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

Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Dana Seitler

This understanding of the invert as fundamentally serial--as intelligible only through its affinities and variations with other Others--helps to clarify understandings of "the homosexual" in early medical discourse. For Ellis, as for many other sexologists of the period, "the homosexual" was not a singular taxonomic designation, nor did it tend to act as an umbrella term for all forms of same-sex sexual practice.

Rather, it was part of a list of sexual differences and practices that exceeded the relationality of the homosexual/heterosexual binary; indeed, homosexuality was, at times, part of a list of nonsexual behaviors and practices--"the man of genius," "the congenital idiot." Ellis is speaking broadly here of the general issue of degeneracy, that ubiquitous threat to the social world in the form of gambling, crime, alcoholism, and a wide range of heritable congenital deficiencies. His language of inversion and sexual difference resonates strongly with models of degeneracy proposed by medical practitioners and researchers of the era (like Cesare Lombroso, Eugene Talbot, and Lothrop Stoddard). Reform-era sexology appropriated the degenerative/ regenerative discourse of the natural selection model as a way to establish a new lexicon that would address sexuality more specifically. (30) But in his description Ellis disrupts the developmental narrative which posits that sexual maturation requires a journey through a series of stages on the way to adult heterosexuality. The capacity of the perverse body to reverse sexual evolution warrants new taxonomies and the production of new relationships. Indeed, the uneven vocabulary of sexual difference can be seen as part of a movement that itself sought to conjoin and serialize socio-sexual practices and behaviors. As Ellis describes it: "'Homosexual' is a barbarously hybrid word." (31) The very use of the word "hybrid'" in this statement suggests the multiple meanings that inform (and destabilize) the term "homosexual." Is Ellis's meaning here that the term "homosexual" acts as a metonym for multiple degeneracies? Or does it signal a fundamental affiliation between diverse medical subjects of scientific theories of social difference? Ellis's formulation is both confused and calculated, for he seems to be aware that for the terms of sexual inversion to become recognizable, they need to be discussed and proliferated by way of their relatedness to other existing anomalies. This may be the most accurate way to describe Krafft-Ebing's famous case studies of homosexuality in Psychopathia Sexualis, where he offers a colossal range of "sexual mania"--lustmurder, necrophilia, pederasty, coprophilia, fetishism, bestiality, transvestitism, transsexuality, and sadomasochism, to name a few--within established biological concepts of congenital abnormality. (32) Krafft-Ebing, like Ellis, proliferates in order to describe and, in so doing, brings a number of vastly different practices and desires into a space of related knowledge.