ReOrienting Foucault: Scientia Sexualis, Epistemic Modernity, and the Conceptual Formation of Homosexuality in East Asia

Most historical accounts of passionate relationships in East Asia, especially in China and Japan (we still know almost nothing about Korea), paint a thriving picture of various forms of same-sex behavior, desire, and intimacy in pre-modern societies.  At the same time, the past few decades or so had witnessed an increasingly worldwide recognition of gay men and lesbians as constituting a sexual minority group.  Although historians of sexuality have begun joining other historians to study the transnational and global elements of the human past, we still know very little about how the social significance and cultural valency of same-sex sexuality changed in the transition from the pre-modern to the modern period in non-Western parts of the world.  While anthropologists have demonstrated the fluidity of the social definition of genital acts (erotic or not) across culture, historians have yet to offer a satisfying answer as to why, over time, such Western inventions as the categorical binary of homosexuality/heterosexuality have increasingly become the paradigmatic frame of reference in places such as Asia and the Middle East.  In fact, as historians Leila Rupp and Craig Loftin have recently demonstrated, there seems to be a growing body of evidence suggesting that the historical roots of the twentieth-century gay and lesbian movement have a much larger, wider, and deeper international dimension than European and American historians have typically assumed.  Therefore, it is all the more important now for historians of sexuality to step back and reflect on the global dynamics of the epistemic foundations of gender and sexuality.  This paper does this by showing that Foucauldian understandings of knowledge and the formation of concepts are particularly helpful for thinking about the emergence, translation, and circulation of the concept of homosexuality in East Asian societies during their processes of “modernization” from the late nineteenth century onward.