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

Locating the Archive

During the era of medicine's greatest professionalization, medical and sexological literature (as many queer theorists point out) emerged as a central and definitionally powerful site for "the invention of homosexuality." Most historical and theoretical accounts of this medico-scientific practice concentrate on refining and deepening our understandings of this process, detailing the ways in which questions of sexuality helped shape and were shaped by histories of American society, literature, and culture. Few scholars, however, have thrown the historical certainty of the medical assignation of homosexuality into question. More time has been spent stressing the emergence of the categorical idea of homosexuality to ascertain its impact on and within understandings of "culture" than in mapping out precisely how actual medical discourses and representations of perversion might either support or impinge upon that understanding. As recent work by Siobhan Somerville and Jennifer Terry demonstrates, closer scrutiny of the language and theories of human science affords an analysis attentive to how medical narratives strove to achieve epistemological clarity about the homosexual body that was not always successful or consistent. In addition, such scrutiny promises to uncover the multiple lines of social and cultural differences that inform late-modern sexual subjectivities. For instance, the turn-of-the-century discourse around sexual perversion and homosexuality intersects with constructions of the racial other as both diseased and less evolved in ways that ask for an analysis of their mutually constitutive emergence. The privileging of medical constructions of homosexual identity, almost to the point of romanticizing the "subversive" power of its taxonomic birth, without attention to the representational practices that evolved through medical science threatens to elide the very different, at times contestatory, contours of modern understandings of sexuality.

To gain a fuller purchase on the fin de siecle human sciences and their production of legitimated knowledge systems of a homosexual body, I look to medical photographs of the period that were increasingly employed to locate discrete physiognomic markers of difference by which to classify different "types" of human beings. Continually, medical and scientific researchers drew upon photographic techniques to try to position "deviant" bodies as physiognomically distinct from "normal" bodies. At the start of this project, my aim was to explore medical images of "homosexuality" that I felt sure would accompany the medico-juridical consolidation of this identity at the fin de siecle. As I outlined earlier, it was the medium of the photograph that was most often deployed within nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century science, medicine, and state institutions as an instrument to survey, record, and account for the human body and its relationship to the changing social world. By freezing bodies in time and space, the photograph was thought to enable a closer reading of the physiognomic details of human being. Scientific culture, early on, celebrated the photograph as a unique medical technique that was able to "realize" something approaching an absolute knowledge of the visible world. As the oft-cited Walter Benjamin put it, "Photography made it possible for the first time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being." (1)