Sexuality in Context:
Michael Lucey helps sexuality studies find a larger home

Berkeley students march in a recent Gay Pride parade

Since the 1960's, the UC Berkeley campus has been a leader in exploring, expressing and influencing the trends of gay and lesbian culture. Now a new organized research unit, the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, will allow students and faculty to take this role one step further.

"In naming our center, we wanted to fight against this idea that there's something reductive or narrow in talking about sexuality," says Michael Lucey, an associate professor of French and Comparative Literature serving as the Center's first director. "Sexuality is something that can be related to a lot of other aspects of culture, tightly woven into an individual life, or into the evolution of a culture. Your class or ethnic or geographic identity could be closely tied to your sexuality, or your sense of art or literature. Sexuality is not just an entity in itself."

The Center for the Study of Sexual Culture is one of UC Berkeley's newest organized research units (ORUs). The ORU program supports faculty and students working in a specified research area by establishing fellowships, funding conferences and lectures, providing facilities and a structure for dialogue. Existing ORUs are reviewed every 15 years, and during the last cycle, a competition opened the way for new units to be formed.

The Center for the Study of Sexual Culture was a winner in the competition. Its inaugural event last April, a lecture by Judith Butler of the rhetoric department, drew over 300 people. The Center had its first official semester in Fall 2001.

"It was because there's been a group on campus doing good research in this field that our proposal was successful," says Lucey. "To name just a few: Judith [Butler] is internationally renowned for her study of the systems and concepts people use to talk about sexuality. Lawrence Cohen in anthropology and Caren Kaplan in women's studies have looked at sexual structures around the world. Leslie Kurke in comparative literature and classics and Sharon Marcus in English have been working intensively on how sexuality was organized in different historical periods."

Lucey's own expertise is sexuality in French literature. His last book examined the 20th century author André Gide, and his next book will look at the work and times of Honoré de Balzac.

Illustration from a mid-nineteenth century edition of Balzac's work

"Balzac represented non-normative forms of sexuality in very explicit and theoretically sophisticated ways," Lucey says. "If you take a novelist like Dickens, there are certain characters, like Miss Wade in 'Little Dorrit,' who can be understood to have non-normative sexualities. But the representation there takes a lot of uncoding. Balzac had no problem making the code much more transparent."

Balzac's culture, the France of the 1830's and 1840's, was a changing society in which older sexual forms were giving way to new. Sexual forms associated with the aristocracy, including same-sex ones, were on the wane. Newer bourgeois forms were asserting themselves, with a variety of forms attached to popular culture existing alongside them.

"Compared to England, France was much more open at that time, legally and culturally speaking," says Lucey. "Men had been hanged in England in the early nineteenth century for having relationships with other men. That was not a possibility in France. Englishmen often fled to France or Italy. There was the idea at the end of the century, for instance, that Oscar Wilde should never have gone on trial, that he should have fled to France as so many others had done."

Lucey cites Balzac as one of the first novelists to give these different sexual forms his serious attention. In his novel "A Harlot High and Low," Balzac includes a scene in a prison exercise yard where the characters use what Lucey describes as "queer slang." While some of the phrases come through in the English translation, much of the dialogue is specific to Balzac's time, language and location.

"We tend to think that everything can be understood through certain categories, homosexuality and heterosexuality," Lucey says. "But in fact, the social forms through which people interact are much more complicated, and words don't always translate so easily."

Lucey says social changes over past decades have paved the way for work like his. While books about sexuality in literature began to reach the mainstream in the 1970's, sexuality studies were not fully accepted in academic circles for several more years.

"Even now, you hear comments like, 'Proust is such a great author. Why reduce him to his sexuality?'" says Lucey. "They could just as easily ask, "Why reduce Proust to his interest in music, or in art, or in anti-Semitism, or in X? 'X' could be anything. When an author's interest in sexuality is so prominent, the question would rather be, why would you imagine it reductive to consider it as part of an intellectual inquiry?"

An upcoming conference at Berkeley, "Studying Sexual Culture," will help the new Center develop plans for the future. The event, one of the first hosted by the new Center, was originally scheduled for last fall. After the events of September 11, it was postponed until March 7-9. Experts from around the world will gather on campus to discuss wide-ranging aspects of sexual culture.

"The forms through which people actually live their lives are undergoing a lot of change," Lucey says. "We don't have a clear notion of what a family is anymore. Social forms for sexuality are evolving, and nobody quite knows where they're going to go. We're trying to understand that."