Review: David M. Halperin: How to Do the History of Homosexuality.

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first part of the Review: 

Halperin diagnoses a peculiar kind of academic "amnesia" (2) when it comes to the history of (homo)sexuality, both in regard to the familiarization of the historical alterity of its object (the sexuality of ancient Greece, for example) and in regard to its methodology (the ways in which we historicize sexuality). He claims that the categories and terminology of our own contemporary discourses on sexuality render the specific alterity of other historical cultures' organizations of sex and gender opaque: "All our research into otherness, into cultural alterity, presents to us an endlessly perplexing spectacle of the exotic, which merely reinforces our attachment to our own categories of thought and experience" (3). Moreover, the constructivist approaches developed out of a need to redress these shortcomings have come to obstruct our vision in their turn. The broad reception of critics such as Michel Foucault, Halperin argues, has led to a conventionalization of his highly original writings to such a degree that they are reduced to a set of almost clichéd concepts. The fault obviously does not lie with Foucault - indeed, Halperin's essays are based on very careful (re)readings of his texts - but rather with the academic commodification of his ideas: The "almost ritualistic invocation of [Foucault's] name" has reduced "the operative range of his thought to a small set of received ideas, slogans, and bits of jargon that have now become so commonplace and so familiar as to make more direct engagement with Foucault's texts entirely indispensable" (25). As a result, Halperin claims, we are nearer to "Forgetting Foucault" (the title of ch. 1) than we might think. This paradox of forgetting the all-too-familiar, and of familiarizing otherness to the point of erasing its specific alterity, constitutes the double focal point of the essays collected in this volume, a paradox which significantly informs the practices and politics of writing the history of (homo)sexuality.