Journal of the History of Sexuality

This fascinating and tragically unfinished book was written as a draft doctoral dissertation by Christopher Chitty, a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Following Chitty's death in 2015, his manuscript and related materials were edited into their present form by Max Fox, his friend and mentor. The result is Sexual Hegemony. Chitty's text is prefaced by both a brief foreword by Fox and an introduction by Christopher Nealon, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who served as an external reader on Chitty's dissertation.

Chitty's project was enormously ambitious—an attempt to "return … the history of sexuality to a history of property" (viii), by relating the social [End Page 437] place of male homoeroticism to the long-term transition from feudalism to capitalism. This is not so much the topic of a dissertation as the definition of a whole area of inquiry, drawing on history and economics, as well as political and social theory. Sexual Hegemony should be seen as a first step on that transdisciplinary path—tentative, daring, possibly at times a misstep, but nonetheless brave and significant.

As Nealon points out in the introduction to the text, Sexual Hegemony's weaknesses are immediately apparent. It is in every sense an unfinished work. This means that it is unpolished and that the arguments do not always flow smoothly. The volume is marked by numerous minor factual errors of the sort found in drafts of doctoral dissertations, and the arguments often shift focus and context in bewildering ways. An analysis of the gendered space of the marketplace in fifteenth-century Florence, for example, is illustrated by a Scottish traveler's description of Venice from the seventeenth century (50).

Despite the volume's roughness, Nealon is right that Chitty's main arguments and assumptions are significant. Chitty's central thesis is that the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the Western world led to increasing bourgeois repression of male homoeroticism. More precisely, he argues that male homoeroticism in this period developed under the hegemony of bourgeois sexuality and defined itself against the bourgeois norms of heterosexuality, monogamy, marriage, and the family. The questions that drive Chitty's study are articulated most clearly in the closing pages of the volume: "To what extent are politicizations and neutralizations of homosexuality contingent or structural features of periods of crisis in the historical hegemonies of the capitalist world system? Does a pattern emerge from a comparative consideration of the successive politicizations of homosexuality by the northern Italian city-states, the patricians of the Dutch Republic, the revolutionary-era French and English bourgeoisie, and finally, the American world-system?" (178).

It is no great criticism of Sexual Hegemony to say that it does not demonstrate any such overarching historical pattern in a deeply convincing way. The historical sites Chitty identifies are loosely based on Giovanni Arrighi's analysis of cycles of capitalism in The Long Twentieth Century (1994). These sites were all hegemonic centers of capitalist development, but they were also diverse societies with differing forms of government, religion, culture, and technology. In his analysis of Renaissance Florence, seventeenth-century Holland, and revolutionary France, Chitty tends to rely primarily on secondary sources. As he is mainly interested in making connections between diverse cultures and events, he tends to reach for points of similarity and to downplay evidence that runs counter to his thesis. This kind of selective analysis is a necessary step to building a convincing larger argument, but because Chitty's project was unfinished, the resulting volume is strong on theoretical speculation and weak on historical detail. The volume's strength comes not from close-grained historical analysis but from its construction [End Page 438] of the larger argument that economics shapes sexual...