I’d like to start this essay with a story, a story about Axayacatl.

Helluva name, “Axayacatl”, who are (or were) they?

Axayacatl was born around 1449 in present-day Mexico, then part of the Aztec Empire.  He was the tlatoani (approximately “king” in English) of the city-state of Tenochtitlan, making him the head honcho of the Aztec Empire as a whole.  As a youth, he’d shown a great deal of military prowess in various campaigns, which is why he was selected to succeed his father Moctezuma I as emperor (and much to the chagrin of his elder brothers).  He was a fairly competent tlatoani: he led successful campaigns against the Tlatelolcoans, commissioned the Great Sun Stone, and even wrote some bitchin’ poetry!  In all, his legacy was only marred by his defeat by the Tarascans, which was the first major military defeat of the Aztec Empire.

But that’s not the story I want to talk about today.

Alright, lay it on me then, what’s the story?

I want to talk about the story of the integration of the Chalcans into the empire, but to do that, you need to understand a bit about the Aztecs.  The Aztec Empire started as three city-states: Tenochtitlan (the military hub and lead partner, which Axayacatl directly ruled), Texcoco (the intellectual powerhouse), and Tlacopan (the younger brother that Mom made tag along, ugh!).  For reasons too complex to get into, the three city-states formed an alliance and began to collectively dominate and ultimately conquer their neighbours.  The Aztec Empire would ultimately become the dominant power in the region and the second largest empire in the Pre-Columbian Americas.

Now, empire is a difficult business; turns out, people tend to not like being conquered and will revolt whenever they think they have a fighting chance!  As a result, empires have come upon similar techniques for keeping their vast realms together.  Among these, one of the most successful techniques is to integrate formerly conquered peoples into your empire, giving them the privileges afforded to the imperial core.  By doing this, the formerly conquered peoples suddenly find themselves with a stake in the success of the empire, and are thus much more amenable to imperial rule and less likely to revolt.  Rome and Persia were perhaps most famous for this, but the Aztecs employed similar techniques.

Now we come to Chalco and its people, the Chalcans.  The Chalcans had been conquered by Axayacatl’s father, Moctezuma I, and were subsequently placed in a tributary status.  This meant they were not full members of the Aztec Empire (and thus did not get any of the privileges of empire), but were forced to pay tribute regularly.  The Chalcans, who had little hope of revolt against the dominant Aztecs, chafed under this arrangement and soon started clamouring for full membership in the empire (and the entailed perks).

Makes enough sense to me.  And where does Axayacatl fit into this?

To considerably simplify, in 1479 the leaders of Chalco decided to send a cultural envoy to convince Axayacatl to accept them as full members of the empire.  With musicians, singers, dancers, poets, and more, you can imagine an envoy for a task of that gravity was a scene to behold.  Among the many performances, it was decided the envoy would perform a song that, not so subtly, bemoaned the suffering of Chalcan women at Aztec hands.  The hope was to inspire either pity for the Chalcans or moral revulsion at Aztec cruelties, which would in turn be the impetus for full membership in the empire.  Needless to say, it was a bold selection, like playing this at your least favourite neighbour’s funeral.  Among the envoy was a man named Quecholcohuatl, who was a talented musician, sure, but not the most talented of the group.  Keep a note of him.

Moving slowly but surely northwest from Chalco, the envoy eventually arrived in Tenochtitlan in order to perform for Axayacatl.   The weather was hot and dry, typical for the region, and the envoy had been marching for a while at this point.  Whether due to the heat, the long march, or just sheer nerves, the head musician fainted before the performance.

Jeez, and let me guess, it goes poorly?

I’m not sure of the Nahuatl translation for “the show must go on”, but it was clearly the philosophy that inspired what followed.  As the next in line of command, Quecholcohuatl took command of the envoy and prepared as best he could for the night’s festival, aware that his life was on the line.  When Axayacatl arrived,  Quecholcohuatl did his damnedest.  He launched into the song with passion, knowing full well it could be his last, all the while trying to assess the reaction of Axayacatl.  Quecholcohuatl noticed that the tlatoani was watching him closely, only adding to the stress of the moment.  But soon, it was clear that Axayacatl was not scrutinizing him, but was rapt with Quecholcohuatl’s performance.  Enamoured by the performance, Axayacatl even joined in the Chalcan’s dance!

That sounds … like a good thing?

It was.  I am sure that Quecholcohuatl was ecstatic at his success and relieved that his head was no longer on the chopping block.  Or at least, he was for the brief moment after his performance, as Axayacatl suddenly turned and returned to his chambers after the song.  Quecholcohuatl worried, had he failed?  More frightening still, an attendant to Axayacatl soon after tapped Quechocohuatl on the shoulder and told him that Axayacatl requested he speak with him in his chambers.  In what I’m sure felt like a funeral procession, Quecholcohuatl went with the attendant to see Axayacatl.

When he arrived at his quarters, he found Axayacatl reclining on a woven mat (a thing of great significance to the Aztecs), wearing high-quality furs, and surrounded by his (numerous) wives.  Quecholcohuatl immediately launched into apologies (as recorded by Chimalpahin), “Oh tlatoani, may you burn me, I who am your vassal, for we have done wrong in your presence”.  But Axayacatl responded that he was not offended, he liked the performance.  In fact, he really, really liked the performance.  He told Quecholcohuatl that, from now on, he was only to sing songs for him.  He then stood up, looked to his wives and said “Women, stand up and meet him, seat him among you.  Here has come your rival.”  Axayacatl then shooed off his wives, bedded Quecholcohuatl, and only re-emerged for the envoy’s ending feast.  Following this envoy, the Chalcans would be integrated as full members of the empire only a few years later.  And Axayacatl, for his part, would be forever remembered as the Aztec’s foremost bisexual icon.

Well, that is an interesting story, certainly not one I’d expect from the human sacrifice-happy Aztecs, but interesting nonetheless.  Why do you bring it up?

The story brought to mind a question I’d been meaning to answer for a while: can you call Axayacatl bisexual?

While debate and discussion can sometimes appear to be concerned with a single issue, this often masks a more complex reality.  This too is the case in the ongoing discussion over whether you can assert certain historical figures are queer.  There are those who claim that you can, like the Sappho and her Friend community.  On the other hand, you have historians who claim that such claims are anachronistic.  Ostensibly, this is a debate between an essentialist and a social constructionist view of sex and gender, but this conceals a parallel debate on the public use of theory. And while there will never be a ‘correct’ way to prioritize robustness versus public utility, Althusser’s theory of interpellation may offer a robust and rhetorically useful approach to this debate.

Well I don’t think there’s much of a debate here.  Assuming Axa, Ayaxa … what was it again?

Axayacatl, it means water bug in Nahuatl!

… Right.  Well, assuming Axayacatl had any interest in his numerous wives (beyond continuing the dynasty), then sure, why not call him bisexual?  He slept with women, he slept with at least one man; by the powers invested in me I dub him bisexual!

Some would certainly agree with you.  To that point, let me acquaint you with the subreddit (a community within the larger website of Reddit) of Sappho and her Friend.  Per their description, the community engages in poking fun at “historical and other LGBTQ erasure from academia and other spaces”.  That is, they make jokes about (usually historical) examples of straightwashing, of misrepresenting queer people as straight.  The name of the subreddit comes from Sappho of Lesbos, a female poet most famous for writing erotic poetry about women.  In fact, her legacy inspired the words “sapphic” (i.e. relating to loving women or lesbians) and “lesbian” (i.e. homosexual woman, since Sappho came from Lesbos).  The major joke, as suggested by the title, is about how some historians have described clearly queer couples as “friends”, “close compatriots” or “Oh my god they were roommates!”, when clearly it was a romantic relationship. 

While Sappho and her Friend (or SAHF) generally has a light-hearted atmosphere, the jokes often belie some genuine frustration with the perceived straightwashing in academia.  Take the case of the eponymous Sappho; she wrote things in her poetry like “Sweet mother, I cannot weave – / slender Aphrodite has overcome me / with longing for a girl”.  While she occasionally refers to her ‘husband’, it is clear that it is an invented character, as her husband’s name roughly translates to “Big Dick Man”.  And yet, you can find many-a-textbook with references to Sappho’s “beloved female friends”, as opposed to “lovers” or “partners”. 

Well that’s clearly ridiculous.  Is this misrepresentation purposeful?  I know that some historians have a more conservative bent, at least as compared to other areas in academia.

Of course there have been historians with an agenda trying to paper over queer history or attempt to highlight the queer aspects of reviled figures.  For example, right-wing classicists habitually discount the clearly queer relationships of figures like Alexander the Great, Emperor Hadrian, and others.  But arguing against these clear misrepresentations of history is, frankly, trivial.  I am more interested in the good-faith argument made by many historians that we shouldn’t use terms like “gay” or “queer” when discussing historical figures.  In short, the argument being made by these historians is that our modern terms for sexuality are anachronistic.  After all, “lesbian”, “homosexual” and “gay” are relatively modern terms, only  coming into use in 1732, 1869, and the 20^th century respectively. 

Hold on, that’s a pretty lame dodge.  Obviously Alexander the Great didn’t call himself gay, he was speaking Ancient Greek or whatever!  He would’ve used whatever Ancient Greek term was available at the time.  Or if there wasn’t a single term, they would still be able to describe their sexuality.

I agree, that would be a weak argument.  But the problem isn’t just “We don’t know the word for ‘gay’ in Ancient Greek”, it’s that these historical figures understood themselves in fundamentally different ways to our modern conceptions of sex and gender.  To explore this, let’s remain with the Greek example (as it’s probably most familiar to readers) and look only at sexuality (as opposed to gender, sex, etc). 

So we (i.e. those of us living today in the West) generally define sexuality by one’s choice in partner.  If you are male and fancy women, you’re heterosexual.  By contrast, if you’re male and fancy men, you’re homosexual.  If you’re interested in both men and women, you’re b–

Based.

… bisexual, but that too I suppose.  What I’m trying to demonstrate is that our definition of sexuality hinges on partner-choice.  When we go back to ancient Greece, however, this definition does not hold.  The ancient Greeks did not use partner-choice as a criterion for defining sexuality, but instead placed much higher importance on sexual role (i.e. active or passive).  Men were expected to take the active role, while women, younger men, and lower-class men were expected to take the passive role.  That is, a Greek noble having sex with his male servant wouldn’t raise an eyebrow; but if that noble were to take the passive role, he would be ridiculed and shamed.

Bringing it back to the question at hand, this is what these historians (who I’ll refer to as SAHF-critical historians) mean when they say that calling Alexander the Great “gay” is anachronistic.  They are not denying that Alexander had sex with men.  They are not denying that Alexander had a romantic, sexual relationship with his bodyguard Hephaestion.  And they’re not denying that Alexander was so distraught at Hephaestion’s death that he spent the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars on an elaborate funeral where he re-enacted the mourning of the mythical Achilles for his lover/compatriot Patrochlus.  What they are saying is that Alexander would not have identified as ‘gay’ because such a concept of sexuality did not exist for the ancient Greeks and we have no idea if he would’ve identified as such.

Now hold on a second.  Everything you’re saying makes sense in terms of different cultural understandings of sexuality and all that.  But isn’t sexuality, like, biological?  I get what you’re saying, but isn’t there the brute “bio-fact” that some men are attracted to men, and some women to women?

That is an excellent question/point, almost like you can read my mind.  Put a pin in that thought, I will come back to it a bit later.  I’d like to first address the ‘debate’, if you can call it as such, between SAHF and SAHF-critical historians.  Despite apparently disagreeing on a single question, whether you can call a historical figure queer, I actually think there are two different discussions taking place.  The first debate is between theories of sex and gender (as mediated through philosophies of language), the second is over the public use of theory. 

“Theories of sex and gender as mediated through philosophies of language?”  What in the hell…

There are actually multiple ways of conceptualizing sex and gender (as discussed briefly in previous essays), but how one conceptualizes those categories is dependent on your philosophy of language.  One such theory is essentialism, one that will probably seem intuitive to most of our readers.  A theory dating back to the ancient Greek philosophers (fittingly), essentialism argues that everything in the universe has a set of qualities (or “essence”) that gives that thing its identity.  A pig’s essence is being pink, having a curly tail, and enjoying playing in the mud; that is essentialist thinking.  Applied to sex and gender, essentialism would prescribe unique essences to each sex, orientation, gender, sexuality, etc.  For example, an essentialist would say a man’s essence is having XY chromosomes, a penis, high testosterone, and other traits.  Importantly, essentialism is trans-historical, meaning that a thing’s essence is the same regardless of time, place or culture.  That is, a thing’s essence never changes.

The theory benefits from being intuitive, but it also has pretty serious weaknesses.  To re-use the pig example, imagine I start with a definition of pig as being pink, having a curly tail, and enjoying playing in the mud.  Then, to my shock, I encounter something that is demonstrably a pig, save that it’s brown!  I say to myself, “Well, I must’ve been wrong about pigs being pink, I now will say that pigs are pink or brown, have a curly tail, and enjoy playing in the mud.  That is the true essence of pigs”.  What I’ve discovered, put differently, is that being pink is not an essential characteristic of ‘pig’, not part of its essence.  Then, let’s imagine the process repeats with a pig lacking a curly tail, or a pig that doesn’t enjoy playing in the mud.  How do I then define pig, as none of these so-called ‘essential’ characteristics are apparently necessary for being a pig?  The same could be said for sex and gender; if there are men without penises, who don’t have XY chromosomes, and have low testosterone, how can I define “man”?

Now hold on, just because the definition has to change sometimes with new information doesn’t mean there isn’t an essence, just that definition of an essence is being redefined to be more accurate!

This is where the second theory comes into play, the social constructionist theory of sex and gender.  Social constructionism holds that terms or categories are defined by how speakers use and understand those terms or categories.  That is, a pig is a pig insofar as we (whatever that “we” may be) would define that thing as a pig.  It is the same with sex and gender, the definition of sex and gender in a particular society is based on how the terms are actually used.  Social constructionism defies the essentialist idea that there are these essences (“Pig”, “Man”, “Queer”, and so on) that exist outside of language.  So while essentialists tie the ‘truth’ of a statement to correlation between the word for a thing and that thing’s essence, the social constructionist ties the truth of a statement to its coherence within the social group it is used, to its use in society.  This makes social constructionism a historically contingent theory, because the meaning of terms differ over space and time

There’s an imperfect analogy to this in economics, the subjective theory of value.  When we were discussing Marx, we talked about the labour theory of value, the idea that we determine the value of things by the amount of socially-necessary labour needed to produce them.  By contrast, the subjective theory of value holds that the value of a thing is whatever the consumers think its value is.  That is, a tomato is worth a buck if consumers ultimately buy it at that price, there is no ‘authentic value’ of a tomato outside of its perceived value.  In other other words, it collapses the categories of “guise” and “disguise”, refusing to differentiate between a thing’s appearance and its essence.  Like how the subjective theory of value defines the value of a thing by how the consumers use and understand that value, the social constructivist defines words by how the speakers use and understand that word.

Weird choice of analogy, especially for a lefty like you.  What’re the consequences of social constructionism?

The major consequence is that a word’s definition is functionally arbitrary, because it is caused by the (arbitrary) whims and decisions of its users, “we can make a word mean anything”.  And if something is arbitrary, it can be changed, and potentially be changed by our purposeful action.  That is, if I get the rest of society to include brown pigs under the definition of ‘pigs’, then brown pigs are pigs!  This has revolutionary consequences, as you can imagine and as I’ve talked about in an earlier essay.

No, I meant the consequences for this discussion.

Getting me back on topic, you keep me honest!

It’s literally what (little) you pay me for.

Well you do it well.  It becomes clear to me, then, that the Sappho and her Friend subreddit is using an essentialist understanding of sex and gender, while the SAHF-critical historians are using a social constructivist understanding.  Starting with SAHF, look at what they’re saying: “No, Hephaestion was not just Alexander’s good friend.  Alexander the Great was gay.”  In our terms, they are arguing part of the essence of Alexander was being-gay, regardless of how he may have been understood by himself or other Greeks.  The SAHF community is arguing that gay, a category they believe to be transhistorical, fits Alexander as well as it does any gay person today. 

But couldn’t you argue SAHF is saying “Alexander is gay because that’s how we define gay, and Alexander fits that definition”?  That would be closer to a social constructivist view.

You could, obviously there is no Sapphic Manifesto, but I do think the language betrays an essentialist understanding of sex and gender.  There are far more “Alexander is/was gay”-s than “We think/we know Alexander was gay”-s, so I think it’s fair to say SAHF is thinking in an essentialist way.

By contrast, SAHF-critical historians are pretty explicitly engaging with a social constructivist understanding of sex and gender.  They would say “The ancient Greeks, Alexander among them, did not use an equivalent word to “gay” because they did not have our conceptions of sex and gender.  Thus, calling Alexander gay is anachronistic because that’s not how the ancient Greeks would define Alexander.”  This tracks with the wider move within the social sciences away from essentialism and towards social constructivism.

This mismatch in frame, essentialism versus social constructivism, explains the dispute; the two have totally different approaches to the philosophy of language.  So it’s no wonder they don’t understand each other’s viewpoint on if or how you can define historical figures as gay!  Because even if SAHF and SAHF-critical historians made the strongest possible case for their views, essentialism or social constructivism, they would be talking past one another.

Okay, so what’s your solution then?  You seem to skew towards social constructivism, are you saying someone just needs to push back on SAHF’s essentialist thinking?

But my solution to this dispute is not simply to try and convince the folks of the SAHF community that my view or these historians’ view of sex/gender/sexuality is more robust.  In fact, I’m sure much of the SAHF community is probably fully aware of the difference between the essentialism and social constructivism vis-à-vis sex and gender.  It’s a largely queer, progressive community, one that’s much more likely to be aware of this discourse than your average Joe.  However, they embrace this essentialist argument because they are engaged in a motivated form of reasoning, a fact that conveniently brings us to the next departure between SAHF and historians: the question of the public use of theory.

“The public use of theory?”  What do you mean by that?

We here at On Second Glance generally avoid the bloodsport of debate for numerous reasons.  That’s not for lack of knowledge, as we hopefully show in these essays, which are backed by (mounds and mounds) of reading.  That’s because we are more interested in theory itself, in its rigour and its coherence, whether it can robustly describe the world we live in (and ideally, ways that it might be improved).  Debate is reliant on coherent, rigorous theory, but that’s not its main focus.  Rather, debate is concerned with theory insofar as it can be used to win over or persuade real people.  That is, debate is more concerned with the public use of theory – how theory and theoretical concepts are received by the average person and the real-world impacts of theory.

I getcha, basically how an idea is used, rather than what the idea actually is.

Exactly, and this is an area where SAHF and SAHF-critical historians depart.  Your average member of SAHF has one goal, demonstrate the existence of queer people in history.  And to this end, the simplest argument to follow is an essentialist one; “Queer people do X, Historical Figure did X, therefore Historical Figure is queer”.  Basically, it’s the “Born this Way” argument.  It’s not very robust, it skips over a lot of detail and nuance, but it’s straightforward that any layman can understand it.  So in this context, the folks in the SAHF community ditch more complex, robust arguments for simpler ones.  And that is because this simplicity is more effective in the public arena, it has greater utility in the public use of theory.

By contrast historians are generally concerned more with the robustness of their work, that is, theory itself.  That’s due to the nature of their audience, which tends to either be academics or those otherwise already immersed in the nuances of an area or discipline.  Put in the negative, your average historian is not writing with the thought in mind “Oh, how would this come across in the court of public opinion?” or “How could a bad faith actor misinterpret my work to suit their political agenda?” 

That’s not to say that historians aren’t aware of the public use of theory.  In fact, far from it, many are all too keenly aware of their work’s relation to wider discourse.  After all, history has very direct political implications and historians are constantly battling against hyper-partisan readings of historical events and eras.  But when historians are writing for their largely academic audience, they are going to be more concerned with rigour than with writing quips that will play well in the battleground of politics.  And this is why an historian will respond to the question “Was Sappho gay?”  by writing pages upon pages of nuanced discussion which ultimately says:

And this is what makes SAHF want to tear their collective hair out.

But what would SAHF have them do?

To the extent that you can say a community has a singular opinion on something, it’d probably be that they want historians to answer “Yes”, without a book-worth of preamble, to the question “Was Sappho gay?”

Is that … a fair request?

You know, I really hate that meme.

Insofar as the request is “Acknowledge Sappho a lesbian in your academic writing”, it’s probably an unfair request.  There have to be spaces and formats in which discussion of sex and gender can take place with the nuance that it deserves.

But there is a different way in which this request is very much valid.  Much of the frustration expressed in SAHF is retroactive.  Specifically, it is a frustration with queer people not being represented in the historical canon, often specifically in the context of school textbooks.  And this is where I think the frustration is most valid.

School textbooks?  But isn’t that just frustration with historians with extra steps?  Aren’t textbooks just simplifying what historians write about?

Not really.  What goes in a history textbook is often more a function of the goals and biases of the particular publisher than of historical consensus.  In the US, Texas is perhaps most infamous for pumping out textbooks that have bias of the “And then Squanto taught the pilgrims how to plant corn”-variety.  That is, they are infamous for putting out highly distorted, whitewashed versions of history.  So well-known is this phenomenon that there are several award-winning books that address specific distortions within history textbooks, such as Lies My Teacher Told Me.

The frustration with textbooks, sometimes misdirected at historians, is two-pronged.  On the one hand, there is queer erasure of the “Sappho’s female friend”-variety, where queer relationships are either ignored or framed as close friendships.  The second (and the more nefarious of the two, due to its subtlety), is implying most historical figures were essentially straight.  This is generally achieved implicitly, by simply not noting the different historical conceptions of sex and gender and allowing students to apply their (contingent, modern, often little informed) understanding of sex and gender onto it.  That is, just like how grafting modern ideas of “what is queer” onto historical figures is anachronistic, so too is grafting our modern ideas of “what is straight” onto them.  In short, it’s a question of consistency: either acknowledge historical figures as queer or straight by our standards of sex and gender, or alternatively, clarify that none of the historical figures would map onto our conceptions of sex and gender.

But why would that be relevant?  Why do the folks of SAHF even care about whether a school textbook acknowledges Sappho as gay, Axayacatl as bi, or whatever else?

I won’t speak to what it means personally for a queer person to see themselves represented historically, that’s not really my place as a straight guy.  But I will speak to the observable effects that come with greater queer representation and visibility.  It is well-established, after all, that greater exposure to queer characters, themes, and perspectives in media is strongly correlated with greater acceptance of queer people, a relationship that is likely causal.  So it should come as no great shock that with the uptick of queer representation in American media in the 1990s was followed by an unbelievable shift in public opinion towards acceptance.  Consider the fact that in 1997, only 27% of Americans supported equal marriage rights for queer couples, only for that to shoot all the way up to 70% approval just over 20 years later!  And representation in history is simply another form of media representation, history is told through stories after all, “hi-story”.  Additionally, my suspicion would be that representation in history is as (if not more) effective to this end, because it can help dispel the idea that being queer is some new phenomenon!

Alright, I can respect that.  But where do you come down on all of this?  People don’t come here just to learn about the arguments, they want to know what you think!  And now that I think about it, you still didn’t answer my question from earlier, isn’t there some biological basis in sex (and by consequence gender)?

Come on…

Sorry, I wish I could give you a straight yes or no, but anything this complex is always going to require nuance.  So rather than digging up my Butler notes and making this already-too-long-essay even longer, I’ll just give you the super condensed SparkNotes version.  Sex, gender, and sexuality are dependent on biology and culture/ideology (to the extent the two can be disentangled).  A combination of genetic, hormonal, epigenetic (possibly), and other biological factors predispose people to certain behaviours and related to sex, gender and sexuality.  This is the case in both humans and other animals.   However, culture and ideology play a role in how we understand and act out those dispositions, they play a role in moulding those dispositions and drives into something comprehensible.  And naturally, different cultures and ideologies will mould those dispositions and drives differently, which explains the varying gender systems across cultures despite negligible difference in human genetics.  There are no hijra without South Asian culture, no Two-Spirits without pan-Indian culture, and non-binary folks without Western culture.  Being partially a function of culture/ideology does not make sex/gender/sexuality less authentic or meaningful, no less than how my “being American” isn’t inauthentic or meaningless just because it’s a cultural/ideological belief.  Finally, the relationship is not a simple, one-way “culture/ideology acts on biology”, but a mutual relationship.  A person’s biological dispositions and drives are moulded and understood through culture and ideology into a coherent sex/gender/sexuality, which in turn affects culture and ideology writ large through that person’s particular iteration of sex/gender/sexuality.  Culture and ideology thus both acts to mould sex/gender/sexuality, and is in turn acted on by the iterations it helps create.  This serves to explain why these categories are understood differently across time and space!

That wasn’t much of a SparkNotes.  Yeah, less wordy than usual, but still fairly complex.  Even someone inclined to agree with you would need a lot of clarification on all that.

And that’s not even getting into performativity!  But you’ve hit the nail on the head.  It is almost impossible to capture the immense complexity of queer theory in a concise way in the public arena.  This is exacerbated further if you’re discussing with someone who disagrees, doubly so if they’re not discussing in good-faith.  This is why many people, the SAHF community included, will rely on simple-if-less-robust arguments when discussing things of importance publicly.  And when you consider the significant stakes of queer representation in history, such a decision becomes entirely understandable. 

That all being said, you can imagine that if you could make arguments that are similarly simple, but even more robust, it makes sense to adopt that new rhetorical tactic.  And I think such an argument, similarly straightforward but more robust, can be found in Althusser.  To that end, let’s introduce the man.

Louis Althusser was one of the many intellectuals born in French Algeria (alongside another who shall not be named).  Something must have been in the water there, because French Algeria produced some truly incredible minds, but that’s besides the point.  Althusser’s contributions to critical theory are far too numerous to count, but one of his most important ideas was his theory of interpellation, that is, the making of subjects.  And it is with this theory of interpellation that I think we can resolve the dispute between SAHF and these historians in a robust and useful way.

In short, interpellation refers to how society makes and understands the subjects of that society through the qualities of the subject.  That sounds bizarre, I know, but let me explain.  Society is literally made up of numerous individuals, numerous people, right?  You, me, your brother, your crazy uncle, and your neighbour who blasts music all hours of the night.  They are all individual people.  But society doesn’t “see” individuals, it sees subjects, where a “subject” is an individual as understood through a category.  Society “sees” me as a man, as an adult, as an American, as a domestically-born citizen, as a straight person, and so on.  And society will act upon me according to those categories through which it understands me.  This society can draft me, on account of being a male subject.  This society can tax me at a certain level on account of being a subject with a particular level of income.  This society affords me certain privileges because I am a subject that has citizenship.  Were I queer, this same society might say “You cannot donate blood” on account of being a queer subject.

One of the most notable consequences of interpellation is that it causes the individual to see themselves as a subject, to see those categories that render them a subject as a core part of their identity.  That is, the categories that convert individuals into subjects are also internalized by the subject.  If I am told time and time again that I am a man, if I am expected to act in a certain way because I am a man, if I have certain expectations on me because I am a man, I’m going to start to think of myself as a man.  And why wouldn’t I, there are tangible impacts on my life based on that perception!  If society says “Hey, you, you’re X” and treats me as though I were, you know I’m going to think “Huh, I guess I am X.  After all, society treats me as X”.

But isn’t society just recognizing your actual attributes?

Not exactly.  Not all categories are interpellating; or not all categories are used to turn an individual into a subject.  For example, I have brown hair.  This is a materially true fact about me, the individual.  But this does not factor into myself as subject, society doesn’t act on me differently because of my brown hair.  If I were born with red or blonde hair, society would not have treated me differently nor would I have understood myself differently.  In short, there are categories (e.g. hair colour) that can have real difference, but aren’t interpellating, that don’t alter how society interacts with you.

Of course, different societies are going to interpellate individuals differently (different both geographically and temporally, “the past is a foreign country”).  We’ve already covered one such vector of interpellation in the different conceptions of sexuality between Ancient Greece and the modern US.  In Ancient Greece, the interpellation based on sexuality is done through their sexual role: active or passive.  By contrast, in the modern US (and much of the West), interpellation based on sexuality is done through partner choice.  Thus, these two societies interpellate individuals differently according to sexuality.

What’s more, different societies may not even use the same vectors of interpellation!  Consider the Indian caste system, caste is a vector of interpellation because it is a method through which Indian society did (and to an extent, still does) understand and create subjects.  That is, whether you are born a brahmin or a dalit materially impacts how society understands and interacts with you.  In the modern US, there is no immediate equivalent to the caste system and so there is no interpellation as a result.  This shows that different societies don’t even necessarily interpellate along the same vectors.

Intuitive enough to me; societies understand their members through their qualities, qualities that can differ from place to place.  And these qualities are generally internalized by society’s members, turning individuals into subjects.  Why is this relevant to the discussion?

I think Althusser’s theory of interpellation is useful to this discussion for two reasons.  The first is that it moves the conversation from the difficult question of what sex/gender/sexuality is, to the simpler question of how identity around those categories is understood.  This is useful because it avoids the esoteric world of philosophy of language, of essentialism vs social constructionism.  This is, of course, useful in the public arena, where simplicity of argument is often more important than sheer robustness.

The second benefit that comes with bringing in Althusser is that it splits the original question, “Was Sappho a lesbian?” into two questions; “Did Sappho have romantic relationships with women?” and “Did Sappho identify as a lesbian?”  The answers to these questions, I believe, are satisfying to both camps, the SAHF community and historians, as well as being a more robust theory than what is offered by SAHF.  To the question “Did Sappho have romantic relationships with women?”, one can answer in the affirmative, “Yes”.  This answer is, rather obviously, historically accurate, and thus satisfying historians.  But more importantly, it is an answer to the main frustration of SAHF over lack of historical queer representation and its consequences.  That is, a queer person could forseeably say “Oh, Sappho had these relationships with women!  That’s something I identify with and so feel represented in the historical canon”, precisely what the SAHF community wants more of. 

To the second question, “Did Sappho identify as a lesbian?”, the answer is “No, because people did not identify as such at that time.”  Aside from being historically accurate, such an answer is acceptable to SAHF because it doesn’t make a claim about the “truth” of the category of lesbian.  That is, such an answer doesn’t make a claim whether “lesbian” is an essential, transhistorical category or a historically contingent, socially-constructed one.  This ambiguity means this isn’t going to be objected to by SAHF.  An added bonus to this argument is that it provides a natural springboard for a discussion of how our understanding of sex/gender/sexuality have changed over time and differs across cultures.  This kind of discussion, if done well, helps dispel the widely held belief that straight=normal=natural=good and queer=abnormal=unnatural=bad.  Put simply, it’s pretty hard to argue “My particular conception of ‘straight’ is the single normal and correct one” when you can demonstrate that, statistically, only a fraction of humanity across time and culture has shared the same ideas.

Okay, sure, I buy it.  Althusser’s theory of interpellation addresses the concerns of both sides in this debate by providing answers that are both simpler and more robust.  Great, whoop-dee-doo, you’ve (maybe) resolved a niche argument between two groups on the internet.  So what?  What was the point of this exercise?

This disagreement, between the Sappho and her Friend community and the SAHF-critical historians, is a lot of things at once.  In the grand scheme of things, it’s a somewhat niche discussion between small groups of people.  You could argue it’s ultimately of little importance, another niche debate among millions on the internet.  And yet, it is also more than that.  In terms of specifics, the debate highlights two major camps that exist in the current discourse on what ‘queer’ is.  They are, at least seemingly, divided on this question: is ‘queer’ a trans-historical, essential category?  Or a historically contingent, socially-constructed one?  Implicit in this discussion is also the question of the public use of theory.  That is, how do discussions of queer representation in history affect people in the real world?  What strategies are most effective (rather than most robust) in asserting the existence of queer people in history?  And perhaps, as I would argue, there are arguments that are both more robust and more effective in the public discourse, like those offered by Althusser’s theory of interpellation. 

But beyond this, it is a discussion that reminds us that theory has consequences.  Theory isn’t just for scoring imaginary Debate Points™ in the Free Marketplace of Ideas, however fun it may sometimes be.  We cannot forget that theories that win out in the court of public opinion will have real material impact on people, often especially for marginalized impact.  Theory has impact; Real People, Real Impacts. 

Even when that theory is about a long-dead, bisexual Aztec emperor.