UC Berkeley

While touring the women’s prison of Saint-Lazare in Paris in the early 1930s, the author Fracis Carco was surprised to find a respectable looking young woman in the menagerie, a set of tiny cages initially set up for the children sent to the prison. At the time of Carco’s tour, the cages of the menagerie were no longer used for children, or as a special punishment for the worst prisoners. In fact, a stay in the menagerie was a special privilege accorded to certain well-behaved prisoners. Even though the cages are tiny, like the cell in a zoo outfitted only with a bed and a chamber pot, the warden says, “the women are happy with them, because that way they can escape the promiscuity of the dormitories and they can get their act together better.” As the warden’s comment suggests, sex between the prisoners seems to be the prevailing norm within the prison. When the tour group encounters an explicit graffito later (“My heart and my ass for Mimi B. —Fernande”), the warden asks a prison guard to erase it. The attendant replies flippantly, “Oh please! I’d be stuck doing that forever! I’d wear out my paws. With these females here, I’d have to start over every day.”These two anecdotes reveal some of the key issues at the heart of my dissertation, titled Vicious Inclinations: Gay Sex and State Power in Prisons from 1830 to the present. Although we often think of sex between prisoners as something highly regulated by the institutions of incarceration, these examples show the limits of that regulation, indeed even sometimes the complete indifference of the guards to sex between prisoners. They also that institutions of incarceration themselves are not monolithic but comprised of multiple different nodes of power which may each have different motivations and actions. In this case, the warden’s power is by no means absolute, and she is unable to mobilize the guard to repress this blatant symbol of sex between the prisoners at her institution. At the same time, even the most horrific and repressive inventions of the disciplinary imagination can be twisted, turned, and used to the prisoners’ own ends. In the case of the Saint-Lazare prison, animal cages used to hold children have become a space where some prisoners can get privacy from the overwhelming and sometimes dangerous social dynamics of public dormitories; the very walls of the prison used to hold the prisoners have become the canvas to express same-sex love. Ultimately, my dissertation shows that the relationship between power and sexuality in prison is incredibly complex, and stands outside of any binary construction of power in which guards and wardens simply exert repressive power over prisoners. My dissertation seeks to take examples of the lived experience of prisoners who had sex with each other as the basis for rethinking how state power and sexuality relate to one another. It has three main goals. First, I seek to uncover and imagine the experiences of individuals who had same-sex sex in prisons from 1830 to the present in what Foucault calls their “infinitesimal materiality.” Far from being hidden, the archive is full of accounts and traces of same-sex sex in prisons throughout this period. In fact, same-sex sexuality is at the very origin of the cellular design and structure of the modern prison, as my work on the July Monarchy demonstrates. My goal is to trace through time the way people talked about and conceptualized prison sex, and to imagine to the extent that we can the lived experience of individuals who had sex with members of the same sex in prison. My corpus is drawn from archival sources that give us a sense of the historical realities of prison life (published works by prison doctors, internal official documents like surveys of prison wardens, conference presentations by criminal sexologists, law enforcement reports, along with the rare accounts from prisoners themselves that become more common after the 1970s). Literary sources, both fictional and nonfictional, also play a key role in my work, because they allow us to analyze the workings of power at the level of individual. Even if they are not always aiming to recount events that actually occurred, they often can give us insight into both a material truth (about the experiences of prisoners who had same-sex sex) and a theoretical truth about the functioning of power. Through this exploration of these lived experiences, I seek to elaborate a theoretical account of how individuals live out their sex lives within the constraints of state power. I argue against a binary account of power (which I argue is still prevalent in queer theory) that sees some individuals as “in” power and others as being “outside” of it. Drawing on a novel theoretical corpus of less-known works by Foucault and Bourdieu, I attempt to narrate these lived experiences in a way that draws out the experiences of individual agents as they navigate the field of state power. I eschew thinking that argues that the “heteronormative state” is necessarily against same-sex sexuality in all situations because it must promote some kind of “biopolitical” agenda. Rather, through my narration of individual experience, I try to think through in very concrete ways how the macro strategies that we can recognize in the state’s behavior are produced by the collective actions of many different agents (agents who often have various and even opposing agendas within the field of state power). Finally, I seek to displace identity’s centrality in investigations of sexual behavior in the past and to historicize our understanding of normativity. Since the debates between the essentialist and constructionist LGBT historians of the 1980s, identity has become the key point of distinction between the different camps of those investigating same-sex sex in the past. The idea that sexual modernity is defined by the invention of homosexuality as a category is an article of faith of queer theory. And yet, this insistence on identity has masked continuities of thought between queer studies and the essentialist groups it critiques. Both are structured around what I call the outlaw thesis, the idea that same-sex sexuality is necessarily outlawed and stigmatized within a heteronormative state and society. Drawing on recent work in queer studies like Laura Doan’s Disturbing Practices and R. Wiegman and E. A. Wilson’s recent issue of differences on “Queer Theory without Antinormativity,” I show that such approaches incorrectly construct heteronormativity as an ahistorical constant. Norms around sexuality change over time just as much as identities do, and they have much less power than the queer account credits. While norms about sexuality certainly play a role in shaping behavior, the rich and varied experience of prisoners I uncover demonstrates that they are not determinative by any means. We must not conflate norms with the behavior of state-aligned institutions and individuals, who often act in conflicting ways that meet the tactical needs of a specific situation instead of out of a commitment to some kind of heteronormative strategic agenda. Scholars of gender and sexuality need to treat normativity and state power with the same rigorous historical method that they apply to identity, and my dissertation seeks both to offer a demonstration of such an approach and to theorize a methodology that could be taken up by other scholars. My dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part centers on the period of the July Monarchy in France (1830–1848) for two key reasons. First, the liberal, reformist monarchy of Louis Philippe I saw the transition, documented by Foucault and others, from the absolutist, arbitrary justice of the Ancien régime to the “enlightened” and modern system of imprisonment that still exists today. Central to these debates, particularly to the invention of the cellular model of imprisonment, was the question of sex between prisoners. Second, this period also saw a huge proliferation of representations of same-sex sex between prisoners. From popular sources (theater, newspapers, and illustrated books) to high literature (Hugo and Balzac), sex between prisoners was one of the key tropes of July Monarchy popular culture. As my entry into this period, I focus my readings around Victor Hugo’s 1834 novella Claude Gueux, which tells the story of a prisoner (Gueux) who assassinates a prison official who has separated him from his intimate friend Albin. While critics acknowledge that Gueux and Albin’s sexual relationship was well known in the popular accounts of the real story on which Hugo drew, they often argue paradoxically that Hugo could not have represented same-sex sexuality himself because the topic was too taboo. In the first chapter, I look closely at Hugo’s text and the critical response to it, from the immediate period of its publication through the 21st century, to reveal the ways in which the historical specificity of the sexual configurations of the July Monarchy have been lost by the anachronistic projection of the idea that same-sex sex must be repressed back onto the 19th century text. I resituate Hugo’s text in terms of 19th-century discourses of friendship. The second chapter explores the context of discussions of prison sexuality in July Monarchy culture, drawing on popular sources, prison reform writings, and the works of prison officials and prisoners themselves, to describe the particular configuration of prison sexuality that was operative in this period. In the third chapter, I analyze the same sources to show the power dynamics between prisoners and prison officials. I then offer my own reading of Claude Gueux, demonstrating how the intimate friendship between prisoners was in fact central to Hugo’s critique of the prison system more generally and his utopian vision of a fraternal society that would combat inequality. The second part of my dissertation traces these questions beyond the July Monarchy period into the present. The fourth chapter rethinks the established narrative of the role of sexology and related scientific fields in determining dominant modes of understanding sexuality. While many historians of sexuality and queer theorists today think of sexologists as all-powerful and take their conceptions of sexual identity to be the dominant conception of sexuality during their time, I try to resituate sexology within a historical moment in which it was very much a marginal field within the growing structure of the officially recognized sciences. Through close readings of sexological texts from across the 19th and early 20th centuries, I show how sexology actually used its description of same-sex sexuality in order to legitimate itself as a true science rather than a pseudoscience. The fifth chapter focuses on representations of the queer murderer Pierre-François Lacenaire, executed in 1836, in the 20th and 21st centuries. Seen as the ultimate figure of revolt in the 19th century, Lacenaire comes to be a symbol of French individualism and of its relative openness to homosexuality in the 20th and 21st. In tracing the ways this outlaw is incorporated into nationalist narratives, I demonstrate that same-sex sex is used in contradictory and mobile ways to bolster national and state power. In the sixth chapter, I return to Claude Gueux and show how 20th and 21st century critics of the text in France and the US discussions of sexuality in the text intersect with the literary critic’s own authority, embedded within state structures of power. The conclusion reads a fragment of a poem written by a prisoner and sung by many as they were being chained up and carted off to a work camp in order to reflect on the place of prisoners’ voices themselves within this archive.