A Symbolic Interactionist History of Sexuality?

Many historians of sexuality explore how sexual subjectivity has taken shape in recent centuries, while historical sociologists tend to focus upon the intimate and erotic aspects of emergent social institutions. Symbolic interactionist sociology can add a new dimension to the existing debates, shifting the primary focus from the history of sexuality to a theoretically informed analysis of sexuality in history. This essay applies symbolic interactionist writings on interaction, scripts and subjectivity to a reading of one particular case: that of a young man committed to New Zealand’s Seacliff Lunatic Asylum in 1891 following his ‘absurd infatuation’ for another man. I attempt to show how symbolic interactionist theory can further enrich historical studies by teasing out the intricacies of the processes through which sexual selves have emerged in the past. What results is not a teleological account of sexual change, but an awareness of the ways particular contexts enable the construction of accounts of sexual subjectivity.