Queer physiognomies; or, how many ways can we do the history of sexuality?

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

Taken together, Lombroso's gymnastics of identification labors to maintain and anxiously repeat connections between very different social, racial, and sexual subjects and themes. Perhaps it is this "work" that keeps figures of degeneracy open to interpretation. On the one hand, Lombroso's description illustrates what Hortense Spillers calls the "vestibular" function of blackness--the process whereby culture comes to define itself through the relay of the black woman's body. (51) In Lombroso's portraits, however, gender, race, and sexuality are all combined; each acts as a relay through which the others acquire meaning. (52) In the text that accompanies these images, he describes the degenerate female as ugly, masculine, primitive, utterly racialized although not necessarily of color, with "wild eyes and perturbed countenances" who "recall women seen in asylum for the insane" (53) or may have "a desire for disgusting food," (54) a "deadness of the clitoris," "traits in common with children," "strong passions and intensely erotic tendencies" and "much muscular strength and a superior intelligence for the conception and execution of evil ... more terrible than any man." (55) Both wild and intelligent, without sexual feeling and intensely erotic, emotionally weak and physically strong, a child and a woman, the degenerate female's body both confirms and resists the scientific struggle for corporeal constancy, as does her etiological and ideological intractability. (56) Her excessive passion and her overidentification with masculinity certainly have some relationship to that complex of attributes that the modern period designated as "homosexuality" (take, for example, no. 9 in fig. 9, who, Lombroso informs us, cross-dressed as a man and joined the Italian army until she was caught and sent to prison). But animal, childlike, ugly, gender inverted, criminal, primitive, racialized, and brutish, the female degenerate's somatic instability refuses any singular identity category.

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

Something more than the categorical assessment of the homosexual body is needed to gain a fuller purchase on the images and embodiments of late-modern sexuality. This is crucial not only for the purposes of historical accuracy but also because it is imperative that we not subsume other meanings--about race, gender, class, disease--into our understanding of sexuality. Rather, we must explore more precisely their interdependent structures. As these images aver, sexual modernity is not just a story about gay and lesbian subjects but must be understood in relation to various histories of erotic persecution and within a larger conception of sexual meaning. My point here is certainly not to argue that the lexicon of homosexuality did not come into formation at the turn of the century, but rather that we need to understand more precisely its conflicted emergence.