Behind the Veil of Social Construction

As the sources I scour about sexuality increase, so does my understanding of the broad problems surrounding the history of sex. However, as my increased understanding, or rather, exponentially growing interest and grasps at the general ideas, grows, more questions seem to arise, the answers to them become seemingly more and more out of reach. The variety of readings does not build up support for just one possible answer regarding sexuality, but instead creates an increased debate; a never-ending maze of permutations.

I was reminded of this most clearly as I was reading Richard Godbeer’s essay “Sodomy in Colonial New England”. I was struck by one section where sodomy and bestiality are quoted as being “unutterable abominations and confusions” (95). “Confusions” made me think about not only my own of trying to discern between what is innate v. “socially constructed”, repressed v. free, but also, and most importantly, about how equally confusing it must have been during the Colonial Era, almost four centuries ago. The colonies had an enormous pressure to create an orderly and productive society in the New World, so it comes as no surprise that people would become closely watched and guarded under laws that govern their private behavior. These laws were constructed by extremely religious people, who followed a scripture that was read to dictate what constitutes as licit and illicit, regarding sexual relations; As Nathaniel Hawthorne points out about his fictional town in Puritan Boston, “a people among whom religion and law were almost identical” (45).

Godbeer discusses 17th century New Englanders’ responses to sodomy as opposed to the laws, most of which saw sodomy punishable by death, as described in Document 1 “Massachusetts Colony’s Laws on Sexual Offenses, 1641-1660” (Peiss, 71). The cases brought against Nicholas Sension and Stephen Gordon display how society could not prove them guilty because of contrivances such as the two-witness rule (95). However, sometimes they did not even want to bother pressing charges because of certain power dynamics that existed between the community and the individuals in question. Alluding to Foucault, Godbeer mentions that things like money and popularity may have protected Sension—whose “sexual impulses were articulated in the context of power relations”—and Gordon from persecution (99).

Whatever social constructions these New England communities were following, evidently some things were not as clear as black and white. Not only were certain members of society willing to overlook social “perversions” such as sodomy and bestiality, but surprisingly the identity of the person, i.e. as a homosexual or heterosexual, was not the thing in question.