The cultural turn

Just at the point that gender history and the history of sexuality were emerging as historical fields, many historians were changing their basic understanding of the methods and function of history.

This heightened interest in discourse among historians, usually labeled the “linguistic turn” or the “cultural turn,” drew on the ideas of literary and linguistic theory - often loosely termed “deconstruction” or “post­structuralism” - about the power of language. Language is so powerful, argued some theorists, that it determines, rather than simply describes, our understanding of the world; knowledge is passed down through language, and knowledge is power.

Historians of gender and sexuality were thus prominent exponents of the cultural turn, and many analyzed representations of women, men, the body, sexual actions, and related topics within different types of discourses. Some historians came to assert that everything regarding gender and sexuality is determined by culture, a position often labeled “social constructionist.” For social constructionists, the idea that everyone had a fixed sexual identity based on something internal was wrong, and those who sought physical bases for sexual orientation were “essentialists.” Gender, too, was a matter of social construction. Because the differences among women (and among men) based on class, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other factors were and are so great, many wondered whether “woman” (or “man”) is a valid category whose meaning is self-evident and unchanging over time, or whether assuming so was, again, naive essentialism. Gender and sexuality, some concluded, are “performative,” that is, roles that can be taken on or changed at will.

The linguistic/cultural turn - which happened in other fields along with history - elicited harsh responses from other historians, however, including many who focused on women and gender. They asserted that it denied women the ability to shape their world - what is usually termed “agency" - in both past and present by positing unchangeable linguistic structures.

New developments and new theoretical perspectives are adding additional complexity. The notion of sexual orientation initially created a dichotomized sexual schema of homosexual and heterosexual, but then other categories were added to more fully reflect the wide range of human desires. Sex­change operations have also become more widely available for people whose external genitalia and even chromosomal and hormonal patterns mark them as male or female, but who mentally understand themselves to be the other. Transsexual surgery can make the body fit more closely with the mind, but it has also led to challenging questions about gender and sexual identity: At what point in this process does a “man” become a “woman,” or vice versa? If sexual identity is based on the sex of one's partner, did individuals who underwent sex-change operations also change from being homosexual to heterosexual or vice versa? In the 1990s such questions began to be made even more complex by individuals who described themselves as “transgen­dered,” that is, as neither male nor female or both male and female. Sexual and gender identities grew into an ever-lengthening list of categories: the longest version I have seen of this in the United States is LGBTTQQI2S - lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, transgender, queer, questioning, inter­sexed, two-spirit. Studies of individuals who challenged sexual and gender categorizations in the past have accompanied the growth of the trans rights movement in the present.

Figure 10.2 Hijras at a Pride March organized by the LGBT community in Mumbai, February 2014, to protest Indian laws that criminalize sexual acts between consenting adults of the same sex (© Subhash Sharma/ZUMA Press/Corbis).

sexuality and to stress that demands for rights for homosexuals or transgen­der people are not simply a Western import.

Some activists and theorists have wondered, however, whether this grow­ing list of categories has reified boundaries instead of blurring or bending them. This point of view has emerged especially in queer theory, which was developed in the early 1990s, a period of intense AIDS activism, and combined elements of gay and lesbian studies with other concepts originating in literary and feminist analysis. Queer theorists argued that sexual notions were central to all aspects of culture, and called for greater attention to sexuality that was at odds with whatever was defined as “normal.” They asserted that the line between “normal” and “abnormal” was always socially constructed, however, and that, in fact, all gender and sexual categories were artificial and changing. Identity of any sort could easily become false and oppressive, and instead what should be celebrated are hybridity and performance. In the last decade, queer theory has been widely applied, as scholars have “queered" - that is, called into question the categories used to describe and analyze - the nation, race, religion, and other topics along with gender and sexuality. This broadening has led some - including a few of the founders of the field - to wonder whether queer theory loses its punch when everything is queer, but it continues to be an influential theoretical perspective.

Related questions about identity, subjectivity, and the cultural construction of difference have also emerged from postcolonial theory. Postcolonial history and theory were initially associated with South Asian scholars and the book series Subaltern Studies, and focused on people who have been subordinated by virtue of their race, class, culture, or language as part of the process of colonization and imperialism in the modern world. Historians of Europe and the United States are increasingly applying insights from postcolonial theory to their own work as they investigate subaltern groups such as racial and ethnic minorities, and world historians apply them to analyze relationships of power in all chronological periods, not just the era of imperialism.

The notion of hegemony, initially developed by the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci, has been an important concept in much postcolonial theory and the history that builds on it. Hegemony differs from domination because it involves convincing dominated groups to acquiesce to the desires and systems of the dominators through cultural as well as military and political means. Generally this was accomplished by granting special powers and privileges to some individuals and groups from among the subordinated population, or by convincing them through education or other forms of socialization that the new system was beneficial or preferable. The notion of hegemony explains why small groups of people have been able to maintain control over much larger populations without constant rebellion and protest, though some scholars have argued that the emphasis on hegemony down­plays the ability of subjugated peoples to recognize the power realities in which they are enmeshed and to shape their own history. Many historians have used the concept of hegemony to examine the role of high-status women, who gained power over subordinate men and women through their relationships with high-status men. The sociologist R. W. Connell has also applied the idea of hegemony to studies of masculinity, noting that in every culture one form of masculinity is hegemonic, but men who are excluded from that particular form still benefit from male privilege.^[326]

Queer theory and postcolonial theory have both been criticized for falling into the pattern set by traditional history, that is, regarding the male experience as normative and paying insufficient attention to gender differences.