I thus want to register a shift in my own thinking (which in The Renaissance of Lesbianism had fallen more on the side of emphasizing alterity) toward an engagement with the following tripartite hypothesis:
• There exist certain recurrent explanatory metalogics that accord to the history of lesbianism over a vast temporal expanse a sense of consistency and, at times, uncanny familiarity.
• These explanatory metalogics draw their specific content from perennial axes of social definition, which become particularly resonant or acute at different historical moments.
• The recurring moments in which these metalogics are manifested might profitably be understood as cycles of salience—that is, as forms of intelligibility whose meanings recur, intermittently and with a difference, across time.
This chapter will attempt to fill in the contours of these hypotheses by drawing on the work of a number of scholars. Before doing so, however, I want to suggest what is at stake in such patterns of discourse for current historiographic practices. Such cycles of salience are what lead us to encounter what can look a lot like “lesbianism” in the distant historical periods in which we work. They indicate, I propose, not lesbianism per se—by which I mean the canonical form that now circulates globally as a modern identity category14—but the presence of symptomatic preoccupations about the meanings of women’s bodies and behaviors. The appearance of consistency and familiarity produced by these metalogics, the axes of social definition from which they draw their energy, and the cycles of salience during which they reappear are not, therefore, simple or self-evident. Nor are these cycles, precisely, continuity—if by that we mean an unbroken line connecting the past to the present.15 I am not, in other words, forgoing an alterist conception for a continuous or transhistorical one. It is less that there exist transhistorical categories that comprise and subsume historical variation than that certain perennial logics and definitions have remained useful, across time, for conceptualizing the meaning of female bodies and bonds.16 Emerging at certain moments, silently disappearing from view, and then reemerging as particularly relevant (or explosively volatile), these recurrent explanatory logics seem to underlie the organization, and reorganization, of women’s erotic lives. Sometimes these preoccupations arise as repeated expressions of identical concerns; sometimes they emerge differently or under an altered guise. Recurrence, in other words, does not imply transhistoricity, and cycles can be nonidentical to themselves. As endemic features of erotic discourse and experience, these logics and definitions, as well as the ideological fault lines they subtend, not only contribute to the existence of historically specific types and figures but also enable correspondences across time. At the same time, the forms these metalogics take, their specific content, the discourses in which they are embedded, and the angle of relations among them all are subject to change. Social preoccupations come in and out of focus, new political exigencies emerge, discourses converge and the points of contact between them shift—and in the process, the meanings of female-female desire are reconfigured.
The methodological reassessment I am offering is made possible by a wealth of published studies. Thanks to social and cultural history, as well as to an even larger body of work by literary critics analyzing cultural representations, we now possess a densely textured picture of what it might have meant for women to love, desire, and have sex with each other at various times in specific communities.17 The research that has taken place in almost every historical period, particularly for England, France, and North America, offers a heretofore unimagined opportunity to confront the conceptual challenges of change and continuity on a larger, more capacious scale than typically has been tried—including pushing against the analytical paradigms and geographic boundaries of the Anglo-European West. Lesbian history will continue to locate its subjects in specific temporal and spatial contexts, while also addressing how their histories intersect and diverge across national, ethnic, racial, and geographical borders. However, by identifying certain axes of definition that have been developed largely out of the histories of white women in western Europe and the United States, analyzing the reasons for their recurrence, and then submitting these narratives to comparative analysis across the boundaries of race, religion, and geography, it may, over time, be possible to fashion a broadly synoptic account of historical regimes of eroticism—without losing sight of each regime’s specificity, complexity, relative coherence, and instability. In short, recognition of these periodic cycles of salience—flaring up and abating—could provide us with a means to collectively write that which, for good reason, has not been attempted since Faderman’s inaugural study: a transnational, culturally specific, and comparative history of lesbianism over the longue durée.
A search for “types” has framed much of the scholarship on lesbian history of England and the United States. From my own book on the relations between representations of the “masculine tribade” and the “chaste feminine friend” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,18 to Susan Lanser’s work on the “sapphist” as a flashpoint for modernity in the eighteenth century,19 to Martha Vicinus’s early delineation of four antecedents to modern lesbianism and, more recently, her exploration of nineteenth-century familial models for female intimacy such as mother/daughter and husband/wife,20 to Judith Halberstam’s exploration of twentieth-century forms of female masculinity,21 an implicit typological impulse has framed efforts to render female-female desires intelligible—both in their own historical terms, and in ours.
In part this typological inclination results from the medical taxonomies from which the modern category of homosexuality was derived.22 Thus, a reliance on systems of classification similarly has dominated studies of male homosexuality, both within the West and cross-culturally.23 David M. Halperin has provided the most explicit description and theorization of typologies of male homosexuality across a broad temporal expanse. Halperin—previously one of the most influential advocates of historical discontinuity—attempts in How to Do the History of Homosexuality “to rehabilitate a modified constructionist approach to the history of sexuality by readily acknowledging the existence of transhistorical continuities, reintegrating them into the frame of the analysis, and reinterpreting their significance within a genealogical understanding of the emergence of (homo)sexuality itself.”24
Revisiting his own historicist practice in order to balance the conceptual appeals of historical continuity and change, Halperin offers a sophisticated analytical paradigm based on four “transhistorical” “pre-homosexual categories of male sex and gender deviance”: effeminacy; pederasty or active sodomy; friendship or male love; and passivity or inversion.25 This rehabilitation implicitly relies on classical models of male-male relations, which are viewed as variously applicable at different times and places. Halperin proposes, however, a transhistorical model only up to the emergence of modern homosexuality—when, owing to a “long historical process of accumulation, accretion, and overlay,” the relations among these categories definitively changed.26
Although I have been inspired by Halperin’s engagement with continuist arguments, my current interest lies not in creating a transhistorical taxonomy of categories or figures—or, at least, this would only be one task in a larger project I envision. I am less interested in describing the contents of typologies and exposing the conceptual strands that contribute to them than in investigating the cultural conditions that render such types culturally salient