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Queer physiognomies; or, how many ways can we do the history of sexuality?
Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Dana Seitler
As Halperin argues, fin de siecle American culture can be characterized by the binary structuration set up between homosexual and heterosexual identity whereby the term "homosexuality" poses as a coherent sign for myriad practices and forms of desire. But what is the function of the italicized emphasis on the word "all" in Halperin's statement that "'homosexuality refers to all same-sexual desire"? For Halperin, such an emphasis purports to describe the new scientific taxonomies for sexuality that disallowed any movement, slippage, or play within their terms or designations. But it also participates in that taxonomic and totalizing impulse by disallowing for the possibility of alternative histories of sexualities that may or may not have fit under the fin de siecle homosexual rubric. In this regard, Halperin's conclusions about the hetero/ homo matrix participate in what has become a widely accepted trend in sexuality studies of the early twentieth century in its most pervasive current form, a trend that, even as it acknowledges "the proliferation of sexual discourse," imagines we can assume a certain stability and even singularity to the emergence of homosexuality qua homosexuality. In other words, there is a sense that we do, in fact, know something concrete and even singular about the emergence of "modern homosexuality," that we can, at this point, claim with some certainty that specific signs of perversion coalesced around the turn of the century through which the homosexual body came to be identified and understood. But if we remind ourselves of Eve Sedgwick's crucial insistence that we understand homosexuality as "a performative space of definition"--that is, as open, definitionally capacious, shifting, and in constant movement--and of Halperin's own interest in tracking the multiple cross-hatchings, practices, and forms of same-sex sexual desire, at least of the premodern period, then we might be able to press on the idea of fin de siecle homosexual coalescence a bit more. (27)
As I have already explained, in my exploration of turn-of-the-century human science and its collaboration with new photographic technologies, especially in their role in consolidating an image of sexual perversion, I found a similar multiplicity of categories that Halperin has described for the premodern period. For instance, in Sexual Inversion, Ellis very carefully outlines a number of different possible forms of same-sex sexual practice or expression: the "congenital invert," "the acquired homosexual," the "psychosexual hermaphrodite," and many other "organic variations" that "appear spontaneously" by "arrest of development" or by "some accidental circumstance." (28) His use of the term "accidental" here is significant, for it emphasizes the unpredictable nature of sexual attachment. Ellis also notes the curious affinities the sexual invert has with other "deviant" subjects: "The sexual invert," he asserts, "may thus be roughly compared to the congenital idiot, to the instinctive criminal, to the man of genius ... who become somewhat more intelligible to us if we bear in mind their affinity and variations." (29) For Ellis, then, the acquisition of knowledge about sexual alterity can only occur by way of an exploration of its contingencies on other (pathologized) structures and types and only through the various forms they may take. As Ellis describes it, the "sexual invert" was not an entity unto him- or herself that was readily discernible but emerged through a process of affinity and resemblance--a coming into existence by way of the arrival of other categorical assessments. For Ellis, sexual deviance could only be cognized relationally, or more to the point, serially. His study literally arranges a set of divergent identities into a constellation of meaning. Sexual deviance thus specifies an affiliation--an intricate, nonfamilial kinship web of human aberration in which an assortment of anomalous characteristics exist within a larger schema of human variation.
