Sexuality and American Culture

A powerful tool that humans have at their fingertips is that of language.  When we do not understand something, we can first name it in order to make it more accessible.  Part of the discursive explosion around sexuality, therefore, is the proliferation of terms with which to discuss and analyze the topic.  This includes words like “petting,” “necking,” “homosexual” and heterosexual,” the last two being more significant.  These terms allow us to categorize certain behaviors and actions and to fit them into the normal/abnormal framework we so love.  However, these expressions (and their manifestations) do not go unregulated, as we know from Comsstock’s efforts and the Motion Picture Code.  In the more revolutionary case of Nabokov’s Lolita we are provided with a whole new set of sexual vocabulary revolving around the “nymphet.”  The lexicon is rich and tempting, almost allowing us to forget the “deviant” nature of the subject matter.  We must not forget however, the power relations at play, which made it difficult for Nabokov to find a willing US publisher and or to circulate his book in a number of countries.
Heterosexuality and homosexuality, according to Katz, are first linguistic constructs and then social ones that began to appear in the 1860s.  It is during that time that the world became eroticized due to a number of factors, significantly, the new economy of consumption and pleasure.  With the “commoditized culture of pleasure,” the “experience of a heterolust began to be widely documented and named” (Peiss ed., 350-1).  The key word here is “named.”  (In Germany, the terms did not first appear as a binary and ironically, “heterosexuality” was first used in defense of homosexual emancipation.)  While it took years of use for the terms to reach their present day meanings, the basic pattern is that by naming the deviant, the norm was established.  This process of normalization was very much in the hands of doctors (Peiss ed., 352), cementing the concept of America’s “scientia sexualis,” and limiting sexuality within certain boundaries.  As a result of this medical discourse, the “heterosexual drama, novel, and advice book” emerged as a new commodity (Peiss ed., 354).
In its linguistic evolution, heterosexuality came to imply “an erotic attraction between males and females” as well as the pursuit of pleasure.  The term was generally considered positive however, sexual conservatives censored not only the portrayal of sexual perversity, but of the “new normal” as well (Peiss ed., 353).  Nabokov, in 1955, took the new commodity of the heterosexual novel and turned it on its head.  His novel represented a challenge to the “new normal.”  It is in deed a heterosexual account; Humbert loves a female and lustfully pursues pleasure.  But of course, being a pedophilic relationship, it subverts the meaning of “heterosexuality.”  In further expansion of the discourse of sexuality, Nabokov not only utilizes three (if not all four) of Foucault’s “great strategic unities,” but he creates a whole new glossary for this clearly perverse if not classifiable pleasure.  With his poetic prose, Nabokov lulls us into considering Humbert’s sexuality a new “new normal.”
The binary sexuality of 20th century America was too limiting, and continues to operate today to a large extent.  But with challenges from local centers of power (like novels and films), we are expanding the discourse, the language of sexuality.  With things as simple as Samantha’s introduction of the word “trysexual” (she’ll try anything once) in an episode of Sex and the City, to films like Shortbus, various forms of resistance are in play.  Maybe one day we will be progressive enough to equal the Victorians in their celebration of a spectrum of sexuality as opposed to our dyadic system.