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

(17.) Talbot, Degeneracy, 20.

(18.) Ibid., 323.

(19.) Ibid., viii.

(20.) Lee Edelman, to whose project I am indebted, has called this "homographesis": the process by which the "inscription of 'the homosexual' within a tropology ... produces him in a determining relationship to inscription itself" and by which "the homosexual comes to signify the potential permeability of every sexual signifier by an 'alien' signification." Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 9, 7. Of course, I also want to call into question his own deployment of the term "homosexual" as in itself a category somehow stabilized, as opposed to constitutionally disrupted, by the processes of representation and inscription he so brilliantly details.

(21.) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Also see Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society (London: Longman, 1981); Stein, Forms of Desire; and Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).

(22.) See especially Eve Sedgwick, "Queer and Now," in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 1-22: and Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," in Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 223-42.

(23.) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 43.

(24.) David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Sexuality and Other Essays of Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 33. Also see his article "How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 1 (2000): 87-123.

(25.) Halperin, "History of Male Homosexuality." 90.

(26.) Ibid., 110. I am deliberately playing with the title of Halperin's article with my own title--"How Many Ways Can We Do the History of Sexuality?"--as one way to mark the differences in our approaches.

(27.) Sedgwick, Epistemology, 47.

(28.) Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 140.

(29.) Ibid., 134.

(30.) One of the primary texts in nineteenth-century theories of the relationship between sex and evolution was Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson, The Evolution of Sex (London, 1889; New York, 1890). For historical accounts of the emerging theories of sexual evolutionism see Cynthia Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); John Haller and Robin Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974); and Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981).

(31.) Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 1.

(32.) Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories (London: Velvet Press, 1997).

(33.) Thomas Mosby, Causes and Cures of Crime (St. Louis: Mosby, 1913), 49.

(34.) Ibid., 58, 54.

(35.) William Sadler, Race Decadence: An Examination of the Causes of Racial Degeneracy in the United States (Chicago: McClurg, 1922), 46, 47, 267, 268.