1  Introduction
Theories of the social-historical construction of homosexuality and heterosexuality suggest that these and other sexualities are produced by human beings in different ways, in different societies, at different times. But what does the social construction of sexualities suggest as a general model of the construction process? Clarifying that model will, I believe, provide a tool for analyzing historically specific modes of construction, and the human constructs produced within each.[1]

To create historically specific studies of sexuality we had to break decisively with an earlier, fundamentally ahistorical idea of sexuality. That major conceptual shift is clear in my own work. In 1976, in my first book on homosexual history, I spoke of “gay” people, desires, and acts in the early American colonies, conceiving those colonists, lusts, and acts as identical to those of present-day U.S. gay people.[2] Those eternal, ahistorical gay colonists were, I stress, implicitly identical, not just similar, to us. The homosexual desires and acts of 1676 were the homosexual desires and acts of 1976. Homosexuality, heterosexuality, and sexuality in general, we assumed, stayed the same. What changed was society’s responses.

But by 1983, in my second book on homosexual history, I was moving with others beyond that ahistorical understanding of sexuality. My analysis contrasted the historical organization of lust and procreation in the early-American colonies with the very different organization of sexuality in the U.S. between 1880 and 1950.[3] The new sexual relativity theory, I began to understand, suggested that everything changed: sexual actors, sexual desires, sexual acts, those acts' effects and meanings, and the systems in which sexuality was produced. The basic character of sexuality has changed over time, along with our understanding of what constitutes sexuality.

The great variation in what we call sexuality is suggested by some of the radically different, powerfully expressive words historically associated with intense, physical, bodily acts, desires, and relations of people with people:

amour, appetite, ardor, attraction, carnality, commerce, concupiscence, connection, contact, craving, desire, drive, eroticism, having the hots for, hunger, impulse, instinct, intercourse, lasciviousness, lechery, libido, longing, love, lubriciousness, lust, passion, object choice, orientation, preference, randiness, sensuality, taste, temptation, urge, venery, yearning.  

Each of those terms bears investigation as a clue to a particular, historical erotic system, a lust regime that time-minded researchers want to understand in its own, specific character. How to best comprehend the historical diversity suggested by those different terms is an issue that motivates this essay.

Many researchers understand now that the phenomena we call sexual have changed radically over time. We’ve learned to deploy the term sexuality provisionally, to ask how they back then named, conceptualized, and organized actors, desires, activities, and the systems in which they were constructed. We’ve learned to investigate each society’s changing way of ordering, making, and understanding lust.

For thirty-five years the idea that sexuality is socially and historically constructed has helped historians, sociologists, and anthropologists reject the earlier ahistorical concept of our subject. The rich empirical and analytical results of the social construction framework are now seen in multiple books and articles detailing the historically particular forms of sexuality, and the systems in which they were produced.[4]

As we left the old essentialism behind, social construction frameworks proved their worth in practice. Once the problem of sexual essentialism was pointed out, few scholars came directly to essentialism’s defense.[5] And so, paradoxically, as the struggle against the earlier fundamentalism was won, social constructionists lost their chief adversaries, and their original motive for developing social construction theory. The earlier intense interest in social construction lost its original reason for being.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, in academia, teachers of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, and queer theorists, were more often welcomed within film, literature, Women’s Studies, American Studies, anthropology and sociology departments than in more conservative history departments. Analysis of the particular, theoretically informed work that historians do, researching, documenting, and interpreting the actions of people over time, in specific social systems, was sidetracked.

One of those queer theorist pioneers, literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in 1990, in The Epistemology of the Closet, objected to social construction theory as she claimed it was formulated by Michel Foucault and David M. Halperin.[6] Sedgwick objected to the idea of a “Great Paradigm Shift” in which a new, medical conception of homosexuality and heterosexuality was produced and, she alleged, everywhere and evenly, replaced earlier concepts – for example, inversion and sodomy. (Nowhere did Foucault or Halperin make such a claim.) She pointed to multiple, contradictory, old and new, concepts and enactments of sexuality circulating simultaneously in present-day societies. And so, she argued, we in the present can’t simply assume we understand others’ understanding of homosex and heterosex.

Sedgwick did have a point. The construction of women’s heterosexuality, for example, has had a different historical timetable, and a different impact, than the construction of men’s. But the contradictions Sedgwick pointed to between different understandings of homo- and heterosex can be studied by constructionist historians as “uneven development,” an old analytical instrument in the historian’s tool box. Instead, however, of arguing for a more flexible, subtle, historically specific social constructionism, Sedgwick threw out the fledgling constructionist baby.[7]

Acting on her objections, Sedgwick set out, she said, to “promote the obsolescence of ‘essentialist/constructivist’” as the two, opposed ways of understanding homosex/heterosex.[8] Instead, Sedgwick suggested, homo and hetero should be analyzed according to whether they conform with or flout dominant gender norms, as sexualities of minority or majority populations, or, alternately, as sexualities universal among humans.

Sedgwick had opened her 1990 manifesto with the dramatic declaration:

an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western Culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/hetero definition.[9]

Despite that provocative challenge, Sedgwick and later students of the queer have shown little interest in the empirical history of the homo/hetero divide – little interest in researching, documenting, and analyzing the detailed evidence of homo/hetero’s origins and construction over time.[10]

Sedgwick’s move to make the essentialist/constructionist debate obsolete, taken up enthusiastically by academic queer theorists, was, in the words of historian David Halperin, “spectacularly successful.” In 1991, for example, while calling publicly for “better social theory,” Michael Warner commented, “The major theoretical debate over constructionism seems exhausted.”[11]

So discredited was constructionism that, by 2002, as formidable an intellect as Halperin was reporting in How to Do the History of Homosexuality:

As a result [of Sedgwick’s critique], the very phrase ‘social construction’ has come to seem a hopelessly out-of-date formula in queer studies, and the mere invocation of it makes a writer appear backward and unsophisticated. I have had to almost entirely avoid it in the essays collected here, in favor of less compromised (if no less contested) terms like “historicism.”[12]

After 1990, in academia, among queer theorists, social construction took on a strong, musty whiff of the passé.[13] And so the further development of social construction theory as active aid to empirical historical research came to a halt. Today, in 2016, we are left with multiple, unresolved, conflicting interpretations of social construction theory.[14] Clarifying and developing that theory still offers, I suggest, a valuable means of understanding the human-produced world. So, yes, I dare to call for a reconsideration of the allegedly naïve and simpleminded, old-fashioned and over, social construction. Even worse, I stress social construction’s intimate alliance with an even older Marxist mode of production theory.[15] At serious risk of being trashed as stupid, naïve, and over-literal, I suggest that, to better comprehend the world we make, we need a clear, general model of social-historical construction.[16]

Because heterosexuality is still so often conceived in universal, eternal, anti-historical terms it provides a good test case to submit to the model I propose. So, by way of illustrating this model, I sample here the history I began in The Invention of Heterosexuality, and research by others.[17] Examples of hetero history are offered here to suggest how this model can work as analytical tool. Empirically detailed heterosexual histories are work for future researchers.

Next: 2 The Model

Notes
[1] The present essay has had a long gestation. Starting in 1956, and continuing intensely through 1962 or ’63, I undertook close, critical readings of major works by Simone de Beauvoir, Christopher Caudwell, R. G. Collingwood, Antonio Gramsci, Arnold Hauser, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, C. Wright Mills, Talcott Parsons, Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Weber, Raymond Williams, and other social analysts.