Our Homosocial Constitution: Sexuality and Visualization in the Early Republic

Abstract

Paintings admired or owned in reproduction by Jefferson and Madison illuminate both the transatlantic visual and political culture of eighteenth century democratic revolution, and the distinct American sexual thought that sets America on its own path. Jefferson and Madison admired history paintings in which virtuous antique men founded republics through oaths and other assertions of their will, suppressing any claims of sentiment, family, or emotion. They found these themes in contemporary art (particularly by Jacques-Louis David and his students) but also sought them out in art of earlier times. Women are almost entirely absent from these paintings. Politically, this art played the same role in American political thought as in English and French: illustrating the classical virtues and suppression of emotion appropriate to republican society. Indeed, their French patrons and admirers included the translators of the Federalist Papers and Mazzei's history of the United States. This transatlantic culture, still strong enough to be the subject of warning in Washington's Farewell, has been little studied in recent US constitutional and legal history. The distinct American path, however, is marked by the extraordinary blindness of their American admirers to the gender ambiguity fairly evident in the paintings. By the time of the American Constitution, England and France already had feminists and homosexual men who publicly challenged gender assumptions in ways yet unimaginable to Americans. Unquestioning adherence, to a constitutional order that excludes women and bases its own legitimacy on masculine will and virtue, necessarily comes into question.