Sexual Hegemony by Christopher Chitty

Author:Christopher Chitty
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4.1. Francisco Goya, Summer, or The Harvest, 1786, oil on canvas. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

The growth of markets and an increasing division of labor and bureaucratic rationality can only partially account for the conditions of possibility of homosexuality or any other “sexual freedom.” The production of a propertyless condition is the decisive factor in the transition from economic production centered around mastery, reproductive marriage, and agricultural community to one based on impersonal market-mediated relations in towns and cities. The compulsion to produce for an employer or for the market is a form of life that produces surpluses, leading to the further development of the forces of production. It is a form of life that emerged on the periphery of peasant proprietorship, a population superfluous with respect to inheritance and land. This kind of population and these social relations emerged alongside the first large-scale textile industries, for reasons that have been discussed above, and specifically in the Mediterranean world, which remained at variance with the wider sociodemographic pattern of family formation in the rest of Europe.

Mediterranean sexuality was a transitional form between that of feudalism and capitalism, combining elements of the old and new, and this sexuality really was at variance with demographic patterns of family formation within the agrarian societies of the western European peasantry. The stark contrast demonstrates how this world’s social form—maritime commerce and relations of mastery and direct domination—formed one of the necessary preconditions of a homosexual way of life. The longue durée has allowed us to see how a combination of factors—a pastoral way of life based on transhumance, a piratical kind of political-economic activity at sea, a specific climate, the urban dominance over surrounding populations, and a strict social hierarchy based on blood relations—form the necessary preconditions for this earlier form of homosexuality. The eclipse of Mediterranean homosexuality or, rather, its transformation in the context of a new world system centered around the Atlantic is, at its outer limit, marked by the geopolitical decline of its hegemony and cultural influence, exposure to syphilis, population decline, and out-migration.

A residual form of this Mediterranean social and sexual formation persists in later Dutch and English capitalist hegemony and even well into the twentieth century in the immigrant communities of North and South America. Mediterranean sailors were still in high demand in the maritime world, and the sexuality of Mediterranean emigrant men was considered ambiguous and suspicious by the Protestants of the north. This is due not only to the out-migration of Mediterranean populations, but this factor is worth considering. The Protestant north understood homosexuality according to a model of contagion, as a foreign influence having spread from the Mediterranean south. Here there was within this new social formation the symbolic conflation of a new disease, syphilis, with “unnatural” sexual appetites. Panics concerning the discovery of homosexual networks in northern cities doubtless reflect an increasing anxiety about a transformation of the morals and sexuality of urban populations resulting from economic cycles of boom and bust and the unevenness of economic development.

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