Abstract
Producing a history of frigidity is no straightforward matter. There are practical reasons for that, as we shall see: our central theme is multiform, with variations and complications that range across centuries of European thought. But there is an ethical imperative that has to be addressed at the outset. Many scholars would consider that ‘frigidity’ is a flimsy and fanciful notion that has been talked about seriously for far too long. ‘Why continue to discuss it?’ they might ask. Why compound its deleterious absurdity by devoting a whole book to the topic? In crediting the notion of frigidity with the status of a historical object worthy of an intellectual genealogy, do we not imply it has been a coherent medical and psychological concept that deserves to be taken seriously? Are we suggesting, in other words, that ‘frigidity’ must actually refer to some thing?
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Notes
Luce Irigaray, ‘Women’s Exile’, trans. Couze Venn, Ideology and Consciousness 1 (1977): 66.
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 63.
This spontaneous performance of quasi-instantaneous critique is consonant with Cixous’ understanding of the role of feminine laughter. On that question, see Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 (1976): 875–93.
Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1968), 55.
Elizabeth Wright, ed., Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992).
For a discussion of Inhibited Sexual Desire (ISD), which was included in an earlier version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, see Janice M. Irvine, ‘Regulated Passions: The Invention of Inhibited Sexual Desire and Sexual Addiction’, in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, ed. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 314–37.
David P. Moore and James W. Jefferson, Handbook of Medical Psychiatry, 2nd edn (Amsterdam/Boston: Mosby, 2004), 99.
See Rosemary Basson et al., ‘Revised Definitions of Women’s Sexual Disfunction’, Journal of Sexual Medicine 1 (2004): 40–8.
Tim Cavanaugh, ‘When Free Love Died: Why the Sexual Revolution Plays Only in Reruns’, Reason 40 (2008): 70.
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Paul Quinchant, Impuissance et Frigidité, causes et traitements (Soissons: Andrillon, 1980);
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Dr M.Landry, Les Déficiences sexuelles masculines et la frigidité; leur traitment par le stress nasal, traitements associés (Paris: Maloine, 1962).
Nicky Lee and Sila Lee, The Marriage Book: How to Build A Lasting Relationship (London: Alpha International, 2000), 135.
Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1981), 179.
Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire’, in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, ed. Suzanne Bachelard et al. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 148.
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 9–20.
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 2: L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 11.
See, for example, Celia Kitzinger, The Social Construction of Lesbianism (London: Sage, 1987);
David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988);
Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1989);
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Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000);
Andrea Beckmann, Social Construction of Sadomasochism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
See, for example, Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de l’hystérie: Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Macula, 1982);
Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Zone Books, 1993);
Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Plume, 1996);
Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998);
Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Londa Schiebinger, ‘Introduction’, in Feminism and the Body, ed. Londa Schiebinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 12.
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), vii.
See Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (New York: Zone Books, 2007);
Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003);
Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
See Jean Baker Miller, ed., Psychoanalysis and Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 145–6.
Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (London: The Women’s Press, 1990), 1.
Sylvie Chaperon, ‘De l’anaphrodisie à la frigidité: jalons pour une histoire’, Sexologies 16 (2007): 189.
Peter Cryle, ‘Les Choses et les Mots: Missing Words and Blurry Things in the History of Sexuality’, Sexualities 12 (2009): 439–52;
and Alison Moore, ‘The Invention of Sadism? The Limits of Neologisms in the History of Sexuality’, Sexualities 12 (2009): 486–502.
Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1990), 4–5.
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
James Whorton, Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
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© 2011 Peter Cryle and Alison Moore
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Cryle, P., Moore, A. (2011). Introduction: A Long History of a Pseudoscientific Object. In: Frigidity. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337039_1
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