The Queer Cases of Psychoanalysis: Rethinking the Scientific Study of Homosexuality, 1890s–1920s (Co-authored: Birgit Lang and Katie Sutton) (original) (raw)
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Homosexuality and Sexology - a draft of an encyclopaedia entry.
It is a well-rehearsed argument, following Michel Foucault's assertion that sometime at the end of the nineteenth century sexology "produced" a "new species", that the foundation of sexology lay upon the construction of the homosexual (Foucault, 1978, p.43). Dissenters from Foucault's "productive" model have shown that there was a well-established homosexual subculture in places like the Port of Amsterdam that well predate this sexological construction of same-sex behaviour (v/d Meer, 1989), implying that homosexuality is diachronically universal in some senses (homosociality, same-sex practices, gender play, etc.). Others have argued that what the homosexual became after this sexological reconstruction (which included not only same-sex activity, but a model of homosexuality based on gender inversion, the 'perverse' sexual impulse, and the psychic life of this 'new species') was a significant rupture from these older homosexual practices and identities Hacking, 1983;. This "new species" reflexively interacted with the labels and concepts that sexologists used to describe them, becoming those labels in a performative sense. If nothing else, sexology helped produce an understanding of the homosexual that people who desired sex with the same sex could interact with: one that was outside of the usual religious, legal, medico-legal and venereological constructions of same sex activity -where it was seen as either something morally perilous, sinister, something to be visually located on the body of the prisoner in order to detect a crime, or as the vector of the spread of venereal diseases like syphilis, all of which posed a perceived threat to the ideology of the family in the nineteenth century (see Hekma, 1993. What it meant to be homosexual from the end of the nineteenth century gradually came to include an interaction with a series of different psycho-biological constructions, in addition to the ways that homosexual communities developed a series of homosexual identities and practices (for example, queens, leathermen, bears, Muscle Marys, etc.). The two happened in tandem. Homosexuals were not passive dupes of scientific research into sexual variations; but nor were they necessarily outside of the influence of the psychiatric construction of homosexuality as psychopathological by virtue of their life in an existing subculture, or later sexological constructions of sexual activity that included negotiating the spread of STIs. By looking at how sexology "produced" varieties of homosexuality, we are looking at the role of psychiatric power in reconstructing identity around concepts of "normality". This focus also requires due attention being paid to resistance . It was the resistance of homosexual rights groups, who have always been in dialogue with medical researchers of homosexuality (although nowadays it is more in terms of biomedical and epidemiological studies of STIs), that helped change the ways in which homosexual behaviour was pathologized .