Introduction
Geographic borders and their crossing have been central to scholarship that defines itself as ‘transnational’. In their dictionary of transnational history, Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier define their topic as ‘what moves between and across different polities and societies’.Footnote 1 Steven Vertovec’s Transnational, an introduction to the field designed for students, describes the book’s subject as ‘sustained cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations, and social formations’.Footnote 2 In an article discussing the transnational turn in US history in the pages of this journal, Ian Tyrrell notes ‘transnational history refers to a broad range of phenomena cutting across national boundaries’.Footnote 3 A widely read discussion of transnational history published in the American Historical Review emphasizes the centrality of the study of ‘movements, flows, and circulations’ across borders.Footnote 4
Other scholars seek to combine this analysis of exchange and movement with comparison, which has long been a key methodology in global and world history. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann have described their concept of histoire croisée, for example, as the history of ‘empirical intercrossings’ and ‘intersection’, in which ‘objects of research are not merely considered in relation to one another but also through one another’.Footnote 5 Others use slightly different terms: Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Victor Lieberman speak of ‘connected histories’, Frederic Cooper of ‘shared histories’, Ann Stoler of ‘comparative connections’, and Shalini Randeria of ‘entangled histories’.Footnote 6 In all of these, theorists and practitioners have used (and problematized) the double meaning of ‘trans’: across or between borders, and above or beyond them.Footnote 7
Histories that are crossed, connected, shared, and entangled still imply borders, however, even if these are blurred, transcended, or ignored. Thus a further step in this transnational movement has been history that emphasizes mixture and hybridity, though in this there has also been debate about terminology, methodology, and focus. Various words to describe the process or condition of mixture have gone in and out of fashion: imitation, borrowing, appropriation, re-appropriation, acculturation, transculturation, amalgamation, accommodation, negotiation, mixing (especially in its Spanish form: mestizaje), syncretism, hybridity, fusion, cultural translation, creolization. As Peter Burke has recently pointed out in his excellent small book Cultural hybridity, historians have borrowed these words from botany, physics, and metallurgy, as well as the more expected borrowings from anthropology and linguistics.Footnote 8 Thus in thinking about borrowing, hybridity, or whatever one chooses to call this process, historians have engaged in it as well, crossing disciplinary borders. Werner and Zimmermann have also noted this, asserting that a central feature of histoire croisée is a ‘multiplicity of possible viewpoints and the divergences resulting from languages, terminologies, categorizations and conceptualizations, traditions, and disciplinary usages’.Footnote 9
Another body of historical scholarship is also wrestling with issues surrounding the crossing, blurring, and transcendence of borders: that on gender and sexuality. Geographic borders certainly figure in this scholarship, but so do other types of borders, beginning with the border between ‘gender’ and ‘sex’. In the 1980s, as gender history was emerging as a field, historians generally used ‘sex’ to mean physical, morphological, and anatomical differences (what are often called ‘biological differences’) and ‘gender’ to mean a culturally constructed, historically changing, and often unstable system of differences, built to some degree on ‘sex’ but also on other factors. In the decades since, that distinction has become increasingly contested, challenged by studies of historical people who were categorized as intersexed, gender-dysphoric, transsexual, third gender, or transgender, and by the personal experiences of contemporary people who identify as such.Footnote 10 Dichotomous cultural norms about gender (that everyone should be a man or a woman) often determined (and continue to determine) ‘biological’ sex, rather than the other way around, as Anne Fausto-Sterling and Judith Butler have demonstrated.Footnote 11 The border between sex and gender that women’s and gender history (and gender studies in other fields) had carefully created thus seems increasingly permeable, unstable, murky, or perhaps even illusory.
At the same time that the biological basis of gender was problematized, historians of women – and historians of men who recognized that their subjects were such – were putting increasing emphasis on other sorts of differences: class, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and so on. They wondered whether ‘woman’ (or ‘man’) was a valid category whose meaning is self-evident and unchanging over time, or whether assuming so was simply naive ‘essentialism’.Footnote 12 These historians noted that not only in the present is gender ‘performative’ – that is, a role that can be taken on or changed at will – but it was so at many points in the past, as individuals ‘did gender’ and conformed to or challenged gender roles. Thus they argued that it is misguided to think that we are studying women (or men, for that matter) as a sex, for the only thing that is in the historical record is gender; ‘women’ and ‘men’ are thus conceptual categories, not enduring objects.
Historians of sexuality have contended with their own borders. One of these is chronological: the border between ‘modern’ sexuality and what came before, what is sometimes described as the point at which sexuality itself was born, created, or discursively constructed (the operative verb varies). As with so much else in the history of sexuality, this issue comes from Michel Foucault. As the argument is usually framed, at some point between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth, people discovered that they had a ‘sexuality’, a quality defined by sexual object choice. Those who desired those of the same sex were ‘homosexuals’ – a word devised in 1869 by the Hungarian jurist K. M. Benkert – and those who desired those of the opposite sex were ‘heterosexuals’, a word originally used to describe individuals of different sexes who regularly engaged in non-procreative sex simply for fun, but increasingly used for all those who were sexually attracted to the ‘opposite’ sex.Footnote 13 Before this point there were sexual acts, but after this point people came to understand that they had a sexual identity or sexual orientation. This ‘acts versus identities’, ‘modern versus premodern’ binary has been widely challenged as overly dichotomizing and ahistorical – even Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a key theorist, has satirically termed it ‘the great paradigm shift’ – but it has been extremely powerful.Footnote 14 Foucault’s ideas and the notion of sexual ‘modernity’ have been used by some scholars who focus on areas outside the West, although others note that this creates problems, especially because it tends to make the United States and Europe appear ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’, while ‘other parts of the world are presumed to be traditional’ and ‘characterized by oppression’.Footnote 15
The notion of sexual orientation initially created a dichotomized sexual schema, but then other categories were added, sometimes mixed together with gender categories into an ever-lengthening acronym of categories: the longest version I have seen of this in the United States is LGBTTQQI2S – lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersexed, two-spirit. Both activists and theorists wondered whether this did not reify boundaries, rather than removing or even blurring them much. Beginning in the 1990s queer theorists asserted that these categories were (and are) constructed, artificial, and changing. Some celebrated all efforts at blurring or bending categories, viewing any sort of identity as both false and oppressive and celebrating hybridity and performance. In the last decade, queer theory has been widely applied, as scholars have ‘queered’ – that is, called into question the categories used to describe and analyse – race, religion, and other topics alongside sexuality. This broadening has led some, including a few of the founders of the field, to wonder whether queer theory loses its punch when everything is queer, but there is no sign that its applications are diminishing.Footnote 16
As in transnational history, these debates in the history of gender and sexuality have to some degree centred on the double meaning of the perplexing prefix ‘trans’, particularly as increasing numbers of individuals describe themselves, and sometimes the people they study in the past, not as ‘transsexuals’ but as ‘transgender’: that is, not moving across a border from one sex to the other but moving beyond such borders to become neither male nor female, or both male and female.Footnote 17 Susan Stryker, one of transgender history’s most influential theorists, has noted ways in which debates about gender and sexual borders have led to consideration of other types of spatial, disciplinary, and temporal borders. In her words, transgender history is history in which ‘questions of space and movement’ are linked ‘to other critical crossings of categorical territories’, and which ‘articulates new generational and analytical perspectives’.Footnote 18
Stryker’s description of transgender history and Werner and Zimmermann’s of histoire croisée are so similar that they could be reversed: both focus on movements and interconnections across borders of various types, both emphasize multiple perspectives, both discuss socially constructed and historically changing ‘imagined communities’, and both draw on the theory and methodology of various disciplines. Despite these parallels, however, until now there has been relatively little intersection between transnational history – and global history more broadly – and the history of gender and sexuality, a situation on which a number of scholars have commented.Footnote 19 In this article, I will first examine this situation in greater detail and suggest some reasons why it developed, but then focus primarily on scholarship that is beginning to bring these fields together. In doing so, I will include some works that their authors and editors frame as comparative, international, or global as well as explicitly transnational, as the borders between all of these terms are just as contested and entangled as are any other borders.
The lack of intersection
Statistics about books, journal articles, and conference papers bear out more impressionistic observations about a lack of intersection. To use book prize competitions as a measure: of the books submitted to the American Historical Association by publishers for consideration for the Joan Kelly Prize in women’s history during the period 2004–06 and 2010–11 (ninety to one hundred books a year), roughly 45 per cent were in US history, another 35 per cent in European, and about 20 per cent for the rest of the world.Footnote 20 Only a handful took on topics that have been at the centre of transnational or global history, such as trade or political economy, and only one or two per year were transnational or global in geographic scope. On the other hand, of the books submitted to the World History Association for its book prize in the years 2005–11, one or two of roughly thirty submitted each year have been on women or gender, and none on sexuality.
To use journal articles, of the roughly 150 articles published in the Journal of Women’s History during the period 2000–10, fifteen address what I would term ‘global history’ topics. However, two-thirds of them do deal with topics outside the United States, and there have been several special issues or article clusters that focus on transnational or global issues.Footnote 21 Of the 160 articles in the Journal of World History for the period 2000–10, eight specifically examine women or gender. In the first six years of its publication, no article in the Journal of Global History has focused explicitly on women, gender, or sexuality.Footnote 22
To use conference papers as a measure, well over half of the paper proposals to the Berkshire Women’s History Conference, the largest women’s history conference in the world, in the years 1996–2008 (the conference is held every three years) were in US history. The ‘globalization’ of US history has affected women’s history, and many of the papers that focused on US topics considered transnational issues such as migration, American neo-imperialism, diasporas, and borderlands. They were still about the United States, however. At the conference itself (as opposed to proposals), sessions focusing on US history occupied about one-third of the programme, which represented a conscious choice on the part of the organizing committee to achieve a better geographic balance than that being produced by the field itself. On the other side, until 2009 there were generally only a handful of papers or sessions at the World History Association conference on women or gender, and none on sexuality. At the European Congress of World and Global History, held in Leipzig in 2005, there was one panel on gender, but at the subsequent Congress in Dresden in 2008 there were none.
By any measure, then, there has not been much connection between these two fields, for which I see three primary reasons. First, transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality have developed simultaneously as, in part, revisionist interpretations, arguing that the standard story needs to be made broader and much more complex. Each has denaturalized and deconstructed a topic that was a given in historical scholarship: the nation on the one hand, and heterosexual man on the other.Footnote 23 Thus both have been viewed by those hostile or uninterested as ‘having an agenda’. Both have concentrated on their own lines of revision, so have not paid much attention to what is going on in the other. In this assessment I differ from Margot Canaday, who commented in a recent forum on transnational sexualities in the American Historical Review that historians of sexuality have ‘less of an establishment to shake off’ and so ‘have more reason to challenge existing categories of analysis’.Footnote 24 That may be so, but most of the hundreds of studies referenced in the footnotes of the six essays that follow Canaday’s introduction stay within one nation, and many within one city. Here, too, as in women’s and gender history, US history predominates. Joanne Meyerowitz, whose article discusses the US, is the only author to note that the literature is so extensive that her footnotes can include only books (that is, not articles), and even then only some of these.
From the other side, in that same American Historical Review forum, Dagmar Herzog, discussing European sexual cultures, comments that the publication in the mid 1990s of several major books on sexuality and imperialism ‘made it impossible to tell the stories of colonial projects of Britain, the Netherlands, or France without recognizing not only the sexualization of colonial encounters in the European imaginary and the intricate imbrication of local sexual and economic arrangements, but also the literal pervasiveness of “cross-racial” sexual and familial intimacies of all kinds’.Footnote 25 Judging by recent general studies of British imperialism, however, fifteen years after the mid 1990s it is still quite possible to do so.Footnote 26
A second reason for the lack of intersection is that the primary revisionary paths in transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality have been in opposite directions. Transnational history in all its variants – comparative history, Transferschichte, histoire croisée, entangled history, shared history – has emphasized connections, links, and the crossing of boundaries: what David Northrup has called the story of the ‘great convergence’.Footnote 27 In contrast, after an initial flurry of ‘sisterhood is global’, gender history over the last decades has spent much more time on divergence, making categories of difference ever more complex. Gender historians have emphasized that every key aspect of gender relations – the relationship between the family and the state, the relationship between gender and sexuality, and so on – is historically, culturally, and class specific. Today historians of masculinity speak of their subject only in plurals, as ‘multiple masculinities’ appear to have emerged everywhere, just as have multiple sexualities in the works by historians of sexuality.Footnote 28
A third reason is the powerful materialist tradition in transnational history, inherited from world and global history, which stands in sharp contrast to the largely cultural focus of the history of gender and sexuality as these have developed over the last few decades. Although Ian Tyrrell notes that transnational history ‘refers to a broad range of phenomena’, most of it has focused on political and economic processes carried out by governments and commercial elites. Women’s history also initially had a strong materialist wing, with many studies of labour systems and political movements, but since the linguistic/cultural turn of the 1980s more attention has been paid to representation, meaning, and discourse, which has also characterized the history of sexuality.
Despite this lack of intersection in the past, however, this border is beginning to be crossed; here I fully agree with Canaday. The organizers of the 2010 World History Association annual conference chose ‘gender’ as one of their two themes; 18 of the 67 sessions at the conference had at least one paper that focused on gender, although only one paper explicitly examined sexuality. The organizers of the 2011 Berkshire Women’s History conference, in their words, ‘restructured the conference to take advantage of new upsurges of intellectual energy in global history, transnational and transregional history’ and 28 of the conference’s 190 sessions included the word ‘transnational’ in their title.Footnote 29 These promising trends should not be overemphasized, as the 2011 WHA had only 7 sessions out of 125 with at least one paper on women or gender, and many of the Berkshire Conference ‘transnational’ sessions were simply papers on several different countries stuck together. However, exciting scholarship that draws on both transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality is beginning to appear, which points toward a future of increased border crossing. I see such work emerging especially in six areas: movements for women’s and gay rights; diverse understandings of sexuality and gender; colonialism and imperialism; intermarriage; national identity and citizenship; and migration.
Movements for women’s and gay rights
A first group of border-crossing studies are those that focus on movements for women’s rights and, more recently, for gay, lesbian, and transgender rights. The history of the movement for women’s rights that began in the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth, the ‘first wave’ of the feminist movement, initially focused on the United States and Great Britain, but more recent scholarship has made clear that this movement was transnational, not simply something emanating from the Anglo-American world.Footnote 30 The ‘woman question’, which, along with suffrage, debated the merits of women’s greater access to education, property rights, more equitable marriage and divorce laws, temperance, and protection for women workers, was an international issue, though with different emphases in different parts of the world. Women’s rights were linked to other social and political issues in both colonies and metropoles, and to calls to broader democratic representation for all, not simply for women. However, efforts to achieve women’s rights and the actions of actual women have often been forgotten, or intentionally effaced, in the nationalist historiographies of anti-colonial struggles, as Louise Edwards and others have shown.Footnote 31 Carmen Pereira, an independence leader who fought the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau in the 1970s, recognized this tendency and noted that women were ‘fighting two colonialisms’ – one of gender discrimination and one of nationalist struggle.Footnote 32 Studies are beginning to revise this picture and examine the interplay between women’s rights movements and state- building, sometimes setting this in a comparative or global context.Footnote 33
Women’s suffrage was not always a force for more general notions of rights, however, but was also linked to racialized constructions of nation and empire. In many places, advocates of women’s rights used ideas about racial and class superiority to bolster their arguments, noting how much more worthy and responsible honourable white middle-class women were than working-class, immigrant, or non-white men.Footnote 34 Women understood to be ‘honourable’ were married and generally mothers, of course, so such lines of reasoning were also heterosexist, although sexuality was never mentioned openly, in contrast to blatant and hostile race and class comparisons. Such arguments form one of the reasons why white women were granted the vote relatively early in Australia and New Zealand, and why one of the first states in the US to allow women’s suffrage was conservative Utah, where Mormon women argued that their votes would outnumber those of non-Mormon men.Footnote 35 Whiteness also became part of notions of who was truly a man; as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have recently commented, ‘White men monopolized the status of manhood itself.’Footnote 36
The second-wave feminist movement that began in the 1960s and 1970s was similarly international, and comparative studies are evaluating similarities and differences between feminisms in West and East, North and South. Some of these works are global, while others are regional but still examine what happens when ideas, institutions, and individuals cross borders. Maxine Molyneux, for example, compares women’s movements across Latin America within liberal, authoritarian, and revolutionary states, and discusses the ways in which these broadened the meaning of rights in different domains of social and political life.Footnote 37 Studies of transnational feminist networks of activists and organizations note class, racial, ethnic and imperial tensions, but also their common agendas and similar programmes.Footnote 38 Wendy Kozol emphasizes the ways in which studies of such groups
have compelled reconsiderations of how historians understand migrations, state formations, globalization, etc … Transnational feminist activists, for instance … articulate social justice claims through their understanding of the inequalities between First and Third World women’s experiences and resources. In dialogue with this critique, transnational feminist historians have begun to reexamine how processes and institutions such as colonialism, modernization, and feminist movements have sustained critical divisions that have differentially privileged or harmed groups through gender, racial, and/or sexual frameworks.Footnote 39
Diverse understandings of sexuality and gender
Kozol links activists and historians in her comments, and this link can also be seen in a second area of border-crossing scholarship: that which examines diverse understandings of sexual relations and gender identities. Here scholarship has particularly focused on individuals now generally described as ‘third genders’. Some of these individuals are intersexed, and occasionally they are eunuchs, but more commonly they are morphologically male or female but understood to be something else. The best known of these are found among several Native American peoples, and the Europeans who first encountered them regarded them as homosexuals and called them ‘berdaches’, from an Arabic word for male prostitute. Now most scholars choose to use the term ‘two-spirit people’, and note that, though Europeans focused on their sexuality, they are often distinguished from others by their work or religious roles, as well as their sexual activities. Two-spirit people often had special religious and ceremonial roles because they were regarded as having both a male and female spirit rather than the one spirit that most people had; they could thus mediate between the male and female world and the divine and human world. The difference was thus one of gender rather than sexuality.Footnote 40 Most scholarship on two-spirit people has examined their roles within Native American cultures, but Mark Rifkin considers them within the framework of state-building and the cultural interaction that is central to transnational history. He examines the ways in which European Americans sought to ‘insert American Indians into the ideological system of heterosexuality’ (especially in an emphasis on the monogamous conjugal couple), which denied ‘the possibility of interpreting countervailing cultural patterns’ (including polygamous households, same-sex attachments, two-spirit people, and kin groups) ‘as principles of geopolitical organization’.Footnote 41 Principles of geopolitical organization have been central to every analysis of the state since those of Herodotus and Sima Qian, of course, but Rifkin’s emphasis on how these principles relate to sexuality is new.Footnote 42
Studies of two-spirit people in the Americas have been accompanied by investigations of third genders in other areas of the world: the bissu of South Sulawesi, who carried out rituals thought to enhance and preserve the power and fertility of the rulers; the hijra of northern India who perform blessings at marriages and the births of male children; the khanith in Oman and the mahus in Polynesia, who were morphologically male but performed women’s work.Footnote 43 These studies of third genders are not simply broadening historical scholarship but are also proving politically useful, as people within the gay rights and transgender movements today use them to demonstrate the variety in indigenous understandings of gender and sexuality and to stress that demands for rights for homosexuals are not simply a Western import.Footnote 44
This use of historical scholarship to support desires for the present and future has been sharply critiqued by some scholars as misrepresenting the past, however. While Walter Williams and Will Roscoe have asserted that most Native American groups valued femininity, so did not disparage men or boys who dressed as women or took the female role (i.e. passive and penetrated) in actual or ritualized same-sex relations, Richard Trexler and Ramón Gutiérrez stress that transvestism and sex were linked to conquest, and the passive partner was mocked and vilified.Footnote 45 One’s position in this debate shapes how one views the impact of European conquest – that is, whether the Spanish and Portuguese, and later other European powers, introduced new attitudes and punishments, or whether they reinforced existing ones.Footnote 46
Colonialism and imperialism
The impact of colonization on same-sex relations is only one of the many threads in the broad array of recent studies of gender and sexuality in colonialism and imperialism, a third area of fruitful intersection. Both men and women were agents in imperial projects, and colonial powers shaped cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity. Many recent works demonstrate that imperial power is explicitly and implicitly linked with sexuality, and that images of colonial peoples were gendered and sexualized.Footnote 47 As Giulia Calvi summarizes in her recent comparison of global gender history in Europe and the US, ‘the gendered bodies of colonizers and colonized formed a contact zone where racialized notions of gender relations and difference were constructed through the exercise and representation of colonial power’.Footnote 48 In fact, gendered studies of colonialism and imperialism have been undertaken for long enough that they are now generating revision and self-criticism. The Winter 2003 issue of the Journal of Women’s History, for example, was a special issue: ‘Revising the experiences of colonized women: beyond binaries’, with articles on Australia, Indonesia, India, Igboland (Nigeria), Mozambique, and the US Midwest.Footnote 49
One of the binaries that this special issue seeks to move beyond is that between colonizer and colonized. Research on gender and sexuality in the context of imperialism has emphasized links between colonized areas and the metropole, arguing that the process of colonization shaped gender ideologies and practices everywhere. Kathleen Wilson, for example, examines the ways in which English men’s and women’s perceptions of their English identity were shaped by colonial expansion.Footnote 50 Zine Magubane traces colonial images of blackness from South Africa to England and back again, noting the ways in which these influenced representations of marginalized groups such as women, the poor, and the Irish.Footnote 51 Clare Midgley and Carolyn Eichner document ways in which European women’s political ideas were transformed by colonial experiences.Footnote 52
That special issue also had a separate section on historians, sources, and historiography of women and gender in modern India that emphasized ‘dissolving’ and ‘rethinking’ various boundaries. It is not surprising that this section focused particularly on India for, among colonized areas, South Asia has seen the most research. Feminist historians of India, including Tanika Sarkar, Manu Goswami, Mrinalini Sinha, and Durba Ghosh, have developed insightful analyses of the construction of gender and national identity in India during the colonial era, and the continued, often horrific and violent, repercussions of these constructions today.Footnote 53 They highlight the role of female figures –the expected devoted mother, sometimes conceptualized as Mother India, but also the loving and sacrificing wife – in nationalist iconography. Though the theoretical framework in this scholarship is postcolonial, these scholars also take much of postcolonial scholarship to task for largely viewing actual women as a type of ‘eternal feminine’, victimized and abject, an essentialism that denies women agency and turns gender into a historical constant, not a dynamic category. The large number of works on India has led some scholars of colonialism to argue that Indian history has become the master subaltern narrative, and that Indian women have somehow become iconic of ‘gendered postcolonialism’. Clearly a sub-field that has developed an iconic representation to be contested is healthy and growing.
Intermarriage
A fourth area of intersection, and one that has been central to theorizing hybridity, is research on intermarriage and other types of sexual relationships among individuals from different groups. These especially occurred in colonies or border regions, increasingly known as ‘gender frontiers’, and were interwoven with developing notions of racial difference and national identity.Footnote 54 For example, Saliha Belmessous, Jennifer Spear, and Guillame Aubert have analysed the way in which French policy in colonial North America changed depending on changing ideas about how best to increase both the colonies’ and France’s strength. Most immigrants in the seventeenth century were unemployed young men from urban environments, who stayed briefly and then either died or went back to France. For a brief period in the 1660s the French crown directly recruited young women to go to New France, mostly poor women from charity hospitals, and paid for their passage. About eight hundred of these filles du roi (daughters of the king) did immigrate, more than doubling the number of European women who were not nuns, but their numbers were never great enough to have a significant effect on the population. The French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert decided not to expand the programme, however, stating explicitly in 1667 that ‘it would not be wise to depopulate the kingdom in order to populate Canada’. Instead he recommended that
the most useful way to achieve it would be to try to civilize the Algonquins, the Hurons, and the other Savages who have embraced Christianity; and to persuade them to come to settle in a commune with the French, to live with them, and educate their children in our mores and our customs … after some time, having one law and one master, they may form one people and one blood.Footnote 55
Thus official policy in New France in the seventeenth century was one of the assimilation of Native Americans through Fransication, by which they would be ‘made French’. The policy of Fransication included intermarriage between French men and indigenous women, for the French hoped that such marriages would help the fur trade and strengthen ties between French and Native American communities and families.
In a few cases, this policy had exactly the effect that the government hoped it would: couples married in Christian ceremonies and Indian women adopted the clothing, work patterns, and language of French women; they crossed the border from native to French. In many more cases, however, the opposite happened. Marriages, if they occurred at all, were ‘in the custom of the land’, and French men adopted ‘savage’ customs. Official opinion changed. ‘One should never mix a bad blood with a good one’, wrote the governor of New France in 1709, continuing: ‘Our experience of [intermarriage] in this country ought to prevent us from permitting marriages of this kind, for all the French men who have married savage women have been licentious, lazy and have become intolerably independent; and the children they have had are even lazier than the savages themselves. Such marriages should thus be prohibited’.Footnote 56 Prohibition of intermarriage became official policy in New France in 1716, and Indian/French marriages were discouraged by secular officials elsewhere in French North America. Despite the fulminations of authorities about mixing blood, however, European men and Indian women continued to engage in sexual relations in western French North America, and, in areas where intermarriage worked to the benefit of the local people, to marry. These marriages were often formalized by Native American rituals rather than Christian ones; only 65 church marriages between French men and Indian women are listed in the records for all of New France during the whole period 1608 to 1765, out of a total of more than 27,000 marriages.
In 1724, French colonial Louisiana (which included a large part of the Mississippi Valley) also forbade the ‘King’s white subjects’ to ‘contract a marriage or live in concubinage with Blacks’.Footnote 57 Officials in Louisiana tried positive measures as well as prohibitions. They succeeded in convincing the king to pay once again for the transport of women from France, and from 1704 to 1728 several hundred French women came to Louisiana. The administrators wanted ‘hard-working girls … daughters of farmers and the like’, but the young women were often recruited from houses of detention in France, so instead turned out to be ‘women and girls of bad life’ who were also ‘extremely ugly’. Male settlers refused to marry the new arrivals, and in 1727 the governor of Louisiana recommended building a ‘house of correction here in order to put in the women and girls of bad lives who cause a public scandal’.Footnote 58 The programme was stopped in the following year. French Louisiana became an area of great cultural and racial mixing, a situation that continues today. Similar examples of shifting policy toward intermarriage and great variation in levels of enforcement can be found throughout the colonial world.Footnote 59
Marriage created an economic unit as well as a sexual relationship, and historians have begun to examine the economic consequences of intermarriage and other encounters involving men and women from different groups in frontier and border areas.Footnote 60 George Brooks, for example, traces the ways in which European and local notions about acceptable marriage partners combined in the colonies of West Africa to create distinctive economic and social patterns. In the patrilineal societies of West Africa, such as the Mandinka and Wolof, Portuguese men and their mixed-race children were not allowed to marry local people of free standing, as this could give them claims to land use; their children could not inherit or join the kin and age-grade associations that shaped political power structures. Brooks has found that this meant that mixed-race children generally went into trade, and in some places women became the major traders, with large households, extensive networks of trade, and many servants and slaves. Because these wealthy female traders (nharas in Crioulo; signares in French) had connections with both the African and European worlds, they were valued as both trade and marriage partners by the French and English traders who moved into this area in the eighteenth century. ‘Some of these women were married in church’, reported one French commentator, ‘others in the style of the land, which in general consists of the consent of both parties and the relatives’.Footnote 61 In the latter form of marriage, the women’s European husbands would have paid bridewealth to their new in-laws (instead of receiving a dowry as was the custom in Europe), provided a large feast, and been expected to be sexually faithful. If the husband returned to Europe, the signare was free to marry again. Thus intermarriage facilitated and was a key part of a pattern of cultural exchange in which European men adopted local customs far more than their indigenous wives adopted European, just as did French men in western North America.
‘Gender frontiers’ were not only found in the colonies, however. In Strasbourg, the Lutheran city council debated in 1631 whether citizens should lose their citizenship if they married Calvinists. Such debates were common in many territories of the Holy Roman Empire after the middle of the sixteenth century. Earlier, most reformers had decided that religious conversion did not give one the right to leave one’s spouse. One could pray that he or she would see the light, but not leave. The later debates were about marriage formation, however, not about changes in marriages that already existed. Should people be allowed to marry across religious lines? In general, the answer was no. Spouses were to be (quoting city councils here) ‘one in body and spirit’ and a mixed marriage would create ‘one body and two minds’ and ‘cause arguments, quarrels, blasphemous wild conduct, and often half-hearted belief’. Authorities ordered sermons to be preached against mixed marriage, warning of the dangers to the soul ‘seduced by the infamous sweet poison of heretical teaching’.Footnote 62 Even the body might be endangered, as Lutheran blood mixed with Calvinist blood, or, even worse, Catholic blood mixed with Protestant blood. The Strasbourg city council largely agreed with this, but, like all early modern authorities, they also worried about unmarried women, those ‘masterless’ women free to saunter about the city and spend their wages on frivolous things. So they decided that a Lutheran man who married a Calvinist woman would not lose his citizenship because (in the words of the council) ‘he can probably draw his spouse away from her false religion and bring her on the correct path’, though he would have to pay a fine for ‘bringing an unacceptable person into the city’. A woman who married a Calvinist would lose her citizenship, however, ‘because she would let herself easily be led into error in religion by her husband and be led astray’.Footnote 63 Thus the gender frontier of Strasbourg also became a gendered frontier, in which notions of male and female honour and sexuality shaped state policies about difference and intermarriage, just as they did in French Canada and French Louisiana.
This did not end with the seventeenth century, of course. In Drawing the global colour line, Lake and Reynolds trace restrictions on immigration and intermarriage in the transnational community of ‘white men’s countries’ in the early twentieth century. Similarly, Dagmar Herzog comments about contemporary Europe: ‘The entire complex of issues surrounding European identities and citizenships, with all the accompanying assumptions about appropriate inclusions and exclusions, now rests with remarkable frequency on sex-related concerns’.Footnote 64
National identity and citizenship
Lake and Reynolds’ book and Herzog’s comment point to a fifth area where there has been a significant amount of scholarship – studies of national identity and citizenship. Although a key aim of transnational history has been to get away from a focus on nations, one of its ironic conclusions is just how transnational nationalism has been (and continues to be). There are articles on gender in many of the new collections on nationalism, and a special issue in 2000 of the new journal Nations and Nationalism was titled ‘The awkward relationship: gender and nationalism’. Feminist Review, Gender and History, and Women’s Studies International Forum have all had special issues on nationalism. An edited collection, Gendered nations: nationalisms and gender order in the long nineteenth century, has been particularly influential in setting out key themes, with essays noting the ways in which national symbols, rituals, and myths are gendered, and tracing both women’s contribution to nation-building and their exclusion from it by the state and its institutions.Footnote 65 Other volumes of case studies have followed, exploring the ways in which gender shaped citizenship as a claims-making activity, and stressing the role of war in defining citizenship for women and men.Footnote 66 As would be expected, most monographs on gender and nationalism focus on one country, but those that examine former colonial areas tend, to some degree, to put their subjects in a global perspective.Footnote 67
Several recent studies of Mediterranean areas have adopted the comparative methodology that has been central to transnational history. Mary Layoun examines ways in which gendered understandings of home and nation figure in Greek refugees’ displacement from Asia Minor into Greece in 1922, the 1974 Cypriot coup, and the Palestinian expulsion from Beirut following the Israeli invasion in 1982.Footnote 68 Elizabeth Thompson looks at how French rulers and elite nationalists in Syria and Lebanon tacitly agreed to marginalize women in public life, despite – or perhaps because of – their participation in mass anti- colonial movements.Footnote 69 Mounira Charrad highlights differences rather than similarities, concluding that the varying political power of kin structures can explain why women in post-independence Tunisia gained legal rights that they did not in Morocco and Algeria.Footnote 70
Sexuality, as well as gender, has shaped the making of nations, especially in the twentieth century. Margot Canaday has examined ways in which the United States excluded homosexuals from full citizenship through restrictions on immigration, military service, and access to public welfare, and Carolyn Lewis how physicians in the Cold War era viewed heterosexuality as essential to a secure nation.Footnote 71 Jasbir Puar looks at ways in which race and religion have inflected the relationship between homosexuality and nationalism in the post-9/11 United States, noting that, increasingly, certain homosexuals – those who are white and middle-class – are incorporated into understandings of who is an ‘American’, while those who appear as if they are or could be Muslim are not.Footnote 72 In Europe, debates about the immigration and citizenship of Muslims often revolve around gendered practices such as the veil, and include discussion of Muslim attitudes toward homosexuality.Footnote 73
Migration
Nations are built through policies of inclusion and exclusion, and entered and exited through migration, a topic that has been a central theme in world history and a sixth area in which there are growing numbers of studies that integrate gender or sexuality. Approximately half of all long-distance migrants today are female, with women’s migration patterns sometimes similar to those of men but sometimes quite different. Recent studies examine the ‘transnational’ character of migrants’ lives, in which women and men physically move back and forth and culturally and socially create and maintain links across borders.Footnote 74 They also discuss ways in which gendered and sexualized migration shaped (and continues to shape) the economies, societies, and polities through and across which people moved. The essays in Moving subjects, for example, assess ways in which distance and movement shaped intimacy, and in which intimacy, or the prospect of intimacy, or the desire for intimacy, influenced the formation of imperial power. The intimate served ‘not merely as a domain of power but as one of the technologies available to colonizer and colonized alike in the struggle over colonial territory, imperial goods, and the meanings of global aspirations’.Footnote 75
Much of the work on gender and sexuality in migration, like much of the more general study of migration, focuses on the ‘globalization’ of the very recent past and the present. Some of this work is not very historical, but some is. In their analyses of contemporary South and Southeast Asians, for example, Sonita Sarker and Esha Niyogi De examine the ways in which ideologies of gender and sexuality within the dominant colonial powers prefigured those of the contemporary postcolonial states. They define both migrants and individuals affected by globalization who do not themselves move as ‘trans-status subjects’, explicitly choosing that prefix for its double meaning of ‘across’ and ‘beyond’.Footnote 76
Research on sexuality and migration has emphasized that, just as the state produced national identities, so it also produced (and continues to produce) sexual and gender identities, often at its borders when it lets in, or does not let in, individuals whom it identifies as a certain type. To those policing geographic borders, ‘homosexual’ was not simply a discursive category but an actual, and threatening, type of person. Many countries refuse to allow in those judged to be homosexual, to say nothing of those who challenge the ‘natural’ gender order of male and female to present themselves as transsexual.Footnote 77 Despite such restrictions, however, those whose sexual and/or gender identity and presentation were in some way ‘queer’ have migrated extensively, so much so that scholars have been able to trace ‘queer diasporas’ in many parts of the world.Footnote 78 They examine ways in which people in different places challenged, adapted, appropriated, and reworked the conceptualization of sexual acts or identities: what is often termed ‘localization’. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, for example, looks at Puerto Ricans who came to the United States in the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, noting the ways in which the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities that they created were shaped by the era in which they migrated and by the city to which they came.Footnote 79
Conclusions
Taken together, all of this research suggests ways in which the subject matter, theory, and methodology within transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality can intersect, and indeed are intersecting. First there is the emphasis on movement, interconnection, and interaction. Transnational history in all its forms is a study of relationships, interactions, and intertwinings. These interconnections also shaped the experiences of people who did not move a metre, for any fixed location can also be saturated with transnational relationships. Sexual behaviour, in its most common forms, is, of course, a combination of just these things: physical, emotional, mental, and other interactions and intertwinings.Footnote 80 Thus the two reinforce one another. The editors of the new journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism explicitly note that they seek to cross many kinds of borders – political, cultural, sexual, disciplinary – and take their theory from both transnational and gender scholarship. The journal’s 2000 mission statement reads: ‘Recognizing that feminism, race, transnationalism and women of color are contested terms, Meridians engages the complexity of these debates in a dialogue across ethnic and national boundaries, as well as across traditional disciplinary boundaries in the academy.’ Many of the studies reviewed in this article do just what the editors of Meridians call for.
Meridians’ mission statement points to a second common quality, an emphasis on multiple perspectives and crossing disciplinary boundaries. As I noted at the beginning, both Stryker and Werner and Zimmermann highlight the interdisciplinarity and multivocality of their different trans enterprises. Almost every collection of essays in the footnotes of this article similarly points with pride at the disciplinary diversity of the authors, as well as their diversity along other lines of difference.
Third, though both transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality have created binaries – elite/subaltern, colony/metropole, homosexual/heterosexual, masculine/feminine – they have also called for their destabilization. Both early transnational studies and early women’s and gay and lesbian history often involved a grand narrative of domination and resistance, in which the subordinate subject was either a victim or resistor (or both). This dichotomous grand narrative has now been thoroughly critiqued, as the studies reviewed here demonstrate. Increasingly, all categories are complicated, and the emphasis instead is on what in gender scholarship is usually termed ‘intersectionality’, in queer and trans history ‘post-identitarian subjectivity’ and in transnational scholarship in phrases such as ‘active and dynamic principle of intersection’. According to this line of thought, all dichotomies are too limiting, particularly in a globalized world in which individuals can blend and build on elements from many cultures to create hybridized or fluid sexual and national identities, or no identity at all.
There is thus much to look forward to as future scholarship draws on the theoretical richness of both these areas of study, but I also want to add a final, more cautionary note. Individuals might very well understand themselves to be beyond a national identity, or beyond a binarized notion of sexual identity, or even beyond gender. It is important to recognize, however, that national identities are not simply discursive categories but very real, as are gender and sexual identities also. Just as it produces national identities, the state continues to produce sexual and gender identities, often at its borders when it lets in or does not let in individuals whom it identifies as a certain type, thus barring them from full participation in a new globalized world. To use Gayatri Spviak’s phrase, states engage in ‘a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest’.Footnote 81 Thus as we examine historical examples of border-crossers and border-transcenders, and often find in them much to celebrate, or as we cross disciplinary, theoretical, or physical borders ourselves, it is equally important to remind ourselves of the continued power of those borders.
