In the remainder of this [cluster of posts] I am going to talk about another way in which people divide up the world, which might seem natural but which isn’t on closer inspection, and that is sex, gender and sexuality.
It is still commonly believed that gender is the social construction placed upon the biological binary of sex. Indeed this lies at the heart of one of the most current and most heated political issues. This is much more complicated, however, than the idea of a natural sexual binary will allow and, as we’ll see, issues that are nowadays often presented as natural and eternal, often with some sort of vague reference back to our historical heritage, were actually seen in very different ways in the past. Again, a closer investigation of how the people of late antiquity thought about the sexual categories of their world permits a different view on the modern world.
The first, preliminary point that must be made concerns gender. It is still often thought that gender history means the history of women; it doesn’t, even though I have made this week’s discussion group about women. Women’s history and gender history are quite different. If you have never had cause yet to read it, then I recommend you read Joan Scott’s classic article on ‘gender as a useful category of historical analysis’, even though it has nothing to say about our period. Gender history is about the construction of the categories of masculine and feminine; it’s relational; it allows us to see masculinity, as in the Roman world, constructed not simply against femininity but also – and sometimes perhaps more importantly – against lesser forms of masculinity. Sometimes, as we’ve seen the construction of gender is not a binary, with a separate feminine and masculine poles, but what one might call monopolar, with a single focus: the masculine. We can see this in the classical Roman world. The creation of new models of masculinity in the fourth century – martial and then ascetic - shook this up in such a way, I have argued, that in the sixth century, as the classical civic masculine ideal faded, it left separate feminine and masculine ideals – a more binary system. In turn, I have suggested, in the seventh century there was a return to something more like the monopolar Roman system but with the crucial difference that the dominant form of masculinity was martial – warrior masculinity – rather than civic. This is manifest in some of the things that I have mentioned already, such as the shift in the focus of investment in decoration and adornment from items of female dress to elements of male costume. There were shifts in the gendering of religious identity too. It’s possible that, as I have argued in an article that has appeared very recently, that gendered ideals in the Christian sphere moved in different directions from those in the secular sphere, so that for example, female and male religious ideals were described in essentially similar terms in 6th-century western hagiography, at a time when there was more of a binary separation in secular terms, and then separated out into distinct male and female ideals in the seventh century, as secular gender norms were returning to a more monopolar set of ideas. There were all sorts of shifts, and regional variations, in the way that power was gendered.
The most important thinker to challenge the traditional ideas of the separation of sex and gender as ‘natural’ and ‘social’ respectively, was the American philosopher Judith Butler, who I think is a really interesting and important thinker. Her classic works on this topic were Gender Trouble, published in around 1990, followed by Bodies that Matter a few years later. There’s no time in a ten-minute or so lecture like this to do anything like justice to this work so I will have to simplify; I do recommend Butler’s work to you; it’s not easy if you’re not used to reading philosophy (well, it wasn’t to me when I first read her, when I hadn’t read much if any philosophy) but it’s a lot easier than some, and she does tend to make the same point several different ways, so if you just persist it will become clear.
One of the key points that Butler made was that while biological sex might, in some ways, be seen as a binary or at least as having two opposing poles, the ways in which human bodies possess the physical or genetic features of the male or female sex are very much messier than that. It’s not the case that all males possess each and every one of a range of features and that all females possess each and every one of an entirely discrete set of scientifically-observable features. That is probably only true in a relative minority of cases. There is a whole gamut of combinations between those extremes and in the middle things can be very mixed indeed. There were two points that Butler made to develop this. One was that the science of sex was sometimes every bit as socially contingent as the science of race, or that it was enormously influenced by the gendered norms of the societies in which the scientists worked. This has been shown to be the case over and over, in all sorts of cases. Sometimes there have been absolutely horrible cases where people have had intrusive surgery to make them conform to the sex that they were declared to be at birth.
Butler’s other point was that, since sex was not – in every single case – something that emerged clearly, naturally, independently, from the physical body and manifested as the simple membership of one of two categories, the sexing of people was as much assigned as anything else. She cites the example of the midwife holding up the new baby and saying, ‘it’s a boy’ or ‘it’s a girl’, arguing that in a sense this is a performative: a statement that creates what it describes. After that, we all experience our bodies via a set of social norms and expectations; there’s no point where we can go back and experience our lives as pre-sexed. So in that sense, sex was very much like gender, rather than being the natural, scientific rock on which the latter was founded. A lot of people still don’t want to accept this but the case doesn’t seem to me to be contestable.
Sex, sexuality and gender interact with each other in an enormously wide range of ways, in Late Antiquity as well as today. We might actually be surprised – given what are regarded as supposedly ‘medieval’ attitudes, let alone those which we are sometimes told are normal or natural about the wide breadth of the things which late antique and early medieval people appear not to have regarded as ‘wrong’, let alone ‘unnatural’. Some of these I will come back to in the next [blog post]. For now I want only to think about sex and sexuality.
The ways in which sexuality, in the sense of one’s choice of sexual partners, related to other aspects of late antique identity was quite different from now. As with race, some of the modern ideas about sexuality, norms and deviations, rather than being age-old, are quite recent and, in particular, many belong to the modern period’s obsession with supposedly scientific organising and categorising.
One of the problems with late antique and medieval sex is the nature of the evidence. On the one hand there are Christian treatises on the topic, which as we have seen, by the end of the fifth century were stressing virginity and abstinence over chastity and restraint; we’ve also seen that in ascetic thinking, sex was seen as a temptation but not simply in itself but as part of a wider range of issues of bodily self-control. We have also seen how by 600 these sorts of ascetic ideas were coming to be applied to secular society. On the other hand, and this is truer for the periods before and after late antiquity there is evidence for dirty jokes, bawdy songs and the rest, or in our period a sort of reverse interpretation of the penitentials’ obsession with sex which saw it as evidence that all this was going on all the time. As one scholar has said, one has the impression on the one hand that ‘medieval people’ were incredibly frustrated and hung up about sex, or on the other hand that they were obsessed with it; that everyone was constantly at it. The problem is that it’s like what judging modern sex would be like if the only evidence we had were the sermons of southern US fire-and-brimstone evangelists on the one hand and hard-core porn on the other. I don’t think medieval people were either incredibly frustrated and sex-starved or that they were incredibly sexed up; boringly perhaps, I think they had an incredibly average amount of sex.
One way in which the post-enlightenment mania for scientific (or pseudo-scientific) categorisation impacts upon our ways of seeing is in the way that heterosexuality has been established as a norm and homosexuality as a deviation. In fact heterosexuality and homosexuality were defined and classified at the same time. Then a whole set of ideas about psychiatry and identity were built on that.
Things were much more complex in late antiquity and the early middle ages and I will develop this point in the next video lecture. In the meantime I will leave you with this diagram from James Brundage’s Law, Sex and Christian Society which illustrates the thinking about sex that is manifested by the penitentials. There are some superficially curious aspects about the penitentials’ attitudes to sex. It took me many years, as a godless social historian, to figure out why oral sex earned a higher penitence than sex with, say, a goat. The answer is that a goat (in early medieval thought) didn’t have an immortal soul that you could corrupt with your disgusting sexual practices. The penitentials, by the way, don’t specify what the penalty was for having oral sex with a goat; perhaps that was considered to be its own punishment.
