Full citation:Turton, Stephen. 2024. Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary 1600-1930. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51873-1
A study of the handling of transgressive sexuality in English dictionaries over the centuries.
Chapter 1 – Legislating Acts
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This chapter looks at how words are defined and cited, and the semantic frameworks they’re associated with, using “sodomy” and “buggery” as the working examples. [Note: my summary is going to give undue attention to discussions relevant to women.]
17 century definitions of “buggery” in legal dictionaries include both homosexual acts and bestiality. They often reference earlier penalties (burning), though that was no longer in force. Two factors contribute to obscuring the specific nature of the acts so named. The descriptions are often in Latin (despite the books being overtly intended for non-scholarly readers), and the sexual nature of the acts is usually not explicitly mentioned. That you get entries like:
“One describeth this offence to be carnalis copula contra naturam & haec vel per confusionem specierum, sc. A man or a woman with a brute beast, vel sexuum, sc. A man with a man, a woman with a woman.” (1652) The question of whether sodomy could be committed between women was actually a point of contention.
These legal texts might have more explicit descriptions of the act elsewhere (e.g., that it requires “penetration and the emission of seed”) while being vague in the glossary. This deliberate vagueness has been a general feature of discourse around homosexuality, with authors often referring to it as an act “not to be named” or “not suitable to be discussed.”
When examined in parallel with other sexual terms, such as “copulation” or “fucking”, there is a general pattern of focusing on men as those who “commit sex”, but also a silent assumption that sex occurs between a male-female couple. So “sodomy” is presented as something a man does to a man where the nature of the act is separately defined as something a man does to a woman. These patterns complicate the interpretation of buggery/sodomy, both in terms of the nature of the act and the scope of its participants. We’ll get back to that.
A 1596 glossary typifies this vagueness, defining buggery, as “conjunction with one of the same kind” or in a later revision adding “or of men with beasts”. This is a relatively judgment-free definition, especially in comparison with the later editions’ definition of “sodomy” as “when one man lieth filthily with another man.”
The cultural association of “sodomy” with biblical references, and "buggery" with the 1533 Buggery Act raises the question of whether word choice depended on the genre of the text. An analysis of the association of these words (in their dictionary entries) with terms associated with religion (e.g., “sin”), or law (e.g., “crime”) also considering association with nature (e.g., “unnatural”) finds a definite association of “sodomy” with religious contexts, but a unclear preference in context for “buggery.”
In general, judgmental language when defining sexual terms works to clearly distinguish approved acts (m/f procreative sex within marriage) from unapproved acts (everything else). At the same time, by identifying and listing unapproved acts, a dictionary recognizes their existence and possibility. Except when specifically addressing acts defined as same-sex, definitions of sexual offenses (such as fornication, incest, polygamy, prostitution), explicitly presented the act as m/f.
The buggery act of 1535 defined buggery as “a detestable and abominable voice…committed with mankind or beast.” The lack of specifics regarding the agent of this act, and the use of “mankind” (rather than, for example, “man”) left room for dispute over whether women were in scope. If “mankind” can refer to human beings of any gender or if the specified agent can be of any gender, then m/f sex is technically included in “buggery”. This is workable if the “vice” in question is something that can be done to a woman, as in a disputed 18th century case where the term was applied to anal rape of a woman. But that requires an additional layer of definition of the act that is often absent or taken for granted.
One position held that “mankind” should be understood as “humanity” not “male persons”. The question of whether the omitted agent could be female was addressed directly in the context of bestiality (“by womankind with brute beast”) and addressed in some expanded definitions of sodomy as “a carnal copulation against nature, two wit, of man or woman in the same sex, or of either of them with beasts.” Others argued a distinction that sodomy excluded bestiality, while buggery included it. By the mid 17th century, legal definitions of buggery settled on including bestiality (by a man or woman) and both m/m and f/f sex. But exceptions occur that do not include f/f ( by omission rather than explicitly). The inclusion of f/f sex is largely restricted to legal dictionaries, rather than general purpose ones. The most limited definition of buggery mentions only m/m sex and omits bestiality. [Note: Despite these published definitions, England was absent of actual prosecutions of f/f “buggery”.]
As a rule, definitions of “sodomy” are more restricted. Bestiality is not included, and when the gender of the participants is mentioned, only men are specified. This is attributed to the model of the biblical story where male-assigned participants are involved. [Note: one might dispute the gender of angels, but they were treated as male by the human participants.]
In some cases, sodomy and buggery were presented as synonyms, but more often, sodomy was considered a subset of buggery.
The chapter moves on to considering the specific nature of the acts involved. While some learned sources make reference (in Latin) to anal penetration, none of the surveyed dictionaries explained the physical act. Instead, vague reference is made to the “unnatural” aspect combined with lust, wantonness, conjunction, copulation. But when those terms are defined, it is always specifically in reference to m/f sex. “The active generation between male and female” etc. Such terms are either too underspecified for clarity (“to join together”) or too over-specified to include same-sex acts.
We return now to the observation that dictionary definitions of sexual terms assume a male agent. Definitions of sex acts typically involve an unspecified agent (understood as a man) doing something to a woman. These formal definitions, however, do not reflect the more expansive use of the words in everyday language, where it is seen that women can fuck and men can be fucked. These uses turn up in legal records of witness testimony, but are not reflected when formal legal dictionaries are drawn up. (This points up only one of the flaws in using dictionaries as a guide to real-world language.)
In the context of this androcentricity there is a brief discussion of Anne Lister’s annotations on a 1735 Latin-English dictionary that placed herself as agent in a sexual context. Some dictionaries were specifically aimed at a female audience. The book speculates whether a woman reading a definition of a sexual verb as “to carnally know a woman” might have been inspired to place herself in the role of agent – as we know Anne Lister did, given that she describes becoming aroused at such a text.
From the mid 18th century on, dictionary compilers dealt with their anxiety around this possibility by increasingly censoring and obscuring sexual language in order to avoid giving people (especially women) ideas. This self-censorship not only appears in legal commentaries and glossaries, but in court records themselves, where accused acts of sodomy/buggery are concealed under phrases like “an unnatural crime” or using severely abbreviated forms of the word such as initials or first and last letter, joined by a dash.
Such words were also disappearing from ordinary dictionaries, such as Samuel Johnson’s (1755). Before that date, more than half of the studied dictionaries included “buggery,” while after, only 15.6% do. Entries for “sodomy” also declined somewhat, though appearing in well over half the texts both before and after. (This will be explored further in chapter 3.) Those entries that did appear from around 1750 to 1850 remove any explicit sexual reference and simply use phrases like “an unnatural crime.”
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