John Boswell - Legacy

Legacy

Although Boswell's earlier works did much to break down the taboo surrounding the serious study of homosexuality in American academia, by the end of his life Boswell was out of step with the main current of scholarly opinion. During the late 1980s, the influence of Michel Foucault's writings led to the emergence of a social constructivist view of human sexuality which emphasised the historical and cultural specificity of sexual identities such as 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual'. Despite Boswell's friendly relations with Foucault, he remained adamantly opposed to the French theorist's views, which he characterised as a reemergence of medieval nominalism, and defended his own striking essentialism in the face of changing academic fashions. Since his death, Boswell's work has come under criticism from medievalists and queer theorists, who—while acknowledging his personal courage in bringing the issue of sexuality into the academy—have pointed out the anachronism of speaking of 'gay people' in premodern societies and have questioned the validity of Boswell's conclusions. Several other scholars, including Terry Castle and Ruth Vanita, have followed in Boswell's footsteps, building up the field of lesbian and gay studies (as distinct from queer theory), and proposing that categorizations of humans by sexual predilection much predate the nineteenth century (where Foucault and his followers place it), both in the West (as in Plato's Symposium) and in other cultures (e.g., India).