ABSTRACT
The choice for celibacy represented a concerted feminist protest against existing social relations and forged a new sexual order. This is why nearly all of the first-generation American leaders of the suffrage movement—including Margaret Fuller, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Antoinette Brown—took lifelong vows of celibacy. Choice functions as a switch point between feminist theory and sexuality studies. While feminist theory valorizes choice as the heart of bodily autonomy, sexuality studies finds the notion of choice nonsensical or even repugnant. The notion of choice being part of sexuality is offensive to sexuality studies for several reasons: First, the idea that sexuality is chosen suggests that it is mutable and thus is understood in the American context to fuel Right-wing ideas that homosexuality can be cured. Second, it seems incompatible with psychoanalytic conceptions that sexuality is wholly beyond our knowledge and beyond our control.
