gender identity, such as race, religion, class, and citizenship? As Dana Seitler suggests, “the construction of perversity appears as part of a story in which race, gender, physical deformation, sexuality, and many other bodily forms and practices emerge in … interdependent ways: each interacts dynamically in a process of mutual reinforcement for the very existence of one confirms the perversity and ‘peculiarity’ of the other.”¹

Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 has been particularly influential in shaping how scholars think about what it means to offer a history for what are deemed deviant acts, orientations, and identities.² As discussed in Chapter 1, he begins by challenging what he terms “the repressive hypothesis” – the idea that in prior periods sexuality was repressed in various ways, which he suggests positions the speaker as a voice for liberation. Speaking in the name of freeing sexuality offers an “opportunity to speak out against the powers that be,” but he asks whether what seems like a “deliberate transgression” of dominant ideas does not, in fact, reaffirm “the same historical network as the thing it denounces” by treating a thing called “sexuality” as self-evident and just a part of human nature that political regimes accept or deny in particular ways. Instead, Foucault argues that the concept of sexuality is invented over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and creates an “artificial unity” among a range of desires, acts, bodily sensations, kinds of emotional intimacy, forms of homemaking, and kinds of family arrangements that have no inherent relation to each other. Treating all of these things as somehow necessarily bound up together naturalizes particular social forms that tie these various kinds of associations and experience together (such as the Euro-American middle-class household and the nuclear family). That dynamic is driven by “the self-affirmation of one class,” namely the rise of a middle class as part of the development of European capitalism and that class’s depiction of its own forms as inherently good, healthful, and contributing to the welfare of the population.³ The artificial unity enacted by the concept of sexuality further is part of a more expansive historical process through which social phenomena come to be represented and regulated in terms of norms that themselves are organized around biologized notions of health, well-being, and productivity – a longer historical transformation in which “notions of error or sin” are replaced by determinations of “the normal and the pathological.” The increasing reliance on normalization is part of what he characterizes as the development of biopolitics or biopower. Measuring “effects and distributions around the norm” provides a different way of justifying law, policy, and administration than relying on the will of the monarch; instead of the divine right of kings, including their right to kill, “power [is] organized around the management of life,” including presenting actions by authorities of all kinds as justified due to their ability to promote the health of the population and diminish threats to that supposed health – such as from forms of deviance figured as a kind of disease in the population.⁴ Notably, though, in this account Foucault does not address the roles played by colonialism in shaping norms with regard to class, embodiment, desire, and family, nor does he address the ways race centrally shapes ideas of health and pathology, differentiates between those whose welfare matters and those deemed a threat to the general population, and provides a principal line of distinction between those made subject to biopolitical regulation and those groups subjected to direct state violence (by the police and/or military).

This chapter will engage these historiographic issues, and the significance of history for queer and trans studies, from several different angles. The first section will address the stakes of centering race and empire, highlighting how doing so shifts the contours and character of queer and trans historical analysis. The next section will consider how scholars have conceptualized eroticism and embodiment in periods before the advent of the concepts of homosexuality and transsexuality. From here, I’ll address the methodological difficulties raised by the question of whether particular historical persons and social dynamics should be understood as queer or trans, and then I’ll turn to the emergence from the late nineteenth century through the mid twentieth century of the dominant categories of sexual and gender identity we’ve inherited from that period, including their racializing and eugenic dynamics. The chapter will close with scholarly articulations of queer and trans temporalities – the effort to rethink how we understand the experience of being-in-time.

Centering Race and Empire

In the context of Euro-American histories, conceptions of desire, pleasure, and gendered embodiment arise within social fields that themselves are shaped in fundamental ways by racial and colonial dynamics. Processes of race-making and empire-making serve as principal sites for the construction of gendered and sexual meanings, identities, and relations. With regard to Europe, the United States, and their spheres of imperial influence and occupation, we might characterize queer and trans histories as always powerfully inflected by dynamics of race and empire. Attending to the ways imperialism has been central to ideologies of sexual and gender normativity highlights how relations with non-European people(s) have been fundamental to Euro-American policy, political economies, and self-articulations.

If Europe and its diasporas often are cast as the origin point for all things modern, including notions of homosexuality and gender transition, what happens if the things taken as expressive of (Eurocentric) modernity are understood as arising as a result of colonial intervention and racialized engagements with those outside Europe (building on the work of women of color feminists, discussed in Chapter 2)? The effort to manage the populations living within the areas claimed as colonies by European powers in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries gave rise, as Ann Laura Stoler argues, to forms of racialized differentiation based on “home environments, childrearing practices, and sexual arrangements,” the very kinds of relationships and social formations that have been seen as central to discourses of sexuality in Europe and the United States. Middle-class notions of home, family, respectability, and proper modes of desire and gender arose out of regulative efforts in the colonies. Such “middle-class sensibilities” emerged through authorities’ attempts to “cultivat[e] … distinctions from those to be ruled,” distinctions that were attributed to racial difference but manifested through the regulation of forms of association, reproduction, and inhabitance.⁵ In this way, the “discursive and practical field in which nineteenth-century bourgeois sexuality emerged was situated on an imperial landscape,” such that “an implicit racial grammar underwrote the sexual regimes of bourgeois culture.”⁶ Reciprocally, as Anne McClintock illustrates, “imperialism is not something that happened elsewhere – a disagreeable fact of history external to Western identity.” Not only did other parts of the world function as “porno-tropics for the European imagination,” onto which “Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears,” but the ideologies of proper desire, gender, home, and family generated in order to manage colonized populations and spaces become the basis for social hierarchy and administrative regulation at home as well. McClintock observes, “Projecting the family image onto national and imperial progress enabled what was often murderously violent change to be legitimized as the progressive unfolding of natural decree,” which involved understanding other social forms (including other arrangements of desire, social reproduction, and gendered embodiment) as less advanced – as indicating an earlier point in a singular timeline of human development (“figured as a prehistoric zone of racial and gender difference”).⁷ Forms of behavior that did not fit this “family image” were presented as eruptions of racial backwardness in the imperial metropole, such as urban slums repeatedly being analogized to the colonies as part of accounts that drew on “popular images of imperial travel.”⁸ The “freak show” is another example of this pattern, in which “nondisabled people of color and cognitively disabled people [were thought to embody] the missing link between primates and humans,” and in that space, “white or whitened gender nonconformity and disability [were constituted] as the same kind of difference,” in contrast to “freaks of color” who were seen as “representative” of their races in ways that positioned the failure of proper sex/gender among white people as expressive of a disabling degeneration toward nonwhiteness.⁹

Attributions of sexual and gender deviancy were crucial aspects of imperial rule, serving as signs of what was taken to be an underlying racial essence and, thereby, justifying Euro-American intrusions as civilizing projects whose aim was to redeem nonwhite populations from their supposed immorality and savagery. Charges of widespread perversity were routine parts of Euro-colonial governance and discourse from at least the sixteenth century onward.¹⁰ In Hernán Cortés’s first letter after he began the project of occupying what would become Mexico in 1519, he asserts, “They are all sodomites”; as Jonathan Goldberg notes, “once made, few reports failed to repeat the charge.” However, the reference to sodomy has less to do with particular acts or desires on the part of Native people (none are described by Cortés) than the role such allegations have in legitimizing military action against a population by Catholic forces. The Spanish invaders transferred images of deviance derived from representations of Muslims, which were part of the early-modern campaign to reclaim Spain for the Catholic monarchy, to the Americas: “Accusations of sodomy, responsible for deaths in the thousands, are transported to the New World. Sodomites ‘are’ Moors,” thereby validating similar action against Indigenous peoples in the Americas as was taken against Islamic populations in Europe. In this way, the charge of “sodomy comes to occupy a place in the ritual of possession and justification.”¹¹ The broader category of “sins against nature” (which included anal intercourse as well as bestiality, masturbation, and certain forms of heresy) served as an important vehicle for asserting Spanish authority throughout the Americas, punishing examples of “excess” and “function[ing] as a means of exerting colonial control over all aspects of the population.”¹² Charges of sodomy also centrally related to supposed violations of Spanish gender norms and served as a way of seeking to remake Indigenous peoples’ own complex gender systems, including forms of spiritual practice and iconography that involved homoeroticism and gender transitivity.¹³ The assertion that evidence of mass perversion among the colonized was contained somewhere in colonial records often provided a way of validating imperial governance, including by distracting from the failures and incoherence of imperial policies. Anjali Arondeker argues with regard to charges of widespread sodomy in India, British colonial reports and court cases often would allude to information supposedly available elsewhere that would substantiate such assertions. Claims about the prevalence of perversity allowed colonial authorities to present themselves as in the know about the goings-on among a degraded population in need of civilizing aid and disciplinary control, rather than as “struggling under the weight of information gathering and reform in a vast region divided by language and religious differences.” As Arondeker suggests, “The sin of le vice … hovers strategically over areas of critical British vulnerability.”¹⁴

Images of and references to sodomy and gender nonconformity in colonial records, then, are less evidence of queer and trans forebears ready to be reclaimed by contemporary LGBT people than markers of processes of imperial recoding, in which complex social dynamics are transposed into terms that facilitate the efforts of colonial powers to manage their own unstable regimes. We might think of this work of colonial regimes less as the persecution of queer and trans people than as the development of ideas of proper intimacy, affiliation, and selfhood in which practices seen as threatening to Euro-American political economy are cast as expressive of ingrained racial difference, which needs to be contained, disciplined, and regulated. In this way, “race has operated not as a fig leaf covering the larger, lurking economic substructures of imperialism; racialization instead frequently conditions the very modalities of economic domination.”¹⁵ As T. J. Tallie illustrates with regard to British policy in Natal (in what is now South Africa), this reorganization of existing social forms includes the management of marriage and the networks of kinship and alliance it can create. Monogamous couplehood between a man and a woman is positioned in colonial discourses as the sole example of civilized family-making, conversely presenting Indigenous peoples’ participation in polygamy as indicative of their African propensities while also seeking to prevent white men from taking part in such unions.¹⁶ Reciprocally, polygamy among those otherwise understood as white, such as the Mormons prior to their renunciation of plural marriage in 1890, racializes them in US popular and legal discourses, marking them as like Asian, African, and American Indian peoples and, thus, as degenerating from the civilized pinnacle of middle-class whiteness in their enactment of deviant kinship, desire, and governance.¹⁷ Moreover, the understanding of monogamous hetero-couplehood and the nuclear family household as central to civilized life served as the means of imposing Euro-American kinship and homemaking on Native peoples in the United States and Canada in ways that sought to break up Indigenous modes of governance, social life, and placemaking.¹⁸

Colonialism generates forms of social distinction that validate and seek to secure Euro-American governance, and the kinds of racial difference produced through that process provide the framework in which gender and sexuality gain meaning. Queer and trans historical work has shown how forms of racialization – particularly with regard to blackness – function as the background against which (white) gender and sexual identities become visible as such. One cannot overestimate the significance of African enslavement in the making of Europe and the Americas from the early-modern period onward.¹⁹ Black feminist scholarship has demonstrated how enslaved people were ungendered by casting them as flesh, whose lack of access to dominant gender roles is a key part of defining them as ownable and saleable nonpersons.²⁰ In this way, blackness takes shape not only in contrast to notions of proper masculinity and femininity but as a lack of gendered differentiation, as a kind of gender unfixedness that serves, by contrast, as the means of giving definition to gender identities that implicitly depend on whiteness. For this reason C. Riley Snorton suggests, “To feel black in the diaspora, then, might be a trans experience,” further arguing that “captive flesh figures a critical genealogy for modern transness, as chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable and as an amendable form of being” in which gender is “subject to rearrangement.”²¹ Thinking of histories of transness as bound up in and dependent on histories of blackness, and their relation to enslavement and its afterlives, draws attention to the ways Black people have been used as resources in the making of white gendered ideals from which they were excluded. For example, Snorton addresses the development of the field of gynecology in the nineteenth-century United States, particularly in the work of James Marion Sims. Sims sought to find a surgical cure for vesticovaginal fistula, and to do so, he experimented on a series of enslaved persons – Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy as well as “unnamed others”– who “function[ed] as a living laboratory” in which their status as malleable “flesh” inherently available for white use served as “a condition of possibility for the science and symbolics of modern sex.” Their status as beings defined by their blackness meant that they would not be extended the kinds of (still deeply patriarchal) respect and consideration reserved for “women,” and as a result, they could enable “the possibility of ‘being made again a normal woman’” for white patients while such a horizon of care and gendered social belonging “would not be available” to them as enslaved people.²²

Across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, blackness served as a crucible for forging the difference between normal and aberrant genders and sexualities in ways that enabled and legitimized white supremacy. In his discussion of discourses of amalgamation in the nineteenth-century United States, Tavia Nyong’o tracks how that concept extended beyond what in the latter half of the century would be termed miscegenation. If the latter more strictly indicates procreation between persons legally defined as belonging to different races, particularly Black and white, amalgamation had a much wider field of reference, illustrating how notions of racial reproduction were enmeshed within broader ideologies of racialized social (dis)order. The term invoked the sense of a wide-ranging “racial state of exception” that “produces situations of legal, racial, and political anomaly that cannot be accurately” conveyed through the figures of “mixedness of halfness” used to describe children whose parents are of different races. In this sense, proximity to blackness, in social and sexual terms, indicated an ungovernable kind of chaos that not only deviated from but actively endangered emergent middle-class ideals of selfhood, behavior, and family formation while, simultaneously, providing a demonized counterpoint that helped shape the emergence of those ideals.²³ In the wake of emancipation, formerly enslaved people often were cast in official and popular rhetorics as immanently criminal, their blackness seen as indicating an inability to enact proper forms of gendered personhood, sexual propriety, and domestic organization (including childrearing). In her study of the incarceration of Black women in Georgia in the post-Reconstruction period, Sarah Haley argues that “the construction of their bodies as monstrous meant not only that their political and economic power would be limited, but also that they would be subject to disproportionate arrest and punishment.” Haley further shows how queer referred to forms of gender and sexual aberrance with regard to Black people as early as the 1890s, significantly before its documented use as a way of naming same-sex attraction per se; the term served as a way for the “mainstream press to describe perverse black bodies, ideas, and behaviors that could only be interpreted and governed through police and judicial action.”²⁴ This understanding of Black people, particularly Black women, as threatening in their deviance was based not on sexual object-choice or specific kinds of gendered self-presentation but on the very fact of their blackness, a category of (non)personhood which popular, judicial, and medical discourses continued to recreate in ways that made it a sign of irredeemable aberrance in need of policing and state discipline and that, as a result, also enabled Black people to continue to be conscripted into enforced, unpaid labor through incarceration.²⁵ Moreover, legitimized through discourses of Black sexual and gendered excess and deviance, the violence enacted on Black people, such as “the ubiquitous presence of lynching in the public imagination during the period from 1890 to 1940,” “may have informed and helped naturalize the rationale used to support medical castration and asexualization” as part of eugenic campaigns against those deemed feebleminded (often itself a result of their perceived sexual deviance).²⁶

The racialization of sexuality further historically operates as a way of managing residency and mobility, within and across national borders. The legal and administrative construction of nonwhiteness (including through the criminalization of marriages between white and nonwhite persons) and the ideological association of it with degeneracy, depravity, and moral disorder shaped social mappings of US space and possibilities for access to political and economic resources. In the early twentieth century, Black people increasingly were pushed into limited and geographically marginal neighborhoods in cities across the country, and those areas also served as vice districts.²⁷ Police and city officials intentionally sought to contain illegal activities considered immoral – such as gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging (after the onset of Prohibition) – in areas that were known to have substantial numbers of Black residents, which themselves were the result of active residential segregation and white mob violence to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods. This creation of racialized vice districts, what Kevin Mumford has called interzones, not only depended on existing associations of blackness with aberrance but spatially intensified the connections between perversity, nonwhiteness, and criminality while also limiting Black inhabitants’ access to income in ways that increased illicit activity (such as more visible forms of sex work, like street walking) and that, therefore, seemed to provide empirical evidence for Black propensities toward deviance.²⁸ More than a place for containing blackness, these zones also provided a site for tabooed interracial interactions, including same-sex erotic encounters which vice reformers noted as especially prevalent in clubs in Black areas.²⁹ Addressing the policing of Black girls and young women in urban areas in the early twentieth century, Saidiya Hartman describes their efforts as “carr[ying] on as if [they] were free” while being construed as a deviant threat in need of containment. Hartman notes, “What the law designated as crime were the forms of life created by young black women in the city,” adding that “segregation was seen as a way to maintain the health and morality of the social body and police power was critical to achieving that goal.”³⁰

On the West Coast of the United States, prohibitions with regard to marriage, property, and residency played central roles in constructing Asianness as a racial category. From the 1870s to the 1940s, a series of US national laws and administrative policies increasingly denied entry to persons from East, Southeast, and South Asia, with different countries and populations at various points coming to be defined as not white and, therefore, ineligible for naturalization as US citizens.³¹ While separate from federal law as such, state policies helped drive this process of racialization, including through acts forbidding white–Asian marriage and alien property laws that prevented those ineligible for citizenship from owning land (which also could prevent “attempts to transfer property between parents and children”).³² As Nayan Shah argues, such “racial bounding of marriage and inheritance rights” produced and sustained a “racial cartel” that sought to police the boundaries of whiteness while giving those deemed white almost exclusive control over major sectors of the agricultural economy.³³ This racial limitation on legally recognized family combined with the prevention of immigration by Asian women, who were viewed as likely to be prostitutes,³⁴ to create communities of largely migrant male laborers whose forms of sociality were then cast by officials as perverse and disruptive – such as in the repeated image of South Asian men as more prone to engaging in sodomy, thereby licensing further surveillance and discipline, regardless of actual behavior.³⁵ As Eithne Luibhéid illustrates, across US history, “the immigration control apparatus” (and associated national, state, and local laws) has served “as a key site for the production and reproduction of sexual categories, identities, and norms within relations of inequality,” which can include homoeroticism and nonnormative gender identity but which also understands the signs of those patterns – and perversity and pathology more broadly – in deeply racializing ways that are irreducible to sexual object-choice and gender expression.³⁶

Foregrounding the roles played by race and empire in histories of sexuality and gender identity draws attention to how the latter do not operate separately from the former. Not only do many dominant ways of understanding sexual and gender (ab)normality emerge from situations of colonization and settlement, but the ideas/ideals that arise out of efforts to institute and sustain imperial governance come to shape life in the metropole. Moreover, notions of health, well-being, and belonging that attach to ideologies of sexual and gender normality often depend on distinctions between whiteness and various kinds of racialization, usually characterized in terms of their own kinds of deviance – like savagery, criminality, and inassimilable alienness. These accounts of ingrained aberrance legitimize and help give form to official modes of racial distinction that regulate access to citizenship, resources, residence, placemaking, and mobility.

Terms, Norms, and “Nature”

When using words like queer and trans to talk about earlier historical periods, what do these terms mean? Do they refer to particular kinds of persons, sorts of bodily experience, specific desires or acts? If these terms function as analytics, as frameworks for interpretation rather than pointing to identities that people had in the past, those frameworks gain meaning in relation to the present. We look back from the heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions at play now and think about other possibilities and social structures that existed then. In Carolyn Dinshaw’s terms, we touch the past in ways meaningful for the current moment.³⁷ However, the social forms and dynamics of our time don’t necessarily fit those back then. Scholars have addressed these continuities and discontinuities in a range of ways, including exploring the unfamiliar meanings and implications of terms we think we know and addressing how notions of the normal or the natural are historically shifting.

Attending to what’s unfamiliar about the past can, somewhat paradoxically, help highlight how it resembles the present, albeit in ways that further raise questions about taken-for-granted ideas of desire, embodiment, and identity (building on Eve Sedgwick’s point about the absence of a singular “Great Paradigm Shift,” discussed in Chapter 1). For example, tracing how people lived gendered lives that did not follow from the sex they were labeled at birth challenges ongoing claims that trans experiences are new (and, therefore, threatening or unnatural). Such assertions of newness have been “consistently used to undermine the legitimacy of nonbinary genders, trans people[;] activists and scholars have had to fight to claim the historicity of trans lives,” including by showing how “narratives about gender transition and gender confirmation were told long before any of those terms came into being.”³⁸ In this vein, we can approach historical study through the idea, in Valerie Traub’s terms, of “cycles of salience” in which “perennial axes of social definition … become particularly resonant or acute at different historical moments.”³⁹ Or, as Greta LaFleur suggests, we can hold onto “the possibility of transhistorical similarities as distinct from continuities,” noting such similarities in ways that allow us to think about them together – relating the past and the present – without assuming that they “share all or even very much ideological territory.”⁴⁰ We can see how the resemblance of prior social phenomena, relations, and identities to those now might open up intellectual possibilities (challenging the idea of history either as a teleological unfolding implicitly directed toward the evolution of some better, more developed form or an increasing awareness of the real dynamics of gender, sex, and sexuality). At the same time, we can mark differences among historically distinct social configurations that have their own potentials and limits and cannot simply be equated to each other. As Rachel Hope Cleves observes, “Rather than simply add nonbinary people and stir, we need to reexamine our core categories.”⁴¹

At the level of basic terminology, the words we have to refer to bodies, felt experiences, desires, and intimacies do not necessarily travel well across time. Attending to the varied configurations of meaning and social significance in earlier periods can help in seeing aspects of present ideas that we might take for granted. As Jeffrey Masten notes, looking to the past “may bring into view for us” how “even our most apparently clinical ways of describing ‘sexual’ practices … must remain subject to queer-philological scrutiny.”⁴² Philology is the study of the history of how words and phrases are used, and Masten suggests that “the word sexual, transparent as it may now seem to us, itself requires our serious historicizing, philological attention,” coming to refer to kinds of genital pleasure only in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.⁴³ Traub notes that “[m]any of the terms that we now regularly use to describe sex assumed their sexual connotations or were coined … much later,” including terms like coitus and sexual intercourse.⁴⁴ With regard to trans histories, such philological concerns open up possibilities for connecting matters of gender to a wide range of social relations. Joseph Gamble observes the proliferation in the seventeenth century of a series of trans terms that address forms of gender variability but also “transitions that reached far beyond the bounds of gender.”⁴⁵ Similarly, Marjorie Rubright points toward the “transgender capacity of words and phrases,” suggesting the potential of “speculative philology” – considering the multiplicity of ways that words might mean in a given context – to enact a “hermeneutics of cispicion”: “to be suspicious” of the presumption that persons are “necessarily cisgender” unless proven otherwise.⁴⁶

Scholars have illustrated how paying attention to those earlier contexts can increase our sense of the multiplicity of ways that what we now largely refer to as gender and sexuality gain social meaning, including the role in that process of other aspects of personhood – such as class, race, religion, and nationality – that are not reducible to someone’s “sex.” Terms used in earlier periods like sodomy/sodomite, tribade, and hermaphrodite can indicate how what we might consider to be different kinds of identity or status were mutually defined, although in ways that largely supported privileged social institutions (like marriage, the Christian Church, and the power of the monarchical/imperial state).⁴⁷

Sodomy in current terms usually means anal intercourse, particularly between two men. If one looks historically, though, the term sodomy neither represents a kind of sexual identity (a stand-in for homosexuality) nor is reducible to anal pleasure of any kind. It appears as part of the English criminal law starting in the 1530s. At that point, as Mario DiGangi suggests, the concept underwent a “historical shift from the understanding of sodomy as an offense against God to the understanding of sodomy as an offense committed within and against social institutions.”⁴⁸ While the sixteenth-century English legal definition focused on anal penetration between men, sodomy had a range of meanings that did not simply evaporate but continued to exceed that of the single male–male sexual act. These associations include its linkage to idolatry and Catholicism, so that public discourses and accusations of sodomy had a much wider field of reference and were shaped by ideas about religious practice and belonging.⁴⁹ In the medieval period, sodomy “inhabits the zone of sexual acts contra naturam that includes other heterosexual acts, such as women on top during heterosexual intercourse,” and it also could include erotic relations among women, masturbation, and bestiality.⁵⁰ While forms of vaginal and anal penetration among persons labeled as female were not legally categorized as sodomy in England, they were elsewhere in Europe, including France, Spain, and the Netherlands,⁵¹ and even when not criminalized, such relations could be part of the term’s web of meanings. More broadly, as Goldberg argues, the implications of sodomy actually depend on the ways “the term remains incapable of exact definition,” incorporating a variety of challenges to extant “social order.” Up through the eighteenth century, whatever violated “the structures of social hierarchy” could be deemed sodomitical, especially inasmuch as such actions were counter to the gendered, racialized, and class relations organizing marriage (itself the principal social unit for propertyholding, inheritance, and social reproduction).⁵² Conversely, the shadow of sodomy haunts the importance of “validated, condoned homoaffection” among men that was central “to domestic arrangements, educational structures, [and] the rhetoric of male friendship.”⁵³ Michael Warner observes with regard to Puritan accounts of settling in the Americas, “The new colony threatened to resemble Sodom not only because of its global notoriety but also because of the intensity of its affective bonds among males,” which were envisioned as crucial to “sustain[ing] a disciplined public body.”⁵⁴ Sodomy, then, represents the disruption of social hierarchies organized around marriage and Christianity as well as the potential for an outbreak of perversity within horizontal relations of fellowship between privileged men. As a figure that “everything bad sticks to,” sodomy also could connote other kinds of social ills and excesses, including “pride, idleness, and gluttony.”⁵⁵ Moreover, it further gained power as a sign of aberrance and threat from being associated with racialized foreignness, particularly Islam: “no geographical domain onto which the Anglo-European gaze has fixed its sometimes imperial, sometimes covetous, sometimes simply curious eye has been so associated with the specter of male-male sexuality over the centuries” as “the Muslim world.”⁵⁶ The Islamicate presence in Europe (prior to the Reconquista and during the height of Ottoman expansion) and as a horizon of European engagement (during the Crusades as well as through circulation of Arab texts in translation, expansive travel literature, and trade) helped fuel the portrayal of Muslims as having sodomitical tendencies while, reciprocally, tinting charges of sodomy with a sense of dangerous – and also potentially alluring – alienness.⁵⁷

Tribadism and hermaphroditism further illustrate how gendered understandings of proper embodiment and eroticism were suffused with racial and religious significance. These two terms are largely no longer in use, the latter because it’s come to be seen as an offensive way of referring to intersexed persons. However, both these words – tribade and hermaphrodite – did important work in making sense of bodies, desires, and social relations. Most simply, the tribade is a woman who gains pleasure through genital rubbing, particularly clitoral stimulation. More than indicating a generic capacity of female bodies, though, such pleasure was seen prior to the eighteenth century “as imitative of masculine prerogatives and hence monstrous,” particularly in terms of women’s erotic relations with each other.⁵⁸ Derived from ancient texts, many of which had been translated from Greek to Arabic and then centuries later from Arabic to Latin (in which form they were disseminated through Europe), the figure of the tribade is envisioned as playing a penetrative role, with the clitoris serving a phallic function. In this way, the term interweaves a kind of desire, a form of embodiment, and a gendered role. The balance among these elements, though, was shifting and indistinct. Were both participants in such erotic relations tribades? Did the term refer only to persons with a particularly elongated clitoris (seen as having penetrative potential), or was it a potential for all women? Was penetration purely clitoral, or was the use of implements (including dildos) also tribadic? Was the term tribade indicative of erotic attention to women specifically, or was it suggestive of excessive forms of desire unconstrained by patriarchy that were present – or at least latent – in many, perhaps all, women?⁵⁹ This ensemble of meanings and potentials further was shaped by racializing conceptions of women from Africa and India who were believed to have excessively large clitorises. The association of physical, erotic, and gendered dynamics with peoples beyond Europe also linked the term tribade with the figure of the Amazons, who were located by various writers at different points in Africa, India, and in the Americas and seen as a limit figure of European Christianity and heteropatriarchal whiteness.⁶⁰

The multifaceted nexus of body, pleasure, desire, and race that tribade indexes overlaps conceptually and referentially with hermaphrodite.⁶¹ In the Middle Ages, that term, along with androgyne, expressed and cut across a range of kinds of social difference. As Leah DeVun argues, “nonbinary sex participated in a staggering range of … intellectual, political, and social contexts,” “play[ing] a pivotal role in the formation of categories and definitions fundamental to the European Christian tradition.”⁶² Various kinds of religious identification inside and outside of Europe were made “corporeally distinct from the residents of Christendom” through their description as hermaphroditical, including Muslims and Jews.⁶³ While speaking to what often were understood to be physical qualities of bodies (including the idea that Jewish men menstruated from their anuses), such categorization also included the ways the practices of those racialized groups were thought to violate the “natural” order, in terms of gendered roles, sexual behavior, forms of marriage and childrearing, and political structure. Thus, hermaphrodite historically solders gender, sex, religion, and race together.⁶⁴ In this way, references to hermaphroditism gesture toward kinds of bodies cast as anomalous, but that anomaly often was not simply a matter of what now usually would be described as a person’s sex. Instead, various dimensions of social identification and difference were seen as pointing or related to gendered embodiment. The layered and shifting meanings connected to terms like sodomy, tribade, and hermaphrodite suggest the difficulty of seeking to pin down specific types of bodies, behaviors, and identifications across time but also the possibilities for the present in considering the complex and multivectored ways gender, sex, and sexuality gain meaning – the range of their meanings and how they are shaped through multidimensional relations to each other and to other kinds of social experience.

More than considering the historically changing and multivalent terms we use to speak and think about erotics and embodiment, we also need to be wary, scholars have suggested, of assuming that dominant ideas in one place and period necessarily stretch to others. Treating contemporary sexual and gender norms as if they themselves do not have histories not only de facto presents them as unchanging and, therefore, unchangeable but also assumes we automatically know the ways desires, practices, and lived experience line up. As Karma Lochrie suggests, we are “seriously distorting our historical recuperations of past sexualities when we position them against a reigning heterosexual norm, since heterosexuality as a norm did not exist before the twentieth century.”⁶⁵ She argues that the very idea of the normal (as both a statistical average and an ideal of health and well-being) emerged in the nineteenth century; earlier cultural “anxieties” about eroticism, including between people of different sexes, were less about what was considered abnormal than expressed a generally “desiro-skeptical” attitude that was “deeply suspicious of the mobility, disruptiveness, and affiliations of all forms of desire.”⁶⁶ Moreover, a concept like heterosexual conjoins eroticism and a notion of in-born orientation with a particular model of family and household. However, as Susan Lanser notes, “where marriage is a compulsory institution especially for women … heterosexual consummation proves nothing about affective affiliation or sexual desire.”⁶⁷ Conversely, the assumption of a unified heterosexuality/heteronormativity leads to “limited definitions of queerness” based on the “tacit sense that cross-sex desires and practices are coherent, predictable, and normal,” thereby leaving aside “pleasures and intimacies” such as “polygamy, group sex, zoophilia, and masochism.”⁶⁸ In this vein, Valerie Traub cautions, “Some forms of female eroticism are neither subsumed under marital exigencies nor performed in defiance of them,” thereby exceeding analytic frameworks organized around “patriarchal ideology or its transgression.” On this basis, she indicates the need for a “historicized theory of sexual variation.”⁶⁹

Presuming that the dominant ideas of now applied to then homogenizes both the present and the past, overlooking how prior systems of power and privilege worked as well as the possibilities that lay within other configurations of bodies, pleasures, and institutional forms. Speaking of the American colonies and the early US republic, Cleves insists, “We cannot and should not shoehorn early American history into an assumed binary rigidity that flatters the present but misapprehends the past.” In a similar vein, the editors of the collection Trans Historical observe that the “past may hold a space for forms of transness that have not yet been fully articulated or imagined, a past that, in the future, may unfold forms of alterity unknown to us at present.”⁷⁰ Historical work, then, can open up the sense of what domination and opposition look like but also of potentials for living that readily fit neither.

Perhaps the most seemingly obvious concept at play in notions of gender and sexual normality is nature, but over time, ideas of the natural have fluctuated widely and wildly. In the Middle Ages, rather than indicating something having to do with biology or physical processes, it largely referred to a vision of God’s will, which could be at odds with bodily or environmental phenomena known to be relatively common: “The Nature of medieval theologians was a prelapsarian one that represented all that was good and perfect” as opposed to “the corrupted nature that was necessitated by the Fall.”⁷¹ A range of things were thought to be “against nature” that had little to do with bodily relations per se, including “heresy” and “treachery,”⁷² and bodies that did not necessarily fit a model of binary sex/gender were seen as having a “morphological defect” (comparable to “dwarfism, obesity, [and] physical disability”) that “reflected the broken nature of this world.”⁷³ Yet, male and female were not themselves fully distinguished as physical types. Up through the late eighteenth century, a one-body model of sex predominated. Drawn largely from the second-century writings of the Greek physician Galen, this vision of embodiment posited a “structural” identity of “the male and female reproductive organs,” in which women’s lack of “heat” meant that they had on the inside what men had on the outside.⁷⁴ As Thomas Laqueur demonstrates, “doctors understood there to be only one sex” but two “social sexes with radically different rights and obligations”; during the Renaissance, for example, despite the growth of human anatomical studies, the modern terms for “female reproductive anatomy” – such as “vagina, uterus, vulva, labia, Fallopian tubes” – did not exist and do not really have period-specific equivalents.⁷⁵

While a binary model of bodily sex gained prominence during the eighteenth century, ideas about what constituted sex as an erotic practice also changed considerably. Building on earlier work by Henry Abelove, Tim Hitchcock traces the “sexual revolution” in which “people engaged in heterosexual activity increasingly restricted their behavior to forms of phallocentric, penetrative sex which could be countenanced as procreative,” a shift endorsed by medical experts and evidenced by the vast growth in population in Great Britain during the 1700s “as a result of changes in fertility, rather than mortality” – including a population increase of about 70 percent and a fall in the number of unmarried adults from about 22 percent to less than 5 percent of the populace.⁷⁶ This reduction of sex to vaginal intercourse with male orgasm (women’s orgasms ceased to be thought of as important for conception while women increasingly were considered “sexually passive” rather than “actively lascivious”) displaced the previous prominence of non-penetrative forms of eroticism.⁷⁷ As Valerie Traub suggests, “we might speculate that nonprocreative, nonmissionary, and even nonprivate sex in the early modern period seems to have been what most people actually did.”⁷⁸

At various points, “nature” also included the ways particular environments influenced bodies, desires, and practices. Addressing “the sexual politics of racial difference,” Greta LaFleur illustrates the presence in the long eighteenth century of “a large-scale cultural faith in the power of one’s social, natural, physical or architectural, climatic, or gustatory environment to affect one’s body, temperament, and character,” such as the understanding of “Turks” as “sodomites” as a function of the “climate” in which they live.⁷⁹ Instances of what we might term perversity, then, depend less on individual orientations than environmental conditions that shape entire (racialized) populations. Similarly, Kyla Wazana Tompkins has addressed the ways that ideas about diet and eating practices were linked to notions of proper embodiment, eroticism, and racialized understandings of nationhood in the nineteenth-century United States due to the ways eating is part of how “an organism yields and opens to the outer world …[,] reveal[ing] the self to be reliant upon that which is beyond its epidermal limits.” Tompkins describes what were seen as wrong forms of consumption as queer alimentarity, “a form of sensuality, in and of itself” that “disrupt[s] both the individual body and the social order” by “indulging in the senses at the expense of virtuous behaviors oriented toward upholding orderly systems of feeling, being, and acting.”⁸⁰ These examples point to varying contexts and frameworks in which what we might consider to be commonsensical ideologies about biology, embodiment, eroticism, and morality did not obtain in the past – or, at least, were configured in ways quite different than what seem to be dominant ideas in most Euro-American societies currently. What queer or trans might mean in those different contexts, then, is also an open question.

Part of considering such possibilities, and not presuming that today’s normal can simply be extended into the past (or that the past can be plotted on a timeline of progress), lies in addressing the potentials for erotic and gender agency that were available in other historical moments in ways that may not look like contemporary identities and practices. As Peter Coviello suggests with regard to considering forms of embodiment, eroticism, and identification prior to the consolidation of sexuality and sexual identity in the late nineteenth century, the goal “is less to make clear the routes by which presexological forms of intimate relation came to arrive at what we now recognize as modern habitations of sexuality than to trace, in as much detail as we can, the outlines of any number of broken-off, uncreated futures, futures that would not come to be,” ones whose “errancy” allow us now to think about the possibility of other feelings, objects, and orientations beyond current identity categories.⁸¹ Such potentials, though, themselves often are shaped by forms of class, racial, and imperial privilege. Earlier, I noted the longstanding European association of Muslim men with sodomy, and while such linkages arise out of a series of racializing and Orientalizing narratives that seriously misconstrue Islamicate societies, they do point toward the presence of homoerotic dynamics, particularly within artistic production – such as male poets addressing the attractiveness and desirability of young men in the ghazal tradition and tales of women’s erotic relation (most prominently in One Thousand and One Nights).⁸² Although, while Euro-American scholars have seen the presence of these works (as well as European travelers’ accounts of the prevalence of homoeroticism) as evidence of a greater erotic permissiveness among Islamic peoples in earlier periods, that perspective can undersell the criminalization of male anal intercourse (on terms much like across Europe) and its outlawing under Islamic law, albeit with great variation with respect to how and whether sexual practices among men were prosecuted and how such desires and practices were interpreted within Islamic theologies.⁸³ The figure of the harem also has provided inspiration for European visions of the possibilities for significant and sustained erotic connections among women, contributing to the literary genre of what scholars have called the feminotopia – in which “women thrive without men and find pleasure in living together without rancor and dissent” – even as polygamy (among the Ottomans and elsewhere) also served as a sign of patriarchal barbarism that was taken to signal the (racialized) backwardness of non-Europeans.⁸⁴

At various points, what often has been termed “romantic friendship” among women also gained public prominence as a way of addressing a range of kinds of affectional, erotic, and household relations. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women living together in what were recognized as long-term partnerships was a matter of public knowledge. From the Ladies of Llangollen (upper-class Irish women living in Wales and visited by numerous luminaries in British literary and political culture) to the “Boston marriages” of the late nineteenth century (women setting up households together, largely in the US Northeast), these were usually elite women who were known in prominent social circles, more or less treated as couples, and who were often seen as models of decorum and of the possibilities for egalitarian relationships that could provide a more equitable vision of couplehood than the gender hierarchies of legal marriage.⁸⁵ Such relationships among upper-class white women gained legitimacy by being implicitly distinguished from a range of others deemed perverse, such as “sensuous barbaric Turks, simple but savage Africans, sexually aberrant Indians, [and] slaves.”⁸⁶ Beyond such partnerships, the language of friendship enabled a range of kinds of connections among white women, more or less erotic and more or less publicly celebrated or satirized at various points depending on situated circumstances (although not following anything like a consistent pattern across time) – at times presented as ameliorating or evading marriage and at times appearing as a crucial supplement to it.⁸⁷ The role of race in shaping those discourses of friendship, though, can be seen in the 1810 case of Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods. They co-ran a school in Scotland and sued the grandmother of a student, Jane Cumming, who had been withdrawn due to the supposedly “lewd and indecent behavior” of the teachers with each other that Cumming had witnessed, a claim the grandmother then publicly circulated. The teachers won the case based on the absence of evidence of a dildo (given the judges’ inability to imagine sexual activity among women absent such an implement or an enlarged, penetrative clitoris) and the fact that Cumming’s status as a “Hindoo” born in India would make her aware of, in the words of one of the judges, such “imputed vice [which] has been hitherto unknown in Britain.”⁸⁸ Indecency and lewdness appear as a function of the presence of racialized alienness, rather than attaching to respectable, white, English womanhood.⁸⁹

Non-elite modes of white transmasculinity were recognized publicly through the figure of the female husband. The phrase was used to describe people assigned female who publicly were known as men and who lived as married couples with women (sometimes actually having gotten legally married). It was coined in 1682 but gained prominence when used as a title by Henry Fielding for a fictionalized account of the real story of Charles Hamilton, and the phrase was used in public discourse (especially newspapers) until the late nineteenth century.⁹⁰ While not allowed to continue living as men once their assigned sex became public, those designated as female husbands largely were not depicted in pathologizing or even necessarily denigrating terms. Instead, as Jen Manion notes with regard to the coverage of James Howe, a tavern owner in London’s East End who became perhaps the most famous female husband, such accounts often were “marked by an emphasis on hard work, respectability, [and] powerful depiction of a husband who embraced civic duty,” and in such public narratives, “being married to a woman affirmed one’s manhood.”⁹¹

Prior to the passage of laws that sought to outlaw what has been called cross-dressing, various forms of transfemininity and transmasculinity were fairly common throughout the US West.⁹² Such gender expressions were highly “visible and … a part of daily life in the nineteenth-century West”; in addition, “news article after news article” about transmasculine persons “both near and far circulated constantly in the region’s newspapers,” as well as about transfeminine behavior.⁹³ Peter Boag argues that the portrayal of various kinds of inversion (including homoeroticism and trans genders – as will be discussed in a later section) “as an unfortunate by-product of modernization” led to their retrospective erasure from the space of the “frontier,” which is then seen as having been “unimpaired by all the troubles of the modern period.”⁹⁴ Similar kinds of metronormative associations of queerness and transness with the urban have helped entrench that erasure.⁹⁵ This example helps highlight the ways importing current terms, norms, and interpretive frameworks into the past can close down our sense of the specific configurations of desire, embodiment, and social roles in given times and places, leaving us with a rather thin sense of their textures and density as well as the implications those other formations might have for thinking of possibilities now and for the future.

Queer vs. Trans

In seeking to engage the past in ways attentive to its complexity, and how the past both resonates with the present and is distinct from it, one significant methodological issue that arises is whether to understand historical persons and relations as queer or as trans. While certainly not mutually exclusive as categories or analytical approaches, the effort to read someone as one can seem to preclude or erase the possibility of the other. Valerie Traub, for example, conceptualizes “lesbian historiography” as “analyzing recurring patterns across large spans of time in the identification, social statuses, behaviors, and meanings of women who erotically desired other women,” and Susan Lansing approaches her analysis of “sapphic subjects” (and the ways representation of them shaped political discourses from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries) as about “intimacies between women,” including “tribade” and “hermaphrodite” in a list of “labels” that address “homoerotic desires and behaviors” and beginning her first chapter with an example from 1566 of a “woman’s act of dressing as a man.”⁹⁶ To what extent do the critical terms lesbian and homoerotic implicitly assert the womanness of persons who may not have understood themselves as such?⁹⁷ To what degree does a lesbian or sapphic historiographic framework close down engagement with how people in the past transed gender? Manion defines transing by drawing on Susan Stryker’s earlier definition of transgender as “people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth,” which Manion suggests offers a way of analyzing historical persons, processes, and practices “without claiming to understand what it meant to that person or asserting any kind of fixed identity on them.”⁹⁸ Thinking back to the discussion of Judith Butler in Chapter 1, how can we trace multifaceted genealogies of gender construction without implicitly presuming the coherence and stability of the category woman?

Jack Halberstam offers female masculinity as a way of complicating ideas of shared womanness while also refusing a clear man/woman binary in favor of the idea of variable kinds of masculinity. He suggests that we need “to think in fractal terms about gender geometries,” considering how masculinity as expressed by persons labeled female at birth “is actually a multiplicity of masculinities”: “because so many women whom one may study under the heading ‘female masculinity’ identify only partially or problematically[, or not at all,] with the category ‘woman,’ relations between women and same-sex relations are poor descriptive terms for the physical relations between masculine women and their lovers.”⁹⁹ Even “female masculinity,” though, can fall into the difficulty Manion addresses of conflating “two distinct relationships to gender: first, a gender nonconforming person who was still perceived by others as a woman; second, a person assigned female who lived … as a man in their society.”¹⁰⁰ This set of conceptual issues is complicated further by the ways the same terms – such as tribade and hermaphrodite – were used to address a wide range of practices, relations, and erotics that differed from extant maritally-organized modes of patriarchal authority.¹⁰¹ Moreover, scholars have indicated the importance of also allowing historical persons “the freedom not to ‘be’ transgender” as well as recognizing how someone’s gender expressions may be mutable – “ephemeral” or “fleeting” – across their lifetime.¹⁰²

More than simply potentially miscategorizing persons from the past, especially given the historical changeability of and overlap between categories for what we might term gender and sexuality, what’s at issue in framing persons, social patterns, and diachronic dynamics as queer or trans is the intellectual and political projects toward which they are mobilized (such as in the question of the place of gender nonconformity and transness within gay liberation and lesbian feminism, discussed in Chapter 2). Lansing, for example, seeks to address how “sexual representations” are not simply affected by but significantly influence “larger discursive frameworks,” particularly the role accounts of eroticism centered on “the sign woman” play in shaping and contesting notions of political order, subjectivity, and personhood.¹⁰³ This focus on the making and undoing of dominant social forms (arguably the principal aim of queering), though, differs from a focus on proliferating possibilities for envisioning livable lives (arguably a central goal of transing). That tension can be seen in discussions of Eleanor Rykener, a person assigned male at birth who was arrested for prostitution and sodomy in late-fourteenth-century London. Carolyn Dinshaw describes them as “a man dressed as a woman,” even though she almost immediately notes that Rykener “is taught by women how to behave, indeed live, [as] a woman.” Dinshaw interprets Rykener as illustrating “queer desires or queer truths about the inessentiality of gender, the inadequacy of binary gender categories of heterosexuality, and the resistance of bodies to their official gender constitution and categorization.”¹⁰⁴ By contrast, M. W. Bychowski understands Rykener as “a trans woman sex worker,” and rather than seeking to indicate a polymorphous queerness that contests dominant heteronorms, Bychowski aims to challenge “the supposed neutrality of cisgender subject positions and the compulsory cisgender assignment of history and historical figures”: “both premodern writers and modern subjects have made medieval transgender identity unutterable by speaking of potential trans subjects almost exclusively under the terms of sodomy and queer identity.”¹⁰⁵ We might read this argument as less about locating transgender identity per se in other times than, drawing on Rubright’s work discussed earlier, seeking to indicate the trans capacities toward which Rykener’s life points – possibilities for selfhood, community, and agency that may be subordinated or displaced in the rush to queerness.

A different issue arises if one considers the relation between molly and sodomite in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Across the long eighteenth century, the term molly was used to describe particular clubs and ale houses, and those that frequented them, in which people assigned male often would dress in women’s clothing, take part in behavior deemed feminine, and/or engage in erotic relations with each other. In a somewhat conventional description of molly houses, Tim Hitchcock characterizes them as the site for “the first recognizable homosexual identity,” further suggesting they represented “the London homosexual community” and were places where “homosexual men could develop a unique attitude to their society and to themselves.”¹⁰⁶ Yet, he also notes the role of women’s clothing and accessories among mollies, a dynamic which, drawing on Emma Heaney’s work, we might characterize as transfeminine.¹⁰⁷ While the molly houses were subject to a series of raids from 1698 to 1810 sponsored by moral reform societies, by the 1820s public concern, in terms of newspaper coverage and arrests, had shifted away from molly houses to acts of sodomy or “attempted sodomy” in public places by otherwise gender-normative men.¹⁰⁸ Conflating the molly with the sodomite (those legally charged for such sexual behavior), and both with the homosexual, not only effaces the significant differences between the two in terms of gender expression and class status (the former largely working class, the latter largely middle class and elite) but creates a sense of a cohesive homosexuality always in the process of emerging rather than a multidimensional array of gendered eroticisms and social dynamics that become sites of popular visibility and legal discipline at different points, in ways not really amenable to a unified narrative of historical development.

Beyond the potential enfolding of transness into queerness in ways that can muddle our sense of gender and erotic relations, trans histories face the challenge of determining who can constitute trans subjects and the available ways of recognizing them as such. In this vein, C. Jacob Hale warns of “necrophagic fights over dead bodies” and reminds us that placing someone within a given identity category involves “hav[ing] reliable, relevant information about those people over whose dead bodies we fight: about how they actually lived their lives and about how they actually thought about themselves.”¹⁰⁹ Further, as Scott Larson observes, that process is complicated by the ways evidence of a person’s eligibility for inclusion in trans history often depends on moments of violation in which the person was “arrested, stripped, prodded, palpated, photographed, interrogated, and cross-examined”: “This raises the critical ethical question of how students of gender histories might engage these pasts without restaging these violations,” including thinking of trans history as one of “gender in motion and variation” that is not solely about persons who are envisioned as in some way verifiably “trans and gender-variant.”¹¹⁰ Moreover, as previously suggested (and as will be developed further in Chapters 4 and 5), non-Euro-American social systems, including those of Indigenous peoples, are enfolded into Western gendered frameworks or viewed as “a utopian, precolonial past,” thereby “consigning Native [and other nonwestern] peoples to a past that is seemingly irreconcilable with the present.”¹¹¹ Either way, the modes of embodiment and self-understandings of people of color can come to serve as a site of identification for contemporary white trans people in ways that reinforce forms of racial and colonial violence.

Inversion and Its Afterlives

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, matters that later would be understood as separately belonging to sexual or gender identity largely were seen as expressive of a version of the same condition – inversion. At base, this concept judged modes of eroticism, gender expression, and felt experiences of embodiment in relation to a model in which there were two biological sexes whose properties inherently shaped distinct gendered social identities and in which those two sexes were inherently attracted to each other. Persons who deviated from this model were categorized in varied ways as taking on qualities, sensations, and desires that properly belonged to the other sex – as inverting the paradigmatic biological order of things. This diagnostic framework, and the field of medicine called sexology from which it emerged, provided the context out of which the concepts of homosexuality and transsexuality would arise.¹¹²

In sexological discourse, characteristics, desires, and actions cast as abnormal increasingly were presented as expressive of a kind of person, the invert, whose selfhood was seen as defined in substantive ways by gender and/or sexual deviance. As Halberstam observes, “Medical experts … tried to force multiple expressions of sexual and gender deviance into a very narrow range of categories and tried to explain a huge array of physicalities in relation to the binary system of sexual difference that they were absolutely committed to bolstering and preserving.”¹¹³ This understanding of nonnormative sexual attraction and gendered embodiment as part and parcel of the same medical condition can be traced as far back as the 1860s in the German scientist Karl Ulrichs’s formulation of “desire between men” as having, in his terms, “a woman’s soul in a man’s body.” The term homosexual, actually, first emerges in an 1868 letter to Ulrichs in which the writer sought to distinguish same-sex desire by masculine men from those whose gender expression appeared inverted.¹¹⁴ Scholars have noted that even as normative gender expression and cross-gendered desire are cast as primary and natural, conceptions of aberrance and perversity in this period historically tend to precede terms for the normal states from which they deviate (such as the term homosexuality being publicly circulated before heterosexuality), making normality somewhat belated even while it is presented as prior and given.¹¹⁵ With regard to sexological narratives of the cause of sexual and gender aberrance, Benjamin Kahan observes that “congenitally and acquisition stand on equal footing into the 1930s”: biological inheritance stands alongside “habit and addiction” as ways of interpreting how such patterns take shape and become rooted in the body.¹¹⁶ Richard von Krafft-Ebing, another German scientist writing after Ulrichs whose work (primarily through numerous editions of Psychopathia Sexualis) would become central to sexological study across Europe and the United States, offered the notion of a primary bisexuality where sexual difference increasingly emerged due to human evolution and the attendant advancement of civilization: “the higher the anthropological development of the race, the stronger the contrasts between man and woman.” In this way, as Mel Storr suggests, Krafft-Ebing manages the “unstable distinction between what is ‘primitive’ and what is ‘civilized’” while also producing a “model of ‘gradation’ or continuum” among kinds of desires, genders, and bodily sensations that “is able to contain the disruptive potential of all this diversity.”¹¹⁷ Serving as a container for everything that did not fit emergent heteronormative and cisnormative ideals, inversion was a flexible, multivalent, and somewhat unstable (set of) medical discourse(s) that presented sex, gender, and desire as intimately biologically intertwined even as it also implicitly illustrated the ways that supposed unity could not really describe the complexities of social reality nor hold steady the distinctions and hierarchies on which that idea of the natural was based.¹¹⁸

Although agreeing that medical discourses did not capture the range of ordinary understandings and categories of eroticism, desire, and gendered embodiment used by people outside of sexological circles, scholars disagree on the extent to which medical formulations successfully effaced or replaced other formulations, especially among those who would have been labeled as inverts in medical terms.¹¹⁹ For example, Heaney observes that “[i]n the late nineteenth century, trans femininity emerged in sexological understanding as an extreme expression of [an] inverted condition,” one modeled on the notion of a woman trapped in a man’s body rather than accepting trans women’s understanding of themselves – and their recognition by many other women – as women. For this reason, Heaney distinguishes between “the expert trans feminine” and “the vernacular trans feminine,” arguing that sexological discourses remake transfemininity as an allegory of inversion that becomes increasingly psychologized through the mid twentieth century.¹²⁰ Sexological texts, though, seem to have circulated somewhat freely among middle-class and elite networks of those who would be deemed inverts,¹²¹ and that dissemination helped give rise to forms of what Stephanie Foote has called “vernacular sexology,” in which “laypeople contest, define, and revise sexual subjectivity in relation to more official modes of sexology.”¹²² Prior to the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis as the privileged public frame for interpreting homoeroticism, a number of men and women inverts, who also described themselves in these terms, drew on sexology to critique popular and official narratives of them as pathological, including through novels like Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.¹²³ In addition, the most famous works by sexologists, such as Kraft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, contained numerous case studies that “allow[ed patients’] voices to be heard without intrusive commentary,” thereby “challenging and even overturning certain widely held beliefs about inversion.”¹²⁴ As Will Fisher has shown, several of the most prominent participants in public discourse around sexology in Great Britain, including John Addington Symonds and Ellis, were also publishing well-known books that helped shape the idea of “the Renaissance.” Historical figures associated with homoeroticism – like Michelangelo and Christopher Marlowe – appear as exemplary of artistic expression and the potentials unleashed by the supposed rediscovery of classical learning, which “had the effect of associating homosexuality with civilization itself.”¹²⁵ These class-, gender-, and race-inflected ways of engaging sexology illustrate how certain social subjects were able to inhabit or redirect discourses of inversion to argue for the legitimacy of some forms of sexual desire and gender expression that differed from an emergent heterosexual standard.

Medical accounts of the kinds of attraction, identity, and orientation that eventually would coalesce in the category of homosexuality (itself still uneven and contradictory, as in Sedgwick’s analysis discussed in Chapter 1) also drew on representations present in newspapers and novels. Focusing on the trial of Alice Mitchell, a woman in Memphis who in 1892 killed her lover Freda Ward for planning to marry a man, Lisa Duggan traces the proliferation in the press of the genre of the “lesbian love murder story,” illustrating how Mitchell is made into a recognizable type through her depiction as “like a man” and mentally unstable. Duggan also illustrates the profound distinctions between the coverage of Mitchell’s crime – and emergent narratives of pathological and gender-inverted (white) desire – and press accounts of the lynching of Black men, famously also occurring in Memphis that same year (leading to Ida B. Wells’s career as an anti-lynching advocate) and at their height nationally.¹²⁶ That distinction, Duggan argues, shows how the press helped medicalize white erotic and gender deviance while casting what was presented as antisocial Black desire as in need of remediation through extralegal but state-backed murder. The 1895 trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde in Great Britain for committing “gross indecency” with other men provides another example of such popular influence. As Ed Cohen demonstrates, the legal category of “gross indecency” was largely undefined, having replaced the charge of “sodomy” in British law in 1885, but due to concerns of public propriety, the newspapers would not “describe or even explicitly refer to the sexual charges made against Wilde.”¹²⁷ As a result, they developed ways of implying homoeroticism without directly naming it, portraying Wilde as a sort of person that would engage in such conduct. Among the most prominent of those strategies was highlighting the differences between Wilde and some of his known associates, “younger, (usually unemployed) working-class men,” implying “that his ‘friendships’ with them could not be ‘proper’ because they were marked by gross disparities in class, age, position, and social and educational background” such that “these relationships could not have taken place within the sphere of ‘normal’ behavior.”¹²⁸ In this way, in newspaper accounts the crossing of class difference serves as a sign not simply of a specific set of sexual acts but of aberrant tendencies toward something like indecency. Similarly, Natasha Hurley illustrates how novels and short stories over the latter half of the nineteenth century built up stock depictions of character types that then helped give shape to the notion of the homosexual as a distinct kind of person. A figure like that of the “old maid” as it appears across a range of kinds of fiction begins to accrue more expansive and specific characteristics: “Types are perhaps discernible once enough detail has accumulated around them” in ways that can “mark a transition in the narration of sexuality from outer to inner life.”¹²⁹ We can think of the figure of the old maid as becoming a lesbian – as coming to be seen as bearing that identity – through the building up of a social type by connecting a range of attributes and relations to each other such that they are seen, in their frequent combination, as all pointing to a distinct sort of personhood. In these ways, popular forms helped coalesce the kinds of characterizations that would gain medical authority in the figure of the invert.

The effort to categorize certain kinds of sexual and gender behavior as expressive of a biological type that differs from normal personhood was part of a broader Euro-American concern with maximizing the civilizational advancement of white people, as against the unhealthful, backward, and brutish tendencies of nonwhites and those whites who were seen as regressively enacting primitive attitudes and orientations.¹³⁰ The intellectual and administrative work of sexology takes place against the backdrop of the growing prominence in Great Britain and the United States of notions of degeneration – a civilizational backsliding of which gender and sexual deviancy were seen as clear examples as well as being symptoms of a broader crisis. Sexologists built their models of distinct kinds of inverted bodies out of available frameworks for describing the differences among racialized bodies, such as comparative anatomy and extant discussions of the perils of miscegenation, and such work further drew on existing Darwinian notions of human evolution in which “sexual characteristics” – and gendered distinctions between men and women – were seen “as indicators of evolutionary progress toward civilization.”¹³¹ Julian Carter illustrates how the rise of the notion of normality in the early to mid twentieth century as a way of designating supposedly generic ideas of human health and well-being replaces what previously had been more explicit references to whiteness and “civilization”: “normality discourse [as presented in a wide range of popular scientific guides] appeared to be politically neutral in large part because it so often framed its racially loaded dreams for the reproduction of white civilization in the language of romantic and familial love.” This “depoliticization of white dominance” meant that “aligning oneself with normal heterosexuality had the effect of performing one’s alignment with ideal whiteness” in the absence of any direct mention of race or associated figures of Euro-American cultural evolution.¹³²

Notions of sexual deviance emerge within a wider field of racializing ideologies and theories of eugenics – the attempt to cleanse the (white) population of diseased and degenerative persons who due to their ingrained nature create social disorder. These campaigns of social hygiene linked together sexuality, gender nonconformity, disability, and race and included dozens of states adopting laws allowing for the sterilization of persons deemed likely to transmit their antisocial tendencies through reproduction.¹³³ Siobhan Somerville illustrates the ways that major participants in sexological public discourse explicitly expressed concerns about a slide into primitiveness. For example, Ellis suggests that “the question of sex – with the racial questions that rest on it – stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution,” elsewhere indicating, “I shall do what I can to insinuate the eugenic attitude.”¹³⁴ Discussions by investigators and prison officials of eroticism among people who were incarcerated took part in this developmental narrative, as the supposed “primitivism of prison sex was often cast in classed and racialized terms.” Connecting homoeroticism to criminality, seeing both as expressive of ingrained tendencies toward immoral action, not only linked same-sex desire to (racial) degeneration but the focus on sex in prison “led to some of the first efforts in the United States to understand and codify deviant sexual types and practices,” which, then, appeared as tied to the deviant and socially disruptive behavior for which prisoners putatively had been convicted.¹³⁵ Relationships across forms of racial difference in the United States also were seen as indicative of perverse orientations given the presumption of racial separation in the Jim Crow era (why interact if not for sex?) and the ways cross-racial intimacy already was coded as deviant given the commonness of anti-miscegenation laws across the country.¹³⁶

In grappling with how to locate (white) gender and sexual nonnormativity in relation to notions of civilizational advancement, various discourses of inversion also took up older European narratives of gender and sexual difference among Indigenous peoples in the Americas as part of evidencing patterns of human variation and generating taxonomies of (Euro-American) abnormality. Will Roscoe notes that “accounts of [Indigenous] North American gender diversity were cited in ongoing discourses on gender and sexual difference,” helping “g[i]ve rise to the modern conception of homosexuals as a category of persons.” He adds, “The construction of the medical model of inversion … required historical and cross-cultural examples” in order to indicate, somewhat paradoxically, that the psychological and behavioral patterns labeled as inversion were neither historical nor cultural but facets of human biological variation, albeit ones that were more notable and visible among Euro-Americans due to their supposed advancement as illustrated by the predominance among them of middle-class marital and gender norms.¹³⁷ Reciprocally, those classified as inverts drew on narratives of Native peoples in order to validate their existence and generate a sense of themselves as having a history (as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2). This “foundling imagination,” in Christopher Nealon’s terms, helps explain the longstanding reference to belonging to “the tribe” as a way of describing gay and lesbian identity.¹³⁸ Indigenous forms of social life and personhood are appropriated as a resource for both medical discourses of inversion and as a strategy for self-definition by Euro-Americans categorized as aberrant within such discourses, without engaging with the ongoing presence of Native peoples or the colonial forces to which they continued to be subject (including such appropriations of them for Euro-American ends).

If discourses of inversion tended to conflate gender expression and (homo)sexual desire, the emergence of transsexuality as a distinct category in the mid twentieth century might be seen as resolving this confusion and as ceasing to position trans experience as evidence of degeneration or a mode of aberrance within whiteness. However, scholars have suggested that not only can notions of medicalized diagnosis be seen as an extension of ideologies of inversion but ideas about the need for surgical and hormonal intervention may arise from and remain immersed in racialized notions of bodily and social order. Transsexuality as a term first was coined in 1949 by an English sexologist named David O. Cauldwell to refer to the desire for surgical intervention to alter one’s physical sex by a person who otherwise is considered biologically “normal” (not intersexed).¹³⁹ He described transsexuals as “individuals who are physically of one sex and apparently psychologically of the other sex,” recommending “psychological rather than physical adjustment.”¹⁴⁰ Gender-affirming surgeries of various kinds had been regularly conducted in Europe (particularly in Denmark and Germany) starting in the 1910s, receiving somewhat sensational newspaper coverage in the United States.¹⁴¹ Up through the mid-twentieth century, the desire to change sex, as distinct from correcting what were seen as ambiguous or mixed-sexed physical characteristics (or presumed physical defects that created aberrant hormonal profiles), largely was understood in Euro-American terms as a perverse or antisocial psychological state in need of mental treatment. Deviations from normative gender and hetero-desire were all seen as due to a similar set of fundamentally psychological causes but also expressive of a psychologically abnormal relation to one’s real sexed body. As Heaney argues, the experiences of transfeminine people were derealized and remade as a figure for a range of perverse genders and sexualities, “install[ing…] a social type as metaphor” such that “female identification” appeared as “a symptom of homosexuality and not an identity or desire in itself.”¹⁴² Trans experiences and embodiments from this perspective are imagined rather than lived, “suggesting that trans women and men were not already women and men (as their lives frequently testified) but that they somehow aspired to become women and men” – a notion “that trans people need medical knowledge” in order to “name or understand” themselves.¹⁴³ The emergence of transfemininities and transmasculinities as a psychological problem that needs to be remedied through medical intervention, then, depends on a denial of trans people’s articulations of their own existing experience of gender (in which gender-affirming care would not make them a given gender but would complement an already present sense of self and embodiment). As Heaney suggests, this medicalizing narrative also emphasizes a class-inflected vision that does the following: focuses on the “needs of bourgeois patients who didn’t have easy access to the working-class queer milieu in which trans women lived without the necessity of medical diagnosis”; conceptually isolates trans people from the communities in which they lived in which their genders were recognized; and effaces the popular awareness of such persons and communities.¹⁴⁴

Furthermore, ideas about the mutability of the body with regard to “sex” (changing it or correcting it for intersexed people, particularly children), as well as the development of medical knowledge and procedures to do so, arise in the context of the broader cultural conversations about degeneration, evolution, civilization, and eugenics discussed above. As Kadji Amin suggests, “access to the medical technologies of transition is always also access to the medical management of populations and rationalization of health and productivity.”¹⁴⁵ In the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, the scientific question of how bodies acquire physical sexed characteristics was never separate from explaining how, and ensuring that, (white) persons come to live appropriately gender-differentiated and heteronormative social lives.¹⁴⁶ Medical intervention to understand and achieve sexual difference, via endocrinology and then increasingly more reconstructive kinds of surgery, depended on the idea of two determinate sexes as physical types; yet, as Jules Gill-Peterson shows, scientists were well aware that not all bodies fit this dimorphic model, leading to investigation of those supposed anomalies in order to trace the process of sexual development in terms of both human evolution (envisioned as tending toward more civilized forms of sex/gender distinction) and forms of individual maturation. Intersexed children served as key in connecting these various intellectual concerns, providing a set of experimental subjects on which to test theories and procedures. As Gill-Peterson observes, “medicine promised to capitalize on their plasticity to produce a binary,” with doctors and scientists “promulgating a developmental framework that made gender identity the endpoint of a teleology of growth out of plasticity” – a teleology that was intertwined with racialized notions of civilizational progress.¹⁴⁷

The concept of gender itself came out of the effort to preserve that evolutionary trajectory. Coined in the 1950s by John Money, one of the founders of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, the idea of gender did not so much displace discussion of physical sexual difference as seek “to save the sex binary from imminent collapse by offering a new developmental justification for coercive and normalizing medical intervention into intersex children’s bodies.”¹⁴⁸ The concepts of “gender role” and then “gender identity” created by Money and his colleagues less aimed to open possibilities for a range of kinds of socially acceptable experiences of embodiment and senses of self than sought to privilege a heteronormative and cisnormative vision of sexed selfhood in line with racialized and classed ideals of proper personhood, understood, though, as simply the healthy endpoint of natural development (even if such development required medical intervention and ongoing monitoring by doctors).¹⁴⁹ Through the 1960s, trans people routinely were refused gender-affirming care, since they were seen as having psychological problems (as some version of invert) rather than as having a physical condition in need of correction (as with intersexed children). This dynamic is why many people who desired gender-affirming surgery or who were able to secure it, such as Christine Jorgensen (perhaps the most famous of trans celebrities, who was featured in US national news starting in the early 1950s), presented themselves as having intersexed conditions. Even after access to gender-affirming healthcare came to be seen as medically legitimate, although still cast as requiring psychological diagnosis and treatment, trans patients needed to disavow any sexual desire for persons of the sex to which they were transitioning, thereby presenting transition as inherently shaped around the gendered norms of straightness.¹⁵⁰ Moreover, Black trans people routinely were diagnosed as schizophrenic and institutionalized or were seen as an issue for the criminal punishment system.¹⁵¹ Thus, even as the history of transsexuality includes increased access to gender-affirming modes of care for some, it also illustrates how such medical interventions and the diagnostic apparatus around them were shaped by the pathologizing legacies of discourses of inversion, including the ways related notions of development and healthful personhood are implicitly oriented around the norms of middle-class whiteness. As Halberstam notes, rhetorics of solving “wrong embodiment” by “moving to the right body … may as easily depend on whiteness or class privilege as it does on being regendered.”¹⁵²

Queer and Trans Temporalities

More than addressing ideas, persons, and dynamics in history, considering how we access and narrate desires and embodiments from the past, scholars have taken up the question of what it means to think about time – and our experiences of being-in-time – in queer and trans ways. In this vein, they’ve developed ideas about what might be called cis time and straight time. For the former, one might include assumptions about the consistency of selfhood, drawing on “the temporal dislocations necessary for self-narrativizing” across processes of transition to point to the ways identity may shift and change across a lifetime.¹⁵³ Conversely, as Jacob Lau suggests, we might focus on how institutions seek to preserve an enduring sense of unity and coherence in forms of identity and selfhood: “I think about the ways state documents such as birth certificates, social security cards, travel visas, and death certificates provide a linear narrative of a gendered, racialized, and classed life.”¹⁵⁴ The everyday of trans experience, then, can open into alternative ways of understanding dynamics of being and becoming that differ from conventional accounts of personal and historical development. In a similar vein, queerness can unsettle the “middle-class logic of reproductive temporality”; it is disjunct from “socially shared, normative periodicities” and potentially “uninvested in lineage as a temporal paradigm.”¹⁵⁵ As José Muñoz observes, “Straight time tells us that there is no future” except “that of reproductive majoritarian heterosexuality,” which he also describes as “normative white reproductive futurity.”¹⁵⁶ Queer and trans approaches to time, then, can contest presumptions about maturation, inheritance, and legacy at multiple scales – personal, collective, and national. What shape is a life supposed to take? What institutionalized cisnormative and heteronormative expectations guide how individual development is supposed to unfold? How do those ideologies shape the relations between generations? In what ways do they affect how we conceptualize the relations among the past, present, and future? Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chrononormativity speaks to these issues – how “[m]anipulations of time convert historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and regimes, which in turn organize the value and meaning of time.”¹⁵⁷ Historically contingent social structures and dynamics are cast as if they were expressions of the natural/given dynamics of the body, and thus an inherent part of the unfolding of time itself, rather than specific ways of constructing, regulating, and maintaining available social forms and kinds of personhood.

From this perspective, the present is neither identical to itself nor is the past necessarily cordoned off from the present, instead multidimensionally inhabiting it. While now may seem self-evident, we can see it as permeated by a range of times in at least two senses. First, as Dinshaw observes, we might attend to “forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with the ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life,” opening “ordinary time frames” to “the multiplicities within.”¹⁵⁸ Second, as discussed in the first section, narratives of progress and development tend to cast practices that do not fit dominant patterns as holdovers from a properly superseded past, such as the imperial representation of non-Euro-American peoples as backward (which McClintock has described as a vision of “anachronistic space”) or of forms of desire that don’t fit a strict hetero/homo binary as premodern.¹⁵⁹ Carla Freccero characterizes the present as “haunted” – “the way the past or the future presses upon us with a kind of insistence or demand” – suggesting that the apparent solidity of now remains perforated by the presence of feelings, memories, and identifications with other times.¹⁶⁰ The past and present, then, can be considered linked, but less in the linear sense of inheritance, succession, decline, or progress than in achronological connections across time.¹⁶¹ Freeman has theorized such relations in terms of what she calls temporal drag. While most literally referring to dressing in the clothing of another era, it more broadly encompasses the felt presence of the past in the present, the “cultural debris” from “incomplete, partial, or otherwise failed transformations of the social field”; forms of generational difference and seemingly outmoded kinds of “collective political fantasy”; and encounters with places, persons, and objects that conjure past pleasures (what Freeman terms erotohistoriography).¹⁶² The sense of an intimate proximity between then and now may be even more pressing with respect to trans identifications. As noted earlier, trans subjectivities and embodiments consistently get cast as unprecedented and new in ways that collude with their depiction as unnatural, monstrous, and dangerous. In this way, connecting trans pasts and presents “might save lives,” “tell[ing] the story of trans lives” in earlier historical moments with the aim of “building a future for trans lives now.”¹⁶³ Reciprocally, such narration of the past for the trans present can offer social and political frameworks for trans youth that exceed the horizon of the nuclear families that Halberstam contends increasingly provide the somewhat individualizing and privatizing context for initial gender affirmation.¹⁶⁴

Such ideas of contact between the past and the present, or sorts of continuity that are not the same as the causal unfolding of time (the passing away of a moment as it shapes the next), put pressure on the notion of the past as an alien space: “Why has it come to pass that we apprehend the past in the mode of difference? How has ‘history’ come to equal ‘alterity’?”¹⁶⁵ As Valerie Rohy notes, “Historical alterity is, after all, a recent invention,” an idea not necessarily consistent with notions of time at play in the past. This way of viewing the relation between the present and the past, Freccero argues, can replay in a different mode assumptions from “cultural anthropology,” but instead of seeing peoples in other places as living in anachronistic ways, “temporality is spatialized as cultural difference,” with the past envisioned, the saying goes, as another country.¹⁶⁶

In this vein, considering the ways racialized groups get cast as of the past, scholars have addressed how attending to that dynamic offers ways of rethinking the present and future. In particular, Indigenous peoples consistently are envisioned as holdovers from a bygone era, in the process of disappearing. As Lou Cornum notes, “In the colonial imaginary, indigenous life is not only separate from the present but also out of place in the future, a time defined by the progress of distinctively western technology,” but by contrast, “indigenous futurism is centered on bringing traditions to distant, future locations rather than abandoning them as relics.”¹⁶⁷ Moreover, while mainstream discourses tend to envision a coming apocalypse, Indigenous peoples “have already survived the apocalypse – this, right here, is a dystopian present.”¹⁶⁸ Thus, rather than presenting non-Indigenous peoples as the inheritors of Indigenous knowledges (including with regard to sexuality and gender diversity),¹⁶⁹ Indigenous peoples themselves connect the past to the future, both indicating the apocalyptic violence of the past half-millennium and carrying forward lived formations of peoplehood. Moreover, those continuities across time cannot simply be written off as heteronormative inheritance. Considering the problems of equating “reproduction” per se with “heter-ofuturity,” Alexis Lothian observes that the labor of parenting must be performed by someone and that “biological and social reproduction” cannot be seen as merely “a byproduct of patriarchy”: “there are many reproductive futures, often in conflict and contradiction with one another” – including the ways racializing and eugenic accounts of particular populations (such as Black and Native people) present them as unworthy of reproducing due to the drag they supposedly produce on a future envisioned in dominant Euro-American terms.¹⁷⁰

From the perspective of such a dominant image of the future, other kinds of futures may seem “like no future at all.” For this reason, to the extent that queerness represents a challenge to the ongoing production of white heteronormativity, it can serve “as an ally in building the antifragility of [Black] freedom dreams.” If indigeneity gets associated with a barbaric past, blackness often is presented as an anarchic antisocial disruption, not the basis for a livable future. However, as Kara Keeling argues, that “cut of Black existence,” if viewed from a queer angle, “might cleave an opening in the present order of meaning and being through which another structure, another world, perhaps might be” seen and made.¹⁷¹ In this vein, Lau observes that “progress narratives” are “dependent on those [who are deemed] temporally abject,” particularly people of color: “cis time functions by trans (particularly of color) bodies ‘doing time,’” including within “the medical and prison industrial complexes.”¹⁷² As Muñoz suggests, “Theories of queer temporality that fail to factor in the relational relevance of race or class merely reproduce a crypto-universal white gay subject that is weirdly atemporal.” Instead of offering an alternative vision of the future that affirms its continuity with non-dominant pasts or dreams of a freedom to come, though, Muñoz insists on the value of the ephemeral. For him, queerness represents possibilities that are “not yet here,” and forms of what he describes as “utopian” potential appear in fleeting moments that provide “an anticipatory illumination of a queer world, a sign of an actually existing queer reality, a kernel of possibility within a stultifyingly heterosexual present.”¹⁷³ In these ways, queering and transing can enable us to consider how race shapes normative ideas of reproduction, inheritance, and generationality while also engaging pasts and futures that do not fit the story of Euro-American progress, especially given its reliance on ongoing histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism.

Conclusion

Turning to the past is less about knowing how we got here – how the present emerges out of a line of development – than considering other possibilities for being in the world. Those possibilities may not necessarily be desirable, but their difference from how things are now challenges the sense of the inevitability of what currently is. Moreover, queer and trans engagements with history prompt questions about how well we know what supposedly is. Historical study does not just reveal something about then but can enable us to look more carefully at the ways prominent (or perhaps dominant) ideas about and categories for gender, sexuality, eroticism, and embodiment do not capture the variability, layeredness, and complexity of now. The sense of a mutable relation between the past, present, and future – which is neither self-evidently one of inheritance nor transcendence of what came before, but, instead, far more slippery relations of desire, longing, haunting, multiplicity, ephemerality, utopian dreaming, and drags of all kinds across time – is the stuff of queer and trans temporalities. As against notions of straight time and cis time, queer and trans studies have sought to address kinds of feeling and relation that do not fit a sense of linear unfolding, especially as shaped around normative conceptions of maturation, milestones, marital reproductivity, and gendered self-sameness.

Not only can one identify with past figures and movements in ways that can facilitate envisioning more livable lives in the present, queer and trans historical work also traces largely acknowledged dimensions of contemporary phenomena, such as the ways that notions of normality, health, perversion, and immorality are braided around longstanding racial and imperial dynamics and vice versa. We can see this dynamic through examining the ways that ideas about sexuality and gender emerge within and help give shape to imperial expansion and occupation, enslavement, and the projects of racialization that accompany both. We can see how the social forms and experiences of embodiment among various peoples and populations get translated within colonial ideologies, giving rise to racialized narratives of backwardness and deviancy while also providing the basis for developing universalizing narratives of proper human desire, corporeality, homemaking, and reproduction (as well as providing examples of other cultural frameworks that problematically are appropriated by Euro-American gender and sexual minorities as evidence of the transhistorical existence of their own identities). Historical work in queer and trans studies further considers the ways attention to enslavement and its aftermaths highlights how the ungendering of Black flesh provides a crucial background for conceptions of queerness and gender mutability and how the regulation of the sexuality and gender of people of color has been crucial to the organization of space, both in terms of policing US national borders and managing various groups’ relation to place within “domestic” space. Additionally, the discourse of inversion, out of which dominant frameworks for naming sexuality and gender have developed, was enmeshed in evolutionary conceptions of degeneration and reproductive fitness that themselves depended on a series of racializing and imperial assumptions about human development and progress.

Queer and trans historiography also raise the question of the stakes of understanding persons and movements in the past as queer or trans. Not only do queering and transing tend to point in different directions, the one emphasizing an undermining of straightness (or assumptions about straightness) and the other the presence of a range of possibilities for gendered embodiment in a given period, but many of the same historical figures may be read within either framework, giving rise to debates about what aspects of their lives are highlighted or erased in the process and what such (in)visibility means to the ways the past gets narrated in and for the present. Moreover, many of the terms from earlier periods used to address what were taken to be nonnormative desires, bodies, and social relations (such as sodomy, tribade, and hermaphrodite) do not nestle easily into a distinction between sexuality and gender, were themselves also complexly cross-hatched with various other kinds of identities, and were measured against notions of the natural quite different from that concept’s current connotations. Likewise, possibilities for forms of erotic and embodied experience in the past do not necessarily fit within current expectations about how to define sexuality and gender, suggesting the presence of practices and forms of agency that do not necessarily map well onto forms of current queer and trans identity.