What does sexual hegemony entail? What’s the nature of its link to socially dominant groups who have practiced sexual regulation to advance their own class interests?
Chitty defines “sexual hegemony” as a relation where the sexual conduct of one group shapes the sexual conduct and self-understanding of other groups to the point that its particular modes of conduct are taken on as common sense, as if they were natural. It’s an analytic that lets him restore the history of class struggle to the long archive of political thought about sexual conduct, primarily in the Mediterranean basin and northwest Europe and identify what was distinctive about sexuality’s development during the transition to capitalism there.
He argues that as local bourgeoisies began to displace peasant communities from the countryside and compelled them to seek their livelihoods through wage labor, the sexual conduct of these newly uprooted classes became a problem. Where and how could they reproduce themselves with no stable relation to land or family structures? When they did stabilize their situations, how could they still be compelled to return to the workplace day after day? This problem required a new kind of political management.
The term Chitty uses to describe their solution is “hegemony,” drawing from two sources: Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of how capitalists obtain political assent from the classes they rule; and Giovanni Arrighi, an economic sociologist whose wrote about the growth of the capitalist world. In Arrighi, the history of capitalism is essentially a sequence of 4 hegemonic centers (Florence, Amsterdam, London, and New York) whose rising and falling fortunes are punctuated by a shift from productive expansion to financialization. Chitty focuses on what happens to sex during this second period, when global hegemony is swinging from one center to the next.
He looks at the specific case of male sodomy and traces the bourgeoisie’s attempts to manage political crisis during periods of financialization by increasing its repression of these sexual practices as part of a larger bid to restore their faltering hegemony. So for example, in the opening stages of this transition to capitalism in Northern Italy, it was extremely common for men to have sex with other men and sodomy wasn’t pursued as a crime very closely. How this changed included extending vagrancy laws to prosecute men for using public space for sex, the establishment of new police powers to investigate accusations and enforce these laws, and then later on, investments in sanitation and hygiene to address public scourges like cruising, urination, STIs, and so forth. In this you can see the extension of the capitalist order into new arenas. So far so good.
/Why/it changed is another question. Instead of assuming some kind of transhistorical impulse toward homophobia, Chitty looks carefully at the documents people left behind on both sides of this struggle and finds that interest in regulation of sodomy mostly deals with public cross-class sexual contact (cruising and prostitution, paradigmatically), which can be a matter of state indifference during periods of expansion but are maybe more troublesome when the ruling class is encountering a challenge to its search for profit, which bears on its hold over the proletarian population. When this new state form took up regulation or repression of homosexual behavior, it was as a way to secure public space for the rule of private property. Proletarian sexual behavior offered a way into private conduct more generally. As always, the law offered the state a weapon against its enemies – that is, the classes it ruled.
Obviously, people’s sexual practices can be extremely potent matters, and Chitty finds that over the next 500 years, efforts to control sex often risked political unrest. Because the stakes of this conflict involved the reproduction of class society, capitalists intervened to make sure that struggles over people’s sexual behavior never won any challenge to their political rule. But hegemony is not repression — it works through assent, pleasure, concessions, common sense, and so forth. Its aim is that a certain rule is experienced as freedom. Capitalists were able to achieve hegemony over proletarians in many ways — including through this struggle over sexuality to the point where we all often take it for granted that norms like having a stable orientation tied to the gender of our object of desire, expecting privacy, consent, and so forth are only the natural expressions of our free sexual nature. This also means that when we seek to fulfill our sexual desires, we aren’t driven past the limits of capitalist society.
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