Abstract
As we have seen, historians of homosexuality have argued, until recently, that developments in sex psychology and the power of this new discipline in the late nineteenth century were central to the construction of modern homosexual identities. Oosterhuis’ important study takes this analysis even further, pointing out that homosexual identities in this period could only be formulated through direct interaction with sex psychologists, such as Krafft-Ebing. Krafft-Ebing and his male, homosexual correspondents lived in the Austrian Empire, German Reich and France. In these nations, there was a grudging social acceptance of the psychiatrist of the sexual and the milieu of the homosexual. The homosexual and his world remained marginal to the bulk of respectable European society. However, the works of Krafft-Ebing and others in his field were published in repeated editions and Krafft-Ebing received a large correspondence from homosexual men throughout Continental Europe. The works of Continental sex psychologists, which examined sexuality between men were not, however, tolerated in Britain. This chapter examines the culture of resistance in Britain to Continental works of ‘inversion theorisation’. Resistance to such ideas also prevented the development of inversion theorisation as a domestic scientific discipline.
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Notes
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© 2009 Sean Brady
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Brady, S. (2009). Resistance. In: Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-27236-1_6
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