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There is a section in Samuel Delany's magnificent autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water, that dramatically raises the problem of writing the history of difference, the history, that is, of the designation of" other," of the attribution of characteristics that distinguish categories of people from some presumed (and usually unstated) norm.'

I am grateful to Tom Keenan for inviting me to the conference (" History Todayand Tonight," Rutgers and Princeton Universities, March 1990) where I tried out some of these ideas, and to the many people there whose questions and comments led to a first round of revisions and reformulations. The students in my graduate seminar at Rutgers in the