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I'm guessing this paper was not written by Francisco ('Chamaco') Vales, the Chilean footballer. Interestingly, this Valdes seems to base much of his account of late antique attitudes to sexuality on the work of Jeb Boswell, who was in fact trying to argue (not particularly successfully) that early Christianity had no objection to same-sex relationships and that the anti-homosexual turn came only in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Of course a lot of good scholarship on the history of sex and gender has come out since 1996, and Valdes can't be blamed for not knowing about the stuff published in the last 24 years. What is more surprising perhaps is that he doesn't seem to refer to some of the relevant literature that was already published: especially Laqueur's absolutely seminal Making Sex. He also seems to be wedded to quite an ahistorical concept of patriarchy, which I think a lot of feminist scholarship would have challenged even in the mid-90s. Even as he claims to challenge essentialist and universalising notions of gender, he's actually kind of propagating them. His argument isn't so much outright wrong as it is grossly over-simplistic. Early Christianity wasn't alone in advocating asceticism and deprecating sexual pleasure - it shared this with several schools of late-Roman 'pagan' philosophy (though not, as Valdes seems to imply, rabbinic Judaism). Attitudes to marital sex varied within early Christianity, with Augustine being virtually alone in arguing that it was more than just a necessary evil. It is certainly true to say that non-procreative sensuality was a sin in early Christianity, but in the view of most of the Church Fathers procreative sensuality was very much a sin too. (This gradually changed over the course of the Middle Ages, and by the fourteenth century - in the West at least - we begin to see a greater valuing of family life, though also an uncompromising insistence on monastic and priestly celibacy as a cultural ideal that is only really challenged at the Reformation by the stridently hetero Martin Luther). But it is a very great stretch to suggest that this reluctant tolerance of heterosexuality was somehow in contrast to Greco-Roman valorisation of non-procreative sex: the ancients had a very functional view of sex indeed, perhaps best exemplified in Augustus' pro-family legislation (though also evident as early as the Oikonomikos of Xenophon, which advises a landowning male to renounce the unnecessary expenses of a boyfriend in favour of a prudent and fertile wife). Christianity, in short, was not quite as odd a creature in the sexual world of late antiquity as Valdes suggests, and its attitudes to heterosex were a lot more diverse than he seems willing to admit. And perhaps more importantly, I think the evidence from both antiquity and the medieval West undermines his argument: gender in premodern Europe was a lot more fluid and a lot less fixed than Valdes seems to think it was. If he is looking for the point at which there emerged a social system that "deduces gender exclusively from sex," then it seems to me he is looking in entirely the wrong place. So I am curious as to why Valdes seems determined to focus on the remote past as the source of contemporary America's moral evils. The questions he raises are interesting ones, but I don't think you need to go all the way back to late antiquity to come up with persuasive answers to them. I am also curious about his rather dogmatic insistence on the naturalness of sex as "the foundation of human identity" and its distinctiveness from gender as "the basis of social organisation." I suspect that a lot of contemporary scholarship would be very, very sceptical about this division (though it was perhaps academic orthodoxy back in 1996). Is it too patronising to say that this article feels like a lawyer trying to write history? Lawyers, admittedly, seem to ruin most disciplines they assail (the worst Christian theology was all written by lawyers). There is something about the narrow legal mind that that struggles with the expansiveness and richness of the humanities. And if that's essentialising and universalising, sue me. |