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Queer physiognomies; or, how many ways can we do the history of sexuality?
Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Dana Seitler
AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL pamphlet from 1934 features a series of photographs and illustrations that had become common to the genre of "scientific" pictorial display in the early twentieth century: images of naked tribal women, transvestism, bearded women, Siamese twins, female homosexuality, and dwarfism, to name just a few. The pamphlet proclaims its "500 authentic racial-esoteric" images to be "after the originals from scientific explorations, field studies and museum archives" and has as its aim the documenting of "racial peculiarities," "fetishism," "aberrations and perversions," "freaks and other abnormalities," along with "the erotic life of savage and civilized races of mankind" (see figs. 1 and 2). By the time of this pamphlet's appearance, the publication in America of George Gould and Walter Pyle's Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1896) had already made available the country's most famous human aberrations, and the practice of the "freak photograph" had become an established tradition. Photographer Matthew Brady, eminent for his images of Civil War soldiers and their war-torn bodies, ran a studio in New York City's Bowery where he gained another kind of notoriety for his portraits of Tom Thumb, Chang and Eng, the Fiji Cannibals, and other human oddities. Not only thought to be scientifically useful but also in actuality hugely popular, these photographs illustrate what Henry James has called an "American scene"--a world preoccupied with observation, supervision, and the intrigues of a new technology. That fin de siecle rite of being photographed--in family portraits, medical studies, cabinet cards, and cartes de visite--inaugurated what would become, and remains, a resounding interest in the contours of the visible body.
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[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]
Remarkable about these curiosities is the chain of connection they produce among a range of bodies designated odd and peculiar. This chain generates a kind of categorical promiscuity that blurs any readily decipherable intention or purpose that we might expect from a scientific treatise. In the pamphlet, for example, a diagram illustrating "where additional milk glands sometimes appear in the female body"--drawing upon contemporaneous theories of reversion and atavism--appear alongside a sketch of conjoined twins from Hungary. While corporeal aberration seems to be what draws these two images together, the pamphlet never analyzes or explains this connection, nor does it disclose the relationship of these images to earlier ones of Parisian sex clubs and a "corset fetishist."
The persistent recurrence to sexual categories to label the images, in addition to the pamphlet's focus on images of a sexualized (at times pornographically displayed) body, suggests that the images in its pages may belong to the history of sexuality. It would not be quite right, however, to understand these images as informing something like a "history of homosexuality" in any stable or unified sense, despite the pamphlet's inclusion of images of homosexuals, transvestites, and women passing as men. As the harnessing together of "racial peculiarities," "aberrations and perversions," and "freaks and other abnormalities" in the pseudo-anthropological text literally illustrates, the scientific construction of perverse bodies is part of a complex cultural story not limited to sexuality, homosexuality, or sexual identity. In fact, the construction of perversity appears as part of a story in which race, gender, physical deformation, sexuality, and many other bodily forms and practices emerge in ontologically and epistemologically interdependent ways; each interacts dynamically in a process of mutual reinforcement, for the very existence of the one confirms the perversity and "peculiarity" of the other.
Nonetheless, these images do coincide with the pathologizing medical discourses of surveillance and punishment of what would come to be known as "'homosexuality" in the twentieth century. The central force in the emergence of this knowledge was Havelock Ellis, whose influential Sexual Inversion appeared in 1897, and, along with Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and, later, Freud's 1905 essays, contributed considerably to the new visibility of homosexuality. Their theories brought to the fore the issue of sexual identity as addressed, positioned, and formed by scientific representations. Thus the pamphlet may have something to say about the medical sciences that came to constrain queer bodies within the registers of identity and visibility. But it also helps us to characterize these practices of medical representation more precisely. If the photograph was thought to hold the capacity to make visible what was formerly invisible, it did so under the aegis of an uncertain discourse. The inconsistent renditions within the human sciences of a legible sexual identity evidenced on the body will be a main focus of this essay. The coming into visibility of sexually pathologized identities was not only troubled by representational and categorical uncertainty: such uncertainty was characteristic of attempts of human science to render sexual identity both visible and pathological. Sexual perversity thus emerges as a category of personhood specified and made intelligible through contiguous relationships with other productions of personhood conceived as deviant or perverse. Thinking about sexuality along these lines means attending to the ways in which the technologies of sexual spectacle bring incommensurate fields of identity into highly productive conjunctions of personhood.
