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Queer physiognomies; or, how many ways can we do the history of sexuality?
Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Dana Seitler
(36.) This is why the term "queer" initially offered such possibility; it opened up the terms of sexual identity to include its connections to gender, race, the family; the state, forms of desire, national fantasy, and culturally and historically specific norms about the body. I am thinking here, in particular, of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's article "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?" (PMLA 110 [1995]), in which they remind us that "the point of using the term queer in the first place was the wrenching sense of recontextualization it gave" (345).
(37.) Sedgwick, Epistemology, 47.
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(38.) Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (1890; reprint, New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1973), 98-102.
(39.) Ibid., 98.
(40.) Ibid., 99.
(41.) George Chauncey, "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female 'Deviance,'" in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 87-117.
(42.) Siobhan Somerville, "Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body," Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 2 (1994): 247.
(43.) Ibid., 265.
(44.) Useful here is David Eng and Alice Y. Horn's Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), where the essays make clear that, as Eng and Hom argue, it is impossible to "bifurcate [Asian American queer identity] into the racial and the sexual" (4). Instead, they stress "the multiple lines of social and cultural differences" (11) that inform racial and sexual subjectivity in relation to each other.
(45.) Talbot, Degeneracy, 272.
(46.) Ibid., 274.
(47.) Ibid., 272.
(48.) Ibid., 275.
(49.) Ibid., 276.
(50.) Cesare Lombroso, Female Offender (New York: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895), 116.
(51.) See Hortense Spillers, "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance (London: Pandora, 1984), 76, and her "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65-81.
(52.) This is different from Sander Gilman's account of Lombroso's work, in which he argues that Lomhroso's portraits stress that "black females do not merely represent the sexualized female, they also represent the female as the source of corruption and disease" Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 101. While Lombroso's use of the photographs of "primitive" women operates as a kind of urtext for degeneracy of many forms, the central analogical dynamic collapses in his description of both sets of images. While Gilman points out that these kinds of racializations brought with them the referents of hypersexuality and disease simultaneously, the knowledge produced here is not obvious or legible. Lombroso's meandering logic is marked above all by excess and ambivalence. As deeply indebted to beliefs about racial degeneracy as his referral to the "red Indian and Negro women" is, the affiliations Lombroso produces cannot be fully accounted for by the rhetoric of scientific racism alone.
