Abstract
What became of ‘inversion’? In the early 1930s The Urologic and Cutaneous Review, a specialist medical journal, ran a regular feature devoted to the subject of sexology. The anonymous, largely homophobic column mostly introduced recent empirical research in the field of sexuality such as the studies of an unnamed female anthropologist who spent a year in Melanesia where she observed heterosexual promiscuity but apparently no same-sex sexual acts, which led her to argue that Western societies should encourage free opposite-sex sexual relations in order to ‘prevent’ homosexuality.1 Less predictably, a pair of related columns, published in 1933 also explored the links between sexology, literature and sexual identity. Specifically, they focused on the historical theorisation of sexuality in relation to the modern scientia sexualis. The first one of these considered the position of sexologist as author, briefly discussing the homoeroticism of Shakespeare’s sonnets (concluding that the poet’s allusions to malemale love were mere expressions of friendship), before moving on to compare Havelock Ellis to Ovid. The author argues that Ellis is ‘concerned with artistry in sex’, praising his ‘unrighteousness’, and claiming that it ‘has done more to show men the way to sanity and decency than all the righteousness of his outraged detractors’.2
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Notes
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, ‘Vorwort’, in Albert Moll, Die Conträre Sexualempfindung (Berlin: Fischer, 1891), v.
Sigmund Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Leipzig und Wien: Franz Deuticke, 1905), 8.
See for example Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (eds), Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996 (New Haven: Yale University Press); Stephen Frosh, Hate and the ‘Jewish Science’: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis (London: Palgrave, 2005), 122–47.
John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988);
Simon LeVay, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research Into Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 47–9.
Steven Angelides, A History of Bisexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 84–5.
Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan (eds), We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics (New York: Routledge, 1997), 239;
Jeffrey Escoffier, ‘Homosexuality and the Sociological Imagination: The 1950s and 1960s’, in Martin Duberman (ed.), A Queer World (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
Martha Vicinus, ‘“They Wonder to Which Sex I belong”: The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity’, in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 446.
William B. Turner, A Genealogy of Queer Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 60.
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© 2009 Heike Bauer
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Bauer, H. (2009). Coda. In: English Literary Sexology. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234086_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234086_6
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