2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

At least since Jonathan Ned Katz published The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995) scholars have acknowledged that heterosexuality has a history. There is a growing literature that attests to the specificities of heterosexual practices and identities, the policies and ideologies that create and maintain sexual (and gender) norms, and the processes of sexual policing. Yet historians have been slower to investigate the usefulness of the category “heterosexual” itself. This roundtable will use the framework of critical heterosexualities, influential within sociology, sexuality studies, and queer theory, to interrogate when, where, and under what conditions “heterosexuality” works as a category of historical analysis, and when and where it obscures more than it reveals.

This roundtable brings together a diverse group of historians with expertise across time (medieval era to the twentieth century) and region (Europe, Africa, South Asia and its diaspora, and the US). Among the questions to be discussed: how does attending to racial formations, economic structures, gender systems, religious beliefs, national, colonial or diasporic settings shift our understanding of how heterosexuality functions as a social institution? When and where ought we speak of compulsory heterosexuality, or of heteronormativity? What, precisely, does a heterosexual identity or a heterosexual practice look like, and how can the tools of historical inquiry help us to see it? Are attraction, touch, desire, longing, lust, care, fantasy, economic exchange, marriage, intimacies between individuals of “opposite sex” always best described as “heterosexual?” If heterosexuality indeed has a history, what are its limits and parameters?