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

Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Dana Seitler

As Jennifer Terry, points out, the painstaking techniques of medical classification that were applied to police and define the deviant body eroded the very possibility of fixing the innate distinctions that researchers predicted. (14) Moreover, sexologists, degenerationists, and biomedical researchers alike did not widely agree on the terms of sexual identity and practice, nor did they always highlight sexuality as a primary category of identification. Rather, they often concentrated on the insights the more generally "deviant" body could yield about the social body as it clashed with and was affected by invisible social-sexual dictates. They focused on primary questions about how "dangerous bodies" affected and influenced culture and, conversely, on how culture influenced and affected bodies. It was precisely the interchange between body and culture that needed to be controlled, and the task of controlling by defining and regulating it fell quite readily to the human sciences. But in their frantic attempts to mark and formalize a distinction between normal and abnormal bodies, a fundamental paradox of the human sciences arose: the more researchers attempted to shore up the parameters of social and sexual deviance, the more the body became open to interpretation.

A serious account of this paradox exposes a fundamental problem with contemporary theories in gay and lesbian and queer studies: a consistent, at times gestural turn to the early sciences as if they were a stable site of power/knowledge production for homosexual identity. (15) Medical photographs from the turn of the century, however, suggest that a genealogy of sexual modernity follows a trajectory that does not necessarily begin or end with a definitive homosexual body. Rather, the differential policing of sexuality at this time can be evidenced in the way that the perverse body was saturated with various intersecting discourses about sexual vice, racial purity, and "gender trouble" simultaneously. The variability of meanings attributed to the deviant body at this time in order to position it as deviant urges us to think more deliberately about how we have imagined the history of (homo)sexuality and its relationship to other categorical racial, classed, and gendered identities in the early twentieth century. (16)

American physician Eugene Talbot, whose book Degeneracy: its Causes, Signs, and Results was edited in 1898 by Havelock Ellis, provides an example of the extraordinary inclusiveness with which medical discourse forged links among diverse social, racial, gendered, and sexual subjects. Talbot uses "degeneracy" as an umbrella term to describe a host of regressive "illnesses"--from alcoholism to hermaphroditism, prostitution, pauperism, moral insanity, "giantism," and "negro degeneracy"--all of which he describes as "buds of the same tree of degenerate heredity." (17) By the same logic, the sexual pervert could be "divided into precisely the same classes as other criminals." (18) Clearly, for Talbot, the category of the sexual invert, pervert, or homosexual at the beginning of the twentieth century was not understood as a discrete one. Rather, he was chiefly concerned with understanding a series of "local and constitutional defects" of the human body, and deliberately avoided "laying stress on any one cause of degeneracy." He proclaims: "The doctrinaire reformer will here find no support for any limited theory" but rather an attempt "to lay down general principles ... in a way that permits their application to the solution of sociologic problems." (19) But how are we to consider the linkages he produces among such varieties of disenfranchised subjects? Since many of his examples of constitutional degeneracy concern "sexual perversion," how do we begin to untangle the ideological constellations that came to shape early-twentieth-century constructions of sexual identity? Taking Talbot's text as an exemplary model, can medical discourses and images in general tell us something about the "invention" of the homosexual body, or do they undermine the possibility of such a uniform claim?