Lesbians! Nymphomaniacs! Prostitutes! Ah, blessed academia!

Okay… I know I’ve been somewhat lax in posting. I’m working on something about Larry Craig and right-wing homoerotics. It’s forthcoming, and soon. I promise.

In the meantime, haven’t you been thinking to yourselves, “Golly gee, if this is the sort of shit she writes for fun, I wonder what her actual term papers are like?” Perhaps in spite of my better judgement, I’m giving you a chance to find out. I completed the following paper for Prof. Jonathan Walker’s excellent Queer Theory class this past winter.

It has a weak ending, perhaps, and some egregious tendencies towards the tangential. But I actually think it’s pretty good. I might even say I’m proud of it. At about 4000 words, it will be the longest single piece of writing I’ve posted here. If that’s the sort of thing you’re into, dig in.

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Falling into Obscurity: Lesbians, Nymphomaniacs, and Prostitutes and the Triangulation of the Transgressive Woman in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Women of a certain inclination know how much they have to hide. They know about boxes kept under their bed, and the importance of setting up passwords on their laptop. They know, on their internet browsers, how to erase the history and empty the cache. They know when to lower their voices, and when to keep their mouths shut. They know a great deal about volume, actually, and the muffling of sound. They know when to roll over and try to sleep, when asking for more is asking for too much. They know about catalogs that sell items to be delivered in plain brown paper wrapping, and stores at which the shopping bags are black, unmarked, and opaque. Perhaps they even know phone numbers to call. Or bars at which to linger. Or maybe they don’t know any of these things. Maybe they only know how to get in trouble.

It’s not a matter of being caught with one’s pants down, a matter of slipping self-control on display. What “natural female impulse” could, in excess, manifest itself in such a way? No, to transgress in these ways is to admit to one’s disease. A (heterosexual) man can proclaim, “I’ll do anything to anything.” And he may be classed as a bad man – immoral, or weak, or a pervert – but at least this badness is imaginable, is somehow in keeping with the irrepressibility of a free man in a free society. In fact, what seems more natural, and more imaginable, than a bad man? And what more natural than a good woman?

The transgression of being a sexually motivated participant-observer is different for women than it is for men. Gail Pheterson, in “The Whore Stigma, Female Dishonor and Male Unworthiness,” discusses the ways in which participation in prostitution is differently coded for men and women. As she puts it, “female dishonor is attached to whore identity, and male unworthiness is attached to trick behavior” (Pheterson  48). To extend this basic construction for our purposes, men with prostitutes or pornography are shamed for getting caught, for a lack of self-control, for moral slippage, while women participating in prostitution or pornography (particularly when they do so unrepentantly) are shamed as deviants, as unnatural, aberrant in their behavior, sick.

The currents of thought that led me to the questions I will ask in this paper started to take shape last spring while I was doing research for a paper on pornography. I was surprised at the frequency with which the audience for pornography was assumed to be, and often stated unproblematically to be exclusively male. (Or “almost exclusively male,” a self-defeating inclusive gesture with its built-in implications of female deviance.) This attitude manifested itself even within purportedly objective and not necessarily anti-porn academic work. In the post-internet era of pornography, such assumptions are rather easily punctured as problematic, although the good women at On Our Backs might have made a similar puncturing gesture as early as 1984.

What seemed more even more interesting than merely arguing that women do look at pornography was the idea that women have always looked, in spite of all the many prohibitions against such looking. And this “secret female gaze” needs to be considered, particularly in light of the prevalence of academic study of pornography that aims to prove a link between sexual representation and sexual violence by men against women.  I wrote the following (rather florid) passage last spring: “the idea of a secret female gaze unseats the construction of the pornographic as an aggressor-breeding aggressor, or as a radioactive toxin that impels men and women to their respective and apparently ahistorical sexual extremes – he who commits beastlike assault, and she who acquiesces to ruination.” The framing of the female socio-sexual role as “acquiescent object of male sexual attention,” whether she was further explained as victim, opportunist, or merely oblivious, seemed to deny the very existence or possibility of certain women, and certain practices.

Lesbian sexual activity has been met with the question, “But, what do you do with each other?” The unintelligibility of the act, for the outsider, has often been attributed to the lack of a penetrative logic – who is fucking whom, precisely? In the absence of a phallus, how do we even begin to make sense of this sex? I would argue that there is an extra dimension to this unintelligibility, even beyond the simple absence-of-cock. The lesbian sexual encounter must arise solely from female desire, must be driven in its initiation and follow-through solely by women’s impulse for sexual contact. No male sexual desire, no male coercion, force, or persuasion is driving the act. And thus it becomes “unthinkable,” to follow Judith Butler’s move. Something directly prohibited, as she explains it, is at least acknowledged to exist. Something so conceptually and ontologically challenging that it cannot even be directly prohibited inhabits a different space.

The word “triangulation” has multiple, occasionally quite divergent meanings. Often, though, it refers to processes by which hidden or unknown locations are determined by their relationship to what is known. One use of the word is to name the method for determining the location of an earthquake’s epicenter by drawing circles on a map around known points at which the impact has registered in a measurable way. The point at which all three circles intersect is the point from which the force emanated. While “locating” anything of a social nature with “scientific precision” is not a task for which I will claim any aptitude or inclination, the metaphor seemed a valuable one in imagining my task. Lesbianism, prostitution, and nymphomania (as-diagnosed, medically or socially), in the 19th and 20th centuries can be conceived of as locations at which women’s non-normative sexuality becomes visible, flares up out of obscurity, is surrounded by discourse the way nacre forms a pearl.

Foucault, in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, discusses the way that after the turn of the 19th century, a “centrifugal” movement can be discerned with respect to sexuality – marriage, previously the site of most consistent scrutiny became a private, privileged, discrete center, around which peripheral-and-thus-deviant modes of sexuality were arrayed. These modes of sexuality (defined in opposition to the singular, sanctified, and presumably known “oyster” of holy matrimony) were to be interrogated, wrapped in a mediating discourse of science to protect the integrity and stability of middle class constructions of “normal sex.”

In the limited scope of this paper I want to lay the groundwork for, or try to map some of the ideas pertinent to, imagining a class of “desiring women,” formed by the social pressures and currents of modernity, who are invisible as a class. I have this notion of a figure, “the desiring woman,” or “the woman with transgressive desires,” who directly counters the prevalent figure of “woman as acquiescent object.” I want to imagine a place for this desiring woman in space and history, a community or continuum in which, perhaps, she made/makes sense. I want to examine the way she was and has been “present in her absence.” I want to look at the sexually-desiring-and-thus-transgressive woman, in Western society and culture post-Enlightenment, as a subaltern figure of sorts.

I will grant from the outset that there are troubling implications arising from such impulses as those I am claiming. Among them: why should the many real, diverse, and multi-dimensional women from which I would construct such a class be defined by the way they desire/d? Doesn’t such a formulation also merely serve to reinscribe, underscore, reify the very notion of difference and even aberrance upon which our exclusion from the dominant culture is based? And furthermore – if I am trying to find my forebears, trying to seek a historical and social sisterhood to make sense out of myself and defend myself against implications of deviance, is that not a problematic means of propping up my right to exist as I do? Why are trends with historical precedence any more right or valid than potentially newly minted human phenomena?

Sometimes the jangling voices of the post/feminist, post/Marxist, post-structuralist, postcolonial, queer and postmodernist theoretical strands trying to become coherent in my mind render me nearly paralytic before I even begin. But I must persist, there is a paper to be written. And even if I have no illusions that I necessarily can or ought to want to escape from those same “social pressures and currents of modernity” that have constituted my desires even as they deny them, it seemed that it might not be a valueless enterprise to shine a light on those pressures and currents by examining their social effects. There seem to be some things at stake in such a line of thought.

Reading Judith Butler’s and Eve Sedgewick’s ideas about ‘the closet,’ and about the troublesome politics of visibility, intelligibility, erasure/effacement, hiddenness, prohibition, and unthinkability added some theoretical dimensions to the ideas about subaltern history that I was already awkwardly wielding. If we “women of certain inclinations” as I have sketched us in my opening paragraph, must enact the compulsory heterosexuality that Adrienne Rich discusses, we must also adopt a compulsory attitude of lukewarmness to all things sexual.

How is this attitude enforced? Clearly, such a question is a complex one. Carol Groneman’s essay “Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality,” was a valuable resource for a variety of the angles I examined for this paper. One particularly chilling passage put into clear perspective the stakes involved in Victorian sexual discretion. In 1894 a medical doctor by the name of Block performed a “thorough physical examination” on a nine-year-old girl brought to his practice by her mother. Diagnosing from her response to his stimulation of her clitoris “masturbation tending towards nymphomania,” he performed a clitorodectomy (Groneman, p 357). This is a rather gross example (not merely in the colloquial sense), but it does show that, if the mechanisms compelling women to hide their sexual appetites exist on a continuum, one end of that continuum is firmly in touch with the materiality of the body.

We are compelled to leave as minute a trace as possible of our existence as such inappropriate, “unnatural” beings – what occurs in the historical record when this efacement occurs in real time? What kind of communities, continuums, and individuals can we imagine, retrospectively, when we are operating on different assumptions of women’s “natural” sexual inclinations, and then contextualizing that breadth of practice in the social strictures of the time? In Groneman’s words, “the behavior described in case studies of nymphomania – masturbation, lascivious dreams, lesbian relationships, sexual intercourse, putting objects in the vagina and urethra, clitoral orgasm – however mediated through the doctors’ presentations, permits us to glimpse a range of erotic activity of Victorian women that has generally been hidden” (Groneman, p 343). The sense Groneman presents of glimpsing that which is usually hidden speaks directly to the line of thought I’m trying to follow here, and to which I will return.

Rich’s idea of the lesbian continuum (once I was able to disengage it from the many aspects of her theorizing that I found odious), and Sedgewick’s concept of the homosocial added a dimension to my inquiry, inspiring an interest in the way that women’s sexuality has been alternately policed and validated by other women. What was the role of sexual communities in this effaced history? Can we talk about communities of sexually transgressive women, or a network? Is that, even, too simple a start? How has homosociality been regulated for sexually transgressive women? How have Western feminist movements since the Enlightenment, with repeating rhetorics of sisterhood, dealt with women’s transgressive sexuality? And what can be gained/lost from postulating a continuum between different groups of women with transgressive desires who can be located historically?

Perhaps I seem to be wheeling wildly away from my avowed theme, here. And yet, as I grapple with these ideas, and with the jangle of self-critique, it seems ever clearer that the story of women and sexuality after the Enlightenment is not merely coincidental to the larger social, political, and economic trends of the modern period. But before discussing this question, it would perhaps seem advisable to actually discuss lesbians, prostitutes, and nymphomaniacs as such.

What are some of the pragmatic questions involved in constructing a relationship between prostitutes, lesbians, and women diagnosed or otherwise classified as nymphomaniacs? First off, this is not precisely (forgive me) virgin territory. The history of feminism has been marked by the presence of debates on and analyses of women as sexual figures. Ellen Dubois and Linda Gordon, in “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual Thought” discuss the ways in which feminist dealings with the sexual have always been defined by a tension between defending women’s rights to sexual pleasure and defending our rights to be free of or protected against sexual danger. Particularly since the “sex wars” of 80’s feminism, there has been much at stake in the active development of pro-sex feminist perspectives, and also with the development and voicing of lesbian and queer interests. Those two projects, pro-sex and queer, have tended to be mutually supportive and informative.

From that pragmatic mutual support have stemmed intellectual, historical, or academic projects that create connections between lesbian history and that of other women classified as sexually deviant. Joan Nestle’s “Lesbians and Prostitutes, a Shared History” is one example of this kind of work. Nestle in some ways reclaims or recuperates a problematic assertion of early “sexologists” that lesbians and prostitutes were somehow naturally linked. Nestle recasts this linkage as one of social context and subsumes her historical thesis within a call for sisterhood. The problematic projects which Nestle simultaneously draws from and rejects are discussed by Heather Miller in “Sexologists Examine Lesbians and Prostitutes in the United States, 1840-1940.” Groneman’s work about nymphomania elaborates the way that lesbianism was just one of many “deviant” sexual practices that could be folded into the medical category of nymphomania. These are just a few examples.

The way these categories – lesbians, prostitutes, nymphomania – interact is clearly worth looking at. Each category, each “sort of woman” is constructed by the matrix of society and language. But it might be said that of the three categories, lesbians and prostitutes are much more “ontologically secure.” While the state of being a lesbian or being a prostitute can be anchored to actual material practices in which women may engage (having sexual contact with women, having sex for money), the designation of nymphomania rests entirely on a qualitative call – women participating inappropriately in the sexual, women whose sex is not appropriate for women. Furthermore, the identity of lesbian, or of prostitute, can be claimed by the individual in question, whereas the designation “nymphomaniac” is not something that one can claim. It is a sort of status that must be conferred by the Foucaultian figure of doctor or criminalist.

Then again, in the very process of making such distinctions, trying to make a bid for the solidity of the first two terms in light of the slipperiness of the other, all manner of productive questions are raised. Those actual, material processes in which women engage, upon which I might so cavalierly hang my “ontological security” begin to waver like mirages. A woman may have sexual contact with women and not be a lesbian, is this not true? And she may never have sexual contact with women, and still be a lesbian, yes? What if she lives for years with a dear, dear, dear female friend, but never pushes to define the nature of the relationship beyond “friendship?” What if she trumpets disavowals of lesbianism, with much hellfire and brimstone, but masturbates to mental images of tits and cunts?

When it comes to the question of who, precisely, counts as a whore, things becomes similarly murky. The term has often been used interchangeably with “slut,” a term which, like “nymphomaniac” has no direct link to having sex for money. How many women marry men they don’t enjoy fucking, or love, or particularly like? They perform their conjugal duties with a professional, perhaps affectionate detachment, and receive, in turn, health insurance, subsidized car payments, perhaps alimony eventually, or a nice life insurance payout. In the 19th century, the economic aspects were even more clearly built into the institution of marriage. Who is having sex for money?

Also, there are multiple ways to barter with sexual favors outside of marriage that may never be called out as prostitution. If a two parties engage in a relationship that is largely defined by the exchange of sex and economically viable goods/services, but neither party acknowledges the similarities to prostitution – is prostitution occurring? What if the nature of the relationship is known within the community or social milieu, but still is not acknowledged as such? Is a woman in such circumstances a whore before an accusing finger is leveled to designate her, diagnose her as such? In the most present of present moments, we might call such an exchange an “intervention,” and perhaps stage it on a popular talk show.

The taking-on of identities as sex-workers and queer women, the claiming of a certain status and marker of self has for some been a source of strength and sisterhood, although Judith Butler recounts the moment of “going off to Yale to be a lesbian” with a sort of wry wistfulness. The action of claiming as a mantle what was once thrown at you as an epithet, or presented in medical jargon as your own personal pathology, has in these cases only manifested in the past thirty or forty years. Perhaps the “claiming of whore identity” was quite unimaginable several decades ago, much as the idea of “claiming nymphomaniac identity” seems rather improbable today.

There are political implications to claiming/defending the prostitute or lesbian. Irrespective of the unsettling experiment we have just conducted, the way the categories of prostitute/prostitution and lesbian/lesbianism have been mobilized is different from the way that ‘nymphomaniac’ has been mobilized. Perhaps it is fair to say that today two strands in Western feminism exist, with respect to sex, and that we can see this schism reflected in the ways these categories of sexual deviance have been utilized. Gordon and Dubois explain that feminists “inherit two conflicting traditions in their approach to sex” (Gordon and Dubois 7). One strand, they explain, has emphasized the dangers of sex, while another much less dominant strand encouraged women’s sexual experimentation and freedom.

Lesbian and prostitute stories never fit neatly into the story of women without agency, victims plain and simple, women over whom power is exercised. Lesbians and prostitutes have struggled with/in feminist discourses in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the mechanism of that struggle illuminates the limitations of feminist engagements with sexuality. Dominant feminism has repeatedly framed women as victims, claiming a sort of Nietzschean slave morality to undergird demands for clemency. Gordon and Dubois sketch the ways in whch feminist engagments with “sexual dangers” have transitioned from a primary concern with prostitution in the 19th century, to a primary concern with rape or sexual assault in the 20th (Gordon and Dubois 9). While 19th century feminists’ concern for their “fallen sisters” was a profound step in the development of a cross-class notion of progressive action, their actual engagement with prostitutes was always patronizing and their goodwill towards these women always hinged on the definition of prostitutes as victims of men, and on prostitutes claiming this victimization. This same “deal,” whereby feminists embrace and champion victims, but only as victims, is echoed in the Angelides essay “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality.”

Nymphomania before the 1920s was a phenomenon of the middle classes – so, incidentally, was white Western feminism, although efforts were made to “reach down” to the poor or otherwise “unfortunate.” The discrepancy in expectations of “natural” middle class female sex and “natural” lower-class or non-white female sex opens up an interesting dimension for analysis. The same traits that required diagnosis and treatment as pathological, deviant, or abnormal in middle class women were assumed to be natural in women of the working classes. Working class, poor, peasant, or non-European women were assumed to have more “animal” sexuality – more desire, less compunctions about fulfilling their desire, more diverse practices and partners. This articulated with ideas about cultural evolution and “civilization” as a pinnacle of human achievement to which all people were more or less successful at achieving. All humans might be equally human, but not all were equally “civilized.”

The notion of the hidden world, underworld if you will, of poor, animal sexuality in which prostitutes and lesbians exist and make space for themselves, and of the need to triangulate points to locate the coordinates of actual life in this shadow-zone are joined by a much more venerable image, that of the fallen woman. The figure of “the fallen woman” in Victorian literature and popular culture is still intuitively defined for us – any woman who has sex out of wedlock is a candidate for such an assessment. But, invoking our earlier discussion of the slipperiness of definitions and categories when it comes to women’s sex, it is clear that a moment of recognition must occur for this label to fall into place. If conducted in secrecy, in shadow, if traces are neatly efaced as one goes, if the actions one takes are not named or interrogated, it seems that avoiding fallenness (and the inevitable downward arc of social destiny attached to such a designation) was a distinct possibility.

“Fallen women” were linked to a social stratum that was an object of study for progressives and/or human sciences in the middle classes. The lower-classes, and nonwhite cultures were seen as  scientifically “discoverable,” but doesn’t this imply the extent to which they were not “known?” “Falling” could result in being expelled from the middle class, absorbed into the lower class, and thus absorbed into an invisible world. The Victorian middle class imagined that this absorption led inevitably to death. Tales of “fallen women” ended with the death of the ruined woman. But don’t representations of death sometimes simply suggest the limits of the imagination? What was really happening there, in the no-man’s-land, the here-be-dragon’s space between the closely guarded boundaries of middle class culture and the death-by-class imagined by that same middle class?

To what extent, we may wonder, was the anxiety surrounding nymphomania profoundly articulated to anxiety about the permeability of the boundaries between social classes, and the un-naturalness of social divisions? If a woman may be born into the middle class, white, of a “good family,” and because of her sexual behavior “fall” into a state of “ruination” – what does this construction suggest? The anxiety here is symptomatic of the tensions between paradigms of social evolution and universal suffrage. How do we reconcile ideas of fundamental equality and fundamental difference?

Before the late 18th century, it has been argued that women were generally understood to be as just as sexually desiring as men – just as lewd, with similar sexual agency. The transition that occurred was fundamentally linked to the shifting understanding of human nature, society, and law that accompanied the Enlightenment and concommitant period of political upheaval and reimagination. Women’s sexual, fundamental, “Natural,” biological difference from men was inscribed and reinscribed in part as a way to make universal male suffrage imaginable, thinkable. In short – “all men are created equal, and we are all defined as a class because we differ from women.”  Joan Scott, in her book Only Paradoxes to Offer, French Feminists and the Rights of Man,  has illuminated how this transition both creates the possibility/necessity for feminism, and mires it in paradox – women must simultaneously demand equality, premised on the absence of difference, while coalescing in a political class of women-as-women, organized around their status as discrete/different.

Constraints of time and space force me to draw to a close. I have only been able to partially cover my concerns, and have completely failed to address the issue of “subalternity” directly, although I think the concept informs the entire paper. Have we “located” our mysterious specter, the “desiring woman?” Not precisely. But I think that the value of placing the figures, concepts, histories, and categories of women designated by the terms “lesbian,” “prostitute,” and “nymphomaniac” in relation to each other is clear. The process of examining what it means to live within the category “woman” (or for that matter, the category “man”) in the modern era to the present, is enriched by doing so.

 References and Works Cited

Angelides, Steven. “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Seuxality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 10.2 (2004): 141-177.

Arondekar, Anjali. “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14.1.2(2005):10-27.

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991.13-31.

Dubois, Carol & Gordon, Linda. “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual Thought.” Feminist Studies 9.1 (1983): 7-25.

Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Groneman, Carol. “Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality.” Signs 19.2 (1994): 337-367.

Miller, Heather Lee. “Sexologists Examine Lesbians and Prostitutes in the Unites States, 1840-1940.” NWSA Journal 12.3 (2000): 67-91.

Nestle, Joan. “Lesbians and Prostitutes, An Historical Sisterhood,” & “My Mother Liked to Fuck.” A Restricted Country. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1987.

Pheterson, Gail. “The Whore Stigma: Female Dishonor and Male Unworthiness.” Social Text 37, A Special Section Edited by Anne McClintock Explores the Sex Trade. (1993): 39-64.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Hetrosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5.4 (1980): 631-660.

Scott, Joan Wallach. Only Paradoxes to Offer, French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Sedgewick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: University of Columbia Press, 1985.

_____________. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Soltan, Margaret. “The Lost Narrative of the Lost Woman.” Feminist Studies 15.3 (1989):563-572.