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• After Homosexuality
• Kate Redburn (bio)

Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System
by Christopher Chitty
Duke University Press, 2020, 240 pp.

Where do gay people come from? This has been one of the central questions for the gay rights movement in the United States. Responses to it animate arguments on all sides. Opponents believe that gay people have sexual practices and compulsions that can be redirected through counseling and prayer. Advocates have often said that gay people are born this way, and some suggest that scientists will prove it by finding “gay genes.” Or at least that’s what they have to say in court; the structure of U.S. constitutional law requires groups seeking sanctuary under the equal protection clause to show that they are a “discrete and insular minority” whose members share immutable characteristics and a history of oppression.

These are fundamentally historical claims. So for decades now, advocates have drawn on the history of homosexuality to bolster their arguments. Some historians became advocates in their own right, testifying in open court and drafting friend-of-the-court briefs for skeptical judges. Far more common is an unspoken acknowledgment by scholars that their work might be put to a particular political purpose, which provides an orientation for the field. Their work foregrounds the kinds of questions that illuminate both the origins of homosexual identity and a history of oppression on that basis.

In the past five years, the arguments finally worked. Gay people won work-place antidiscrimination protection and the right to marry. Some declared victory and went home; others have turned their attention to protections for trans people or to campaigns that touch gay lives—prison abolition, immigrant justice, and progressive climate policy, to name a few. The work goes on, but the public fervor over homosexuality has diminished. It is tempting to wonder if, in the United States at least, we have reached the end of gay history.

The answer, of course, is no. And Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System, an ambitious retelling of the history of capitalism through the politics of gay sex, has arrived just in time to help dissuade us of that idea. Sexual Hegemony suggests new substantive and methodological directions for the history of homosexuality—directions that could transform the meaning of queer politics in our moment.

The book is a gripping, and at times frustrating, attempt to return “the history of sexuality to a history of property,” as Chitty described his research. It is also a bittersweet record. In 2015, Chitty killed himself while he was in the final stages of his PhD in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His friend and comrade Max Fox collected drafts of his dissertation, [End Page 152] seminar papers, research notes, and transcriptions of his conference presentations to compose the final manuscript. In his grief, Fox couldn’t bear for the world to lose Chitty’s ideas, too. It’s an extraordinary act of generosity and care—for Chitty’s memory, for the countless scholars who will be debating and building from this text, and for sexual politics on the left.

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After the 1975 Gay Pride Parade in New York City (Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images)

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Start just about anywhere in the history of sexuality, and the road will lead back to Michel Foucault. The first volume of The History of Sexuality endowed the field and gave it a research agenda. Two core questions animated the book and the scholarship that followed: First, what explains the emergence of “homosexual” as an identity category? Here, Foucault famously declared 1870 as the birthday of the modern homosexual, a result of scientific discourses that converted diverse sexual acts into a consolidated “species.” He claimed to have found a historical trajectory where criminal sexual acts became understood as a medical pathology, and then a personal identity. Second, Foucault asked, how does sexuality relate to modern governance? His response— that modern states subjugate bodies and control populations through the exercise of “biopower”—illustrated his theory that regulatory power is...

中文翻译：

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同性恋之后

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 同性恋之后
• 凯特·雷德本（生物）

《性霸权：世界体系崛起中的治国法，鸡奸和资本》，
克里斯托弗·基蒂·
杜克大学出版社，2020年，第240页。

同性恋者从何而来？这一直是美国同性恋权利运动的核心问题之一。对它的回应引起了各方的争论。反对者认为，同性恋者的性行为和强迫可以通过咨询和祈祷来改变。提倡者经常说同性恋是这样出生的，有些人建议科学家通过发现“同性恋基因”来证明这一点。或者至少那是他们在法庭上必须说的；美国宪法的结构要求在平等保护条款下寻求庇护的团体必须表明他们是“离散的，孤立的少数派”，其成员具有不变的特征和压迫的历史。

这些从根本上讲是历史主张。因此，几十年来，倡导者利用同性恋的历史来支持他们的论点。一些历史学家独立地成为拥护者，在公开法庭上作证，并为怀疑的法官起草法庭上的庭友简介。更为普遍的是，学者们毫不掩饰地承认他们的工作可能有特定的政治目的，这为该领域提供了方向。他们的工作提出了各种问题，这些问题既阐明了同性恋身份的起源，又阐明了以此为基础的压迫历史。

在过去的五年中，这些争论终于奏效了。同性恋者获得了工作场所的反歧视保护和结婚权。一些人宣布胜利并回家。其他人则将注意力转移到保护跨性别者或涉及同性恋生活的运动上，例如废除监狱，移民司法和渐进式气候政策。这项工作还在继续，但是公众对同性恋的热衷已经减少。令人怀疑的是，至少在美国，我们是否已经走到同性恋历史的尽头。

答案当然是不。克里斯托弗·基蒂（Christopher Chitty）的《性霸权：世界体系崛起中的治国之道，鸡奸和资本》，是一场通过同性恋政治来重述资本主义历史的雄心勃勃的举动，正好赶上了劝阻我们放弃这一想法的时刻。性霸权为同性恋历史提出了新的实质性和方法论方向，这些方向可能会改变我们当下的酷儿政治的含义。

正如奇蒂（Chitty）所描述的那样，这本书令人着迷，有时令人沮丧，它试图将“性史转变为财产史”。这也是苦乐参半的记录。2015年，Chitty处于加利福尼亚大学圣克鲁斯分校的“意识史”课程的博士学位最后阶段时自杀。他的朋友和同志马克斯·福克斯（Max Fox）收集了他的论文草稿，[End Page 152]研讨会论文，研究笔记以及他的会议演讲文稿的转录本，以构成最终的手稿。在悲痛中，福克斯不能忍受全世界失去奇蒂的想法。这是一种非凡的慷慨和关怀行为，对Chitty的记忆，对从本文中进行辩论和建构的无数学者以及对左翼的性政治而言都是如此。

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1975年纽约同志游行之后（艾伦·坦嫩鲍姆（Allan Tannenbaum）/盖蒂图片社（Getty Images）

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从性史上的任何地方开始，这条路将回到米歇尔·福柯（Michel Foucault）。性史的第一卷赋予了该领域并给出了研究议程。有两个核心问题使这本书和随之而来的奖学金变得活跃起来：首先，是什么解释了“同性恋”作为身份类别的出现？在这里，福柯著名地宣布1870年为现代同性恋的生日，这是科学论述将多种性行为转变为统一的“物种”的结果。他声称找到了历史轨迹，犯罪性行为被理解为医学病理学，然后是个人身份。其次，福柯问道，性与现代治理有何关系？他的回应（现代国家通过行使“生物权力”来征服身体并控制人口）说明了他的理论，即监管权力是……