ABSTRACT
Much has been made in recent years of the construction of gender through the performance of certain social roles; for adult men and women, one of the most pressing of these is the appropriate expression of sexuality. Historians of sexuality have suggested that the study of forms sexual desire and behaviour that have been outlawed in the past, in particular prostitution and homosexuality, sheds light upon how normative heterosexuality is enshrined and policed in society. This has even led some historians to suggest that the binary division between male and female is inadequate to define the full range of human experience. Randolf Trumbach, for example, has proposed that the emergence of the ‘molly’ (male homosexual) in the eighteenth century led to a discernible division between as many as four genders - male and female, ‘straight’ and ‘gay’.1 This approach is not without its limitations; Trumbach does little, for example, to sketch the sexual histories of women who were not prostitutes at this time. In the existing historiography of early modem sex and marriage, many surveys focus upon structurally-enforced punishment against those who participated in illicit forms of sexual activity (such as sodomy and prostitution) while doing little to enlighten the reader about a wider range of experiences. Michael McKeon, for example, moves rapidly from talking about gender, to considering the outlawing of homosexuality in the long eighteenth century.2 The more elaborate the edifices of gender become, the more remotely the contemporary voices of early modem England seem to be heard.
