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

Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Dana Seitler

Many scholars have acknowledged how the primary discourse in the field of sexual science, sexology, can be understood as a site of "contested narration" that, despite its instabilities, played a major role in constructing and popularizing sex as a significant object of study. (7) As such, it necessarily enjoys a privileged position in contemporary work interested in documenting the formation of early-twentieth-century sexual identity categories and practices. (8) In these contemporary accounts we can see how new sexological models consolidated sexuality into an identity. Scholarship of turn-of-the-century history and culture that deploys the medicalization of homosexuality as a historically significant starting point [or understandings of late-modern sexualities has put a needed pressure on the tacit assumption of a transhistorical heterosexuality and, as Jonathan Goldberg argues, actively participates in the transformative understanding of how sexuality "structures and destructures the social." (9)

It was primarily through the writings of Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing that the twentieth century received its stereotypes of male homosexual and lesbian morbidity and the definition of these terms as new medico-sexual categories. But over the span of their writings, each produced a range of contradictory and contestatory versions of human sexuality. Like most sexologists of the period, Ellis and Krafft-Ebing drew upon a combination of methodological and theoretical sources from comparative anatomy to natural selection to spotlight homosexual bodies as atavistic anomalies, referring to them, as U.S. physician "Dr. K" did in Ellis's appendix, as "a sign of the degeneration of the race," (10) or, as Krafft-Ebing did, as expressing "antipathic sexual instinct," itself "a functional sign of degeneration." (11)

Changes in the historical understanding of sexual identity accompanied a more general fear of the collapse of certain social boundaries engendered by a distinctly urban modernity. In facing what physician Max Nordau called "the horror of world annihilation," many increasingly turned to science as a way to reestablish those imaginary boundaries. (12) The human sciences, serving as a conservative guarantee against this tide of change, rigidly reinforced conventional certitudes about racial, social, sexual, and political hierarchies. The sexually disqualified populations that emerged out of this pandemonium of medical scrutiny became figures against which sexually sanctioned practices--and gendered behaviors--could be measured. And yet the sheer replication of perverse bodies within these sciences, the texts that imaged and inscribed them, and the juridical realities that surrounded them points rather insistently toward their own fractured instability. As Oscar Wilde's infamous trial reminds us, medical explanations of male homosexuality existed alongside other cultural practices and literary representations that understood same-sex desire within a set of signs based on sexual "style": homosexuality, in this arena of explanation, was overt, flamboyant, and grounded in an aesthetic of sumptuousness, sartorial excess, and dandyism. (13) Indeed, the iconography of perversion was never an untroubled or static phenomenon; rather, it was rife with moral, social, and political tensions, subject to persistent conflict both in contemporary debates within the human sciences and among its various cultural mediations, and therefore open to, and racked by, multiple etiological claims.