queer masculinities

72 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
medical discourses that began in the second half of the nineteenth
century. It was these discourses that, according to these historians, generated
an entirely new concept of the existence of a third or intermediate
sex: men with an innate female soul or inverted sex drives, or at
least with a congenital moral pathology. In turn these discourses are
supposed to have inspired the emergence of new subjectivities,
meaning more or less exclusive same-sex desires and identities.
Research shows rather that, in north-western Europe, in terms of
desires, subjectivity and of physical and social realities, modern homosexuality
began to emerge in the late seventeenth century. It also
shows that notions about the existence of a third sex, both among
men with same-sex desires and among their adversaries, had already
become part of popular lore by the early nineteenth century. In other
words, half a century later the medical profession did not just invent a
new category, but gave ‘scientific’ articulation to pre-existent folk
knowledge.
Our understanding of the world today and the order we perceive in
it is by and large based on sexual differences and sexual identities,
which also create at least the illusion of human equality. Far into the
early modern period, the world was understood by its hierarchical features.
Sexual and gender differences were subservient positions in
general hierarchical distinctions. Hierarchy was supported by the
pursuit of honor. Honor, by definition, was first and foremost a public
virtue. It related to ‘the good feelings others have about us’, as one
jurist put it in the seventeenth century. 62 Honor depended not only on
people’s behaviour, but also on intricate sets of interdependencies:
class, gender, family, employer, profession and neighborhood dictated
how honorable persons were and how they would perceive themselves
and others. Such a society was by virtue a society in which inequality
reigned, since honor was not equally distributed. A person, a class, a
family, a sex, a profession, a generation could claim to be more honorable
than others or indeed deny them honor. 63
From the end of the seventeenth century onwards personal conscience
was becoming a disciplinary force as well. This affected people’s
social behavior, yet its emergence as an inner force also reflected profound
ontological and psychological changes, indeed changes in psychological
habitus, creating interiority and subjectivity. 64 The
emergence of personal conscience gave rise to what Lawrence Stone
would call affective individualism. 65 In other words, at the end of the
seventeenth century the modern individual as an individual began to
emerge: the individual who began to know him- or herself and others