Accounting for the Unaccountable: Lesbianism and the History of Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain

What is the history of sexuality a history of? This article provides an overview of scholarship in the field of 18th‐century studies and the history of sexuality, paying particular attention to the exemplary case of female same sex desire in order to explore the hermeneutical problems faced by this area of study. Unlike, for example, the history of women which has its object of study defined within its title, the history of sexuality is, in many ways, a history without a proper object. Is it a history of sexual practices such as prostitution, homosexuality or adultery? Is it a history of sexual identities like the sodomite, the sadist or the virgin? This essay argues that it is a history of ideas and ideologies surrounding sexuality’s discursive significance and reads how what we know about the past is grounded in our present cultural understandings of sexuality. Concentrating on the history of lesbianism and the emergence of a bourgeois discourse of heteronormativity in the 18th century, the article demonstrates how what we know about sex in the past is determined by who speaks, from where, and when.