Homoeroticism, Female/Male, Concept

The concept of homoeroticism marks a relatively recent but important moment in the theorization of sex and gender. Linked to terms in the same family (homosexuality, homoaffectivity, and homosociability), yet crucially distinct from them, the concept of homoeroticism has had a major impact on the study of same-sex history and cultures. Among other contributions it has allowed scholars to explore issues of sexuality beyond the boundaries of gender identity and the sexual in a purely biological sense. As a result it has allowed major advances in gender and queer theory and in understanding the mappings of past sexual sensibilities, particularly in the areas of art and culture.

The terms homoeroticism and homoerotic refer to the tendency for erotic feelings to be projected onto a person of the same sex. They thus imply a preference for sameness over difference and stress the role of emotion. Although same-sex desire as a feature of art and culture has a long and geographically wide history, the terms homoerotic and homoeroticism are relatively recent coinages within the theorization of sex and gender. Developing out of the medical discourse of the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the German-born Austrian sexologist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) in the nineteenth century that inaugurated a new way of categorizing sexuality, these terms first appear in psychoanalytic texts of the early twentieth century, where they are used as clinical descriptors of what were at the time seen as sexual neuroses.

HISTORY AND THEORY OF HOMOEROTICISM

As with homosocial, homoerotic is a neologism, derived from homosexual but in current usage distinct from it. Although occasionally employed as synonyms for homosexual or homosexuality, the terms were adopted by some analysts precisely because they directed attention toward a psychic and emotional dimension distinct from the strictly genital aspect of sexuality. Thus, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933) argued that the word homoeroticism was preferable, given that it stressed the psychic aspect of the impulse in contradistinction to the biological term sexuality. The new coinages can thus be seen as attempts to move beyond the rigid categories of sexual identification that were imposed in the nineteenth century on hitherto more fluid behaviors and identities, and that made homosexuality less a set of actions or impulses than a defining characteristic of a person's identity. By rejecting the explicitly biological that is a component of the term homosexual, homoeroticism is able to describe feelings, attitudes, and desires that reach beyond (often pathologized and medicalized) gender identities.

Just as homosocial is used to describe single-sex contexts that are not specifically sexual, so homoerotic provides a way of labeling single-sex feelings or impulses that are not restricted to biology. Nancy Chodorow (1994) argues that biology alone cannot explain cultural fantasy or private eroticism. Less bound to the biological than homosexual and more focused on feelings and affect, homoerotic has a flexibility that makes it useful for discussion of personal desires and attributes of art and culture. That ability to identify aspects of gender beyond biological sex has made homoerotic and homoeroticism important conceptual terms for the study of sexuality in history and culture. Modern taxonomies of sex and gender are notoriously unhelpful for describing premodern and non-European identities, desires, and behaviors, because most of those societies do not employ categories fully comparable to modern notions of sexuality. The exploration of homoerotic themes, subtexts, strains, and tendencies in the expressive culture of those societies has made possible a more nuanced history of sexuality and its effects.

Homoeroticism is usually distinguished from the related terms homosociability and homoaffectivity, which refer to social bonds between persons of the same sex that are not sexual and that lack an explicitly erotic component. Male friendship would be properly described as an example of homosociability or homoaffectivity but not as homoeroticism. Homosociability is often used to refer to same-sex social interactions such as the all-male worlds of medieval guilds, boarding schools, and the army, or the all-female worlds of sewing circles, sororities, and maternity wards.

Because the boundaries between the social and the sexual are blurred, it can be difficult to distinguish homosociability from homoeroticism. Particularly in societies in which men's and women's spheres are kept separate, male-male and female-female bonds may be much stronger and more visible than in societies in which the sexes mingle more freely. But any reading of those bonds as homoerotic would need to include an awareness of the specific cultural parameters and the expectations about social roles and behaviors in that society. In some polities in ancient Greece, for instance, there was a continuum between male friendship and male homosexuality that complicates any attempt to identify specifically homoerotic cultural moments. The best studies of homoeroticism in history and global culture are attuned to this blurring of categories and situate same-sex desire within a broader interplay of sexual orientation, gender identification, gender roles, and sexual practice.

The work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984) helped set the theoretical stage for the notion of homoeroticism as it is currently used by cultural critics. Lacan's account of power, sex, and language made it possible to distinguish between anatomic or biological sex and cultural gender as well as to consider not just women's but also men's relations to the phallus as the locus of power. In doing the former Lacanian psychoanalysis opened a space for discussion of desire beyond the constraints of biology and separated desire from gender identification. In doing the latter it allowed for consideration of the effects of male-centered power on men and by extension the effects of same-sex desire as a cultural force. At the same time Foucault's understanding of gender as a representation that nonetheless holds real implications for individuals and societies pointed the way to considering the processes by which gender is constructed in all aspects of societies, such as in the media, schools, the home, the legal system, art, and discourse.

An extension of these ideas is the notion, advanced by Teresa de Lauretis (1987), that the sex-gender system is a sociocultural construct and a semiotic system or representational scheme that assigns meaning and value to individuals within a society. She argues that the construction of gender goes on chiefly through various technologies for representing gender (e.g., cinema, novels, plastic arts). The job of the critic, therefore, is to scrutinize how such representations work and what effects they have. Much modern work on homoeroticism has implicitly followed this path of scrutinizing the technologies of gender at work in different societies and historical periods.

Although her explicit focus is on male homosocial desire, Eve Sedgwick's (1985) analysis of the structures of desire in the novel shares common ground with and has inspired later studies of homoeroticism in art and culture. Sedgwick's claim is that male heterosexuality in modern American society is actually a displacement of male homosocial desire. Drawing on René Girard's 1965 study of erotic triangles in which the bond that links male rivals can be stronger than that between the rival and the beloved, she argues that the real object of male heterosexual desire is not a woman but other men. In Sedgwick's view the female love-object actually functions as a mechanism for the expression of men's desire for men. The importance of her study for the development of the concept of homoeroticism as an investigative tool is that Sedgwick deliberately aims to draw the homosocial back into the orbit of desire and of the potentially erotic. In this way Sedgwick attempts to reconstruct what she calls a broken continuum between homosociability and homosexuality. By focusing on homosocial desire, a phrase that she admits is something of an oxymoron given that homosocial usually implies relations that do not include sexual desire, Sedgwick seeks not to reconstruct a genetic cause of male homosexuality but instead to devise a strategy for generalizing about and describing historical differences within the structure of men's relations with other men. Her emphasis on the notion of homosocial desire as a tool for inquiry usefully redirected criticism toward fertile new areas of investigation into the structures of gender identities.

HOMOEROTICISM AND CRITICAL INQUIRY

Major advances in gender and queer theory have resulted from the notion of homoeroticism. Among them is the ability to focus on representations of same-sex desire in art and culture and to understand how they help shape sexual behaviors and attitudes. Studies of homoeroticism in the Biblical world, in classical Arabic literature, in sports, as a subtext in Star Trek, in vampire cinema, and in any number of other cultural productions and institutions have shown the crucial role played by same-sex desire in forming cultures. Charting a range of experiences from love and friendship to intimacy and sex, critical work has stressed the importance in European and North American literary history of homoerotic relations between men (and less frequently, women) even before homosexuality became codified at the end of the century. Homoerotic tendencies in Homer's verses on Zeus and Ganymede, the poetry of the Roman Catullus (84–54 bce) and the Greek Sappho (ca. 612–570 bce), William Shakespeare's Sonnets, and the writings of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959) have all been studied as part of the history of the social shaping of gender and sexuality.

The notion of the homoerotic has been especially useful in analyzing the role of desire in art, regardless of the biological sex of the creators or consumers of that art. It thus becomes less necessary to identify the sexual orientation of Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) or Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) than to consider the ways in which all sorts of cultural objects and art works contain homoerotic features. Such a perspective allows recognition of the strains of homoeroticism that have been present in European art since the time of the ancient Greeks and to trace its tradition through the Renaissance (1350–1600) and on to the present. It also frees scholars from assuming that male (or female) homoerotic art is always or inevitably the creation of homosexual men (or women) and that it is aimed solely at readers or viewers of the same sex. Instead, the erotic imagination of art can be examined in a more fluid way that makes it possible to understand, for instance, the Japanese tradition found in the anime subgenre of yaoi of male homoerotic art produced by female artists.

Several recent studies show the advantages of the concept of homoeroticism in freeing scholars from the limitations of a narrow focus on gender identity and from exploration of sexuality in a purely biological sense. In studies of eroticism in art, for instance, the notion of the homoerotic has made it possible to broaden the inquiry so that an artist's sexual identity becomes only one possible factor in understanding the erotic content of a work of art. In this way an art historian can analyze the erotic themes and images of artworks without directly examining the sexual orientation of the artist, as Jonathan Weinberg does in Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art (2004). Although Weinberg excludes works of art by women and although gay artists are important to his study, he insists that he has not written a history of gay art and he does not explicitly engage the subject of homosexuality. Instead, his study explores same-sex desire in U.S. art through representations of male bodies such as the swimmers in Thomas Eakins's (1844–1916) "Swimming" or the boxers and athletes in the pictures of George Bellows (1882–1925). Weinberg focuses particularly on the theme of male bonding but also makes room for consideration of the female gaze and of representations of race. In taking this approach in his book, he largely bypasses identity politics in favor of an investigation into expressions of sensibility.

The concept of homoeroticism has also contributed to a better understanding of past sexual sensibilities. Whereas the homosexual person is a modern invention, as Foucault observed, a focus on homoeroticism makes it possible to explore same-sex desire before the advent of modern definitions of homosexuality. By opening the door to the investigation of a fuller range of expressions of same-sex desire that lie beyond sexual determinism or gender identification—such as friendship, male or female bonding, and intimacy—studies of homoeroticism have provided a way of understanding past sexual attitudes and behaviors that do not fit modern categories. The essays in Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, edited by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger (2002), for instance, explore encounters between women that might have ranged from the homoerotic to the homosocial from prehistoric Crete to Egypt in the fifth century ce. One essay describes how grave stelai in the main cemetery in Athens depict female gazes, including some that seem homoerotic; other essays discuss Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 bce–17 ce) and Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, 39–65 ce), ancient Latin poets who offer examples of male authors who write narratives of female homoeroticism. Although male homoeroticism has received far more attention than has female homoeroticism, studies such as those in Among Women have begun to explore the history and cultural representation of female homoerotic desire and are starting to fill in another overlooked aspect of the construction of gender and sexuality.

A final advance offered by homoeroticism as a conceptual and critical category is that it directs attention to the ways in which gender relations are constantly created, maintained, and contested in daily life. With its emphasis on attitudes and feelings, which by definition are changeable, homoeroticism is a reminder that sex and gender relations are not static pregivens but, instead, are molded by ongoing processes. The task of critical inquiry into the dynamics of homoeroticism is therefore to chart those ongoing processes and to show how various experiences and representations across time and different cultures help create sexualities.

Considered as developments in the theorization of sex and gender, the adoption of the terms homoeroticism and homoerotic can perhaps best be understood as a largely successful attempt to find a more nuanced way of describing the nature of desire and the processes of gender construction. Although new terms continue to be coined to more accurately depict aspects of sexual behavior that may not be clearly expressed through existing terminology—for example, the phrase men who have sex with men, which is used neutrally to describe a specific activity without associating that activity with any one sexual orientation or self-identification with a certain group—the concept of homoeroticism remains valuable for the way that it has enabled scholars to be less hampered by the particular demands of identity and the sexual in a genital sense. The notion of homoeroticism is consistent with a postmodern awareness of the artificiality and constructedness of gender and sex and speaks to the advent of widely shared ideas about gender flexibility. As such it is a term that is tied to its own cultural moment in the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, but it remains well equipped to meet the methodological challenges of historical and cross-cultural inquiry into the creation of human sexuality.

see also Homoaffectivity, Concept; Homosexuality, Contemporary: I. Overview; Lesbianism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chodorow, Nancy. 1994. Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

De Lauretis, Teresa. 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ellenzweig, Allen. 1992. The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images, Delacroix to Mapplethorpe. 1992. New York: Columbia University Press.

Ferenczi, Sándor. 1910. Sex in Psycho-analysis, trans. Ernest Jones. New York: R. G. Badger.

Foucault, Michel. 1980. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Rob Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

Girard, René. 1965. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Nissinen, Martti. 1998. Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin, and Lisa Auanger, eds. 2002. Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.

Smith, Patricia Juliana. 1997. Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press.

Waugh, Thomas. 1996. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press.

Weinberg, Jonathan. Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art. 2004. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Wright, J. W. and Everett K. Rowson, eds. 1997. Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

                                                Claire Sponsler