Featured White Papers
- Oct. 14th: Simplified IT with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (ZDNet)
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
- The rise of Web commuting (Citrix Online)
Content provided in partnership with
Queer physiognomies; or, how many ways can we do the history of sexuality?
Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Dana Seitler
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
Further, the conception of sexual perversion (marked in Mosby as a type of gender trouble, a state of racial reversion, and a series of unnamed "anomalies") coexisted among a range of scientific diagnostics aimed not only at defining the threat of hereditary and contagious disease on the individual body but also on predicting its effects on the national body. In an extended study entitled Race Decadence: An Examination of the Causes of Racial Degeneracy in the United States, physician William Sadler advises his readers that "the time has come when the American citizen should wake up and take a real interest in postponing his own funeral." In this "examination," Sadler calls those who hold and act on desires for the same sex "a class of defectives who may be said to belong to and constitute the 'third sex," in that they are so thoroughly abnormal that they can scarcely be classed sexually as either typical males or females" and who are "of a class belonging to the feeble-minded group as a whole ... who have directly inherited their brutal and perverted sex tendencies." (35) Sadler's study specifies those bodies that are the greatest threat to national progress as either atavistic throwbacks or hereditary threats, usually both. For Sadler, and degenerationists and eugenicists like him, the perverted and degenerate body was a living artifact that could be read as a danger to the processes of the modern nation-state and, simultaneously, as a signifier of modern decay
Of course, the very existence of these images and interpretive diagnostics in Mosby's and Sadler's studies attests to the ways in which personal existence was now understood to be constituted by not only an assignable race or gender but by an assignable sexuality. But the same images also suggest that conceptualizations of the sexually perverse body did not converge in some coherent or overarching identity form or definition, lf the turn of the century witnessed the eruption of a new focus on sexuality, a solipsistic analysis of the homosexual body does not begin to take into account the complexities of emergent models of perversion. Instead of a stable homosexual body, these models suggest, rather, a "queer physiognomy" whose meanings signify across a number of multiple and unstable registers. This queer physiognomy is not a coherent identity category but an idiosyncratic composite of modern perversity that creates the conditions for newly imagined binds and cross sections of personhood.
