The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada

Abstract

Canadian women's studies programmes and the Canadian politicaleconomy tradition have for the most part kept their ears firmly plugged to the enormous growth of interest in the history of sexuality which has taken place in England, the United States and Western Europe over the last decade. Particularly in the American case, the history of sexuality occupies a central place in contemporary women's history and feminist political debates. The emergence of a literature on the history of same-gender sex parallels and overlaps this feminist historiography. The history of sexuality has moved from its earlier focus on gay and lesbian history to an examination of sexual desire in all its forms, marking a realization that heterosexuality too has a history, and that the social dominance of certain forms of sexual practice and the subordination of others must be seen relationally. Kinsman's The Regulation of Desire is a comprehensive overview of the history of sexuality in Canada, the sole such survey which has thus far been published. The book constitutes an immense contribution to the history of sexuality. In keeping with the recent literature, Kinsman aims to explain/problematize the development of both same and different gender sex. Drawing on the writings of Dorothy Smith, Kinsman's text employs a more sophisticated sociology of knowledge than has appeared to this point in the historiography. He is centrally concerned with the question of how to explicate the disjuncture arising between the practices1 categories of regulation and the daily experience of populations targeted by regulatory agencies. The book references a host of unpublished lectures and community publications of the Canadian gay and women's movements, a literature accessible to Kinsman given his longstanding participation in Canadian sexualpolitical organizing. The exposition becomes especially excellent in those areas where Kinsman has himself done primary research. Complementing John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities,' which showed the existence of homophile organizations in the United States prior to the mythical birth of gay liberation, the Stonewall Riots (1969), Kinsman documents the existence of numerous Canadian homophile groups during the early 1960's. Strongest on legal history, the text adds much to our understanding of the inclusion of gross indecency in the 1892 Criminal Code, the administration of criminal sexual psychopathology, the Canadian and interpretation of the Wolfenden Report, with its suggestion for legalizing private, consensual homosexual acts and more strictly regulating public ones. Citing unpublished work by Philip Girard, Kinsman summarizes evidence regarding the littleknown purge of homosexuals from the federal civil service during the 1950s and 1960s, a purge which appears in Canada to have been far more virulent for gay men (and lesbians?) than for leftists. Discussion stretches very thin on some topics, partially due to the patchy state of the literature. Treatment of the changing relations of heterosexuality proceeds in a perfunctory fashion; two pages (plus footnotes) on Heterosexual Hegemony and the Welfare State signals rather than develops an important topic. The section on native peoples is, despite Kinsman's good intentions, dreadful, characterized by an all-too-common fascination with the berdache, a corresponding disinclina-tion to examine kinships systems, offensive reference to tribes, an overconcentration on the fur trade as a determinant of social/sexual relations versus, for instance, compulsory schoolingfsedentarization, a homogenizing of native peoples, and an inaccurate and inadvertently disempowering view of native sexual and gender relations as being replaced by those of European~.~ A manic drive for comprehensiveness leads to telegraphic contextualizing introductions which no one other than a specialist could decipher. Similarly, the chapter on the emergence of homosexuality and heterosexuality does a capable, condensed description of the English, American and German cases, but the selection of topics should have been motivated more in terms of the Canadian reception of social forms rather than a synopsis of the historiography. Kinsman's introductory remarks note that the text deals principally with gay men due to the state of the secondary literature, but that he regards the inclusion of lesbians as crucial to writing the history of sexuality. Elsewhere he repeats Gail Rubin's and Jeffrey Weeks' observation that contemporary sexuality is becoming increasingly autonomous from gender relations. It is difficult to grasp what might be meant by autonomy7' here, other than the increasing independence of sexual regulation from marital relations. This, however, does not mean that the system of sexual regulation has been constituted as genderless. Is it not possible to conceive of, say, psychiatricflegal regulation as gendered? Feminist historians have certainly found this adoubleproject, and have theorized social processes as gendered even where women were not historically present. The problem of including lesbians stands in for this more general and more difficult understanding of sexual regulation as gendered. The materialist method used by Kinsman has beneficial effects in shaping commonsense notions which naturalize and make eternal our contemporary sexual relations. As social critique, a realist, narrative of sexual regulation has credibility and puts questions of class and the state firmly on the I agenda. Nonetheless, I don't think we should conflate with sociological analysis, a path down which Weeks' notion of the historical present might lead. As M a n emphasized, the order of exposition in Capital is determined by the social relations of the capitalist mode of production, not by the history of capital or successive modes of production. By analogy, description of contemporary sexual regulation will have its order of exposition determined by the social relations of sexual organization, not by the order of the history of sexuality/sexual regulation. Differences between sociological and analysis should make us cautious of substituting one for the other even in the midst of the boom in the history of sexuality.

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