ABSTRACT
To think about sexual categories as being arbitrary, or contin-gent on historical or social practice, is still dicult for most people because sexuality, like musicality, has been so thoroughly naturalized during the twentieth century, and intimately embedded in an individual sense of self (Jagose 1996, pp. 17-18). But, while maintaining the importance for modern society of the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality themselves and the process of acculturation that surrounds them, thinking historically about that “sense of self” has, paradoxically, become the basis of much lesbian and gay critical work. It also underwrites “queer theory,” the intellectual phenomenon based on the recuperation of the pejorative term, “queer,” and the inecting of lesbian and gay knowledge with postmodern knowledge and ways of thinking. Arguing along lines proposed by Foucault, Halperin (1990, pp. 24-5) pinpoints the historical diculty: “Homosexuality presupposes sexuality, and sexuality itself…is a modern invention” which “represents the appropriation of the human body and of its erogenous zones by an ideological discourse.” Before the beginning of the nineteenth century deviant sexual acts such as sodomy-“that utterly confused category”
(Foucault 1978, p. 101)—were not particularized according to gender or even species; and some ancient modes of same-sex desire, such as Sapphism and pederasty, can be traced through Western culture. By the end of the century, however, the dominant model of heterosexuality was posited upon its binary opposition to an actual (but still incoherent) homosexual identity. A similar process of identity formation can be seen in music, where “musicality” replaced the earlier and vaguer “musicalness” as an inherent quality attributed to “nature” but actually constructed in musical institutions of various kinds, particularly educational ones involved in the development of musical talent (see Kingsbury 1988).
