>Now, two questions for the list:
>
>(1) What does a historical materialist analysis of sex, gender,
>'sexuality,' etc. look like -- an analysis that is committed to (or fully
>caught up in) neither empiricism nor left-Hegelianism nor psychoanalysis?
(and with an eye to rakesh on marx/darwin)
abstractly: an analysis of sex, gender, 'sexuality' etc. in which the emphasis is on causal rather than conceptual necessity, and in which teleology is restricted to the intentional causality of embodied human agency and its appearance elsewhere is to be rationally explained.
concretely: an english example (more a research program):
parliament first made sodomy a statutory criminal offense (indeed, a felony - i.e. punishable by death) in england in 1536. the same parliament (and in the same year) that legislated the dissolution of the monasteries. the legislation against sodomy was part of a conscious campaign directed from the office of royal secretary thomas cromwell to weaken opposition to the dissolution.
as for the performative nature of the criminalization of sodomy, here is ralph sadler (cromwell's personal secretary & his successor as secretary to henry viii) reporting on what he told king james v of scotland after he had been sent to scotland in early 1540 to persuade james not to ally with france & the pope but rather to dissolve the scots monasteries, reform the scots church, and in general ally with henry -
after first rather insultingly explaining to james that with the new revenue he would be able to stop being a commercial sheep grazer & start being a king, and that the monks 'are a kind of unprofitable people, that lived idly upon the sweat and labours of the poor' he continued that:
"[the monks] profess chastity, willful poverty and obedience...as to the first that is chastity, I dare be bold to say, that unless your monks be more holy in Scotland than ours were in England, there reigneth nowhere more carnality, incontinency, buggery, sodomy and lechery, and other abominations, than is used in cloisters, among monks, cannons, nuns, friars..." [incidentally, sadler was totally unpersuasive and unsuccessful, and perhaps among the reasons was that he did not understand how minimal in fact were the realizable revenues of the scots monasteries]
so in building upon the understanding of alan bray (*Homosexuality in Renaissance England*) that the homosexual identity in england (with special consequences obviously for the english settler colonies) that emerged in modernity was an historical product formed in some not inconsiderable part in response to the threat of sanctions for samesexsex, an historical materialist analysis would go back - at least - to the dissolution (and as part of an analysis that places the dissolution causally in the subsequent creation of an agricultural proletariat in england & the origin of capitalism).
similarly, there is a complex of property relations between husbands and wives that underwent major changes at the same time (such as the prohibition - in the Statute of Uses of 1536 - of the predecessor of the trust device as a means of preserving a widow and minor heirs interests in an estate some part of which was held in knight service), of which i would hope an historical materialist analysis would understand in isolation from neither the dissolution of the monasteries nor henry's dysfunctional marriages.
john mage