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This introduction maps the ways in which sexual scientific thought circulated during the fin de siècle, tracing the interconnections between and breaks in the global circuits of sexological thought and how this circuitry continues to structure sexuality in the present. In so doing, Kahan and LaFleur position their approach and that of the special issue as a whole within the larger field of sexology, placing it in more robust dialogue with sexuality studies and attending in particular to sexology's racial and imperial logics. They examine the ways in which racial science and colonial knowledge constitute sexual science as an amorphous object, one with a problematically vast reach that contributes to contemporary understandings of racialization and undergirding colonial infrastructures. And yet, they argue, sexual science is not something that can be wished away or easily left behind, for its taxonomies and ways of knowing continue to structure identitarian frameworks of gender and sexuality.

This article brings together world-systems analysis, which explores how the world's capitalist markets became globally integrated, and sexuality studies for the first time in order to examine how the homo/hetero binary came to integrate and govern sexual organization throughout much of the world. Zooming out from the metropolitan and national frames that have dominated sexual historiography, this article operates at a different scale and order of magnification to explore forms of sexuality shared in whole and in part across the world. My theorization of the sexual world-system aims to understand the encounter between object choice as the organizing dimension of sexuality and its collision with other sexual knowledges and organizations: intimacy, bodily practice, positionality, sexual acts, behaviors, desires, and so forth. Reading across literary, sexological, legal, and religious archives, I examine the relationship between these varieties of sexual knowledge in order to contribute to a comparative study of sexuality and to write sexuality into what Immanuel Wallerstein calls “geoculture.”

Wiley-Blackwell Critical Theory HandbooksEach volume in the Critical Theory Handbooks series features a collection of newly-commissioned essays exploring the use of contemporary critical theory in the study of a given period, and the ways in which the period serves as a site for interrogating and reframing the practices of modern scholars and theorists. The volumes are organized around a set of key terms that demonstrate the engagement by literary scholars with current critical trends, and aim to increase the visibility of theoretically-oriented and -informed work in literary studies, both within the discipline and to students and scholars in other areas.

This essay charts a history and theory of celibacy. Redressing the scholarly and popular tendency to read celibacy as “closeted” homosexuality, I disarticulate the history of celibacy from the history of homosexuality. Despite Michel Foucault's much-recited lesson that “there is not one but many silences,” queer theory continues to read celibacy as the sign of another practice: homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name” or the “impossibility” of lesbian sex. Mapping celibacy across sexuality studies' major conceptual grids (homo/hetero, acts/identities, fantasy/practice, friendship/homosexuality), this essay attempts to articulate an affirmative content for celibacy. Reading Marianne Moore's last single volume of original work, Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), and Elizabeth Bishop's memoir of Moore, “Efforts of Affection” (1979), I elaborate a definition of celibate temporality in relation to recent work on queer temporality. Under both these rubrics, time is an ideological force that regulates sex: for example, the “old maid” is “late” according to a trajectory of normal sexual maturation that must pass through marriage. Moore's Tell Me, Tell Me offers a depathologized temporal model of celibacy by unfolding a life narrative that does not punish the “old maid” for being developmentally “late.” Celibacy is usually understood as pure potential: its future is unwritten, unacted on, leaving open the threatening possibility that celibacy can take on any sexual character. Rather than see the celibate as desiring something lacking or as embodying a disjunction between desire and practice, Moore's volume posits a coextensive desire and practice, suggesting a theory of celibate desire.