ABSTRACT
Where are the animals in the history of sexuality in America? Take John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s indispensable Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America as a measure. The word “animal” is used several times in the book to describe overly lusty humans, but not enough to warrant a separate index entry. Most uses of the word animal coincide with the book’s three entries for bestiality, entries that span a total of three of the book’s 536 pages.1 Where animals do occasionally turn up may offer us a clue to why animals are mostly absent. The two places where animals appear are, first, in discussions of sodomy in the Colonial and Early National periods and, second, as a metaphor for unrestrained human sexual passions. In the colonial period, the category of sodomy, which spanned homosexual and bestial sex, was often deployed by European authorities as evidence of the barbarism of indigenous cultures, and many contemporary portrayals of bestiality as the backward practice of rural people echo this colonialist legacy.2 Similarly, the public and scholars alike often suggest that bestiality indexes a society’s distance from modernity and dependence on agriculture.3 This belief relegates human sexual contact with animals to an agrarian, preindustrial past when people were ostensibly closer to nature and more like animals. This, in turn, hinges on the perception that animal sexuality is natural, raw, and savage, and, therefore, an apt metaphor for human sexuality unfettered by religion, morality, social decorum, or fear of censure. This final move cements the absence of animals from histories of sexuality: admitting the raw sex of animals into the cooked history of sexuality contravenes the basic social constructionist commitments of the field.
