The Promise of Polyvocality
Davis sets out to tell a narrative history of polymorphous sexuality that meets our current moment, emphasizing at once the range of other orderings—political, sexual, gendered, and otherwise—that defined the past, and demonstrating that “those challenging draconian anti-abortion and anti-trans law have real antecedents to call on.” On its face, this work has the potential to actualize the promise of a range of new scholarship in queer and trans history that has demonstrated the ahistorical and contingent natures of heterosexuality and the gender binary. Yet Davis does not seem to understand the need to foreground polyvocality precisely to help contemporary organizers. Instead, she opts to tell a wishful history of the late 19th century (including Comstock, Craddock, and “Little Egypt”), full of easy, liberal victories. Such a narrative not only undermines truth and marginalized people but also actually hinders the larger argument about a polyvocal past that she otherwise advances so compellingly. Ultimately, then, Fierce Desires fails to fully grapple with the implications of sexual and gendered diversity.
Specifically, Davis abandons the story of multiplicity in the 19th century, opting instead for a somewhat narrow story of conflict—that continues up to the present—between what we might call sexual liberals and sexual conservatives. Across the 19th century, prominent advocates of sexual repression and of sexual freedom committed themselves to the regulation of reproduction and promised the perfection of the white race. Even as they demanded important—if limited—new sexual freedoms for women and sexual minorities, the liberals invested themselves in the reproduction of a notion of healthy sexuality that pathologized and sought to eradicate unruly desire and trans people.
Bourgeois sexual liberals and conservatives all materially benefitted from the contingent political economic project that was cissexuality and spoke in a language of racial regeneration. Ignoring this fact not only distorts history but also fails to help us understand our current moment, brought about not just by the prudery of Anthony Comstocks but also by the illiberal thought advanced by such “radicals” as Ida Craddock. Bill Clinton, just like Donald Trump, liberals and fascists alike, maintained decades-long relationships with powerful pedophilic eugenecists like Jeffrey Epstein. Elon Musk may be a modern-day Madison Grant enthusiast, but in the Make America Healthy Again movement’s esoteric rituals and fascination with the occult (two things that the scientific eugenecists categorically rejected) we can hear the echoes of Craddock’s phallus worship.
Well-intentioned but defensive stories that merely include queer and trans people are not enough. Our existence should shake the foundations of the historiography.