Constructing sexuality (and other categories) in medical science

Question 1

Chauncey: What social changes led to social anxieties and therefore increased interest in medical explanations for homosexuality?

Answer 1

1. Resexualization of women -> women can be sexual and have sexual desire, but only tied to men
2. Increasing visibility of urban gay male subcultures (creating anxiety about biological basis of male role in society)
3. Challenges to sex/gender system by women (questioning gender roles, declining marriage and birth rates)
4. Globalization

-> public anxieties about the breakdown of social order, masculinity, and traditional family structures

Question 2

Chauncey: How did medicine respond to these social anxieties?

Answer 2

Doctors began to describe homosexuality and gender nonconformity as a symptom of disease—first as an acquired condition (from masturbation), then as an innate inversion of sex and gender (rather than a sin all are capable of). This shift allowed medicine to claim authority over sexual deviance, framing it as a mental or biological disorder that required diagnosis and treatment, rather than punishment or moral correction

Question 3

Chauncey: Logic behind inversion of character for women

Answer 3

Women were thought to be passionless and asexual, so how could two women stimulate excitement between themselves? Only a complete inversion of the woman’s character could explain this (she was man-like)

Question 4

Chauncey: What changed in medicine/society’s conceptualization of sexuality in the 1900s?

Answer 4

Initially, same-sex desire was thought to result from a complete reversal of gender roles (gender inversion)

Later, sexual desire evolved in the idea of sexual inversion, which focused on one’s sexual object choice rather than sexual aim

Sexual inversion was redefined in more narrowly sexual terms, distinguishing it from gender inversion. Freud introduced two concepts: sexual aim (preferred mode of sexual behavior - passive/active) and sexual object (who you sleep with)

Question 5

Chauncey: Homosexuality refers to

Answer 5

Sexual object choice -> without implications of gender inversion

Question 6

Chauncey: Did the same shift in sexual inversion happen for men and woman?

Answer 6

No, character inversion was a regular feature of female inversion, with women who took the aggressive, masculine role in sexual relations also seen as masculine in character and social role

But was a shift in how female invert’s wife was seen, from “normal” women playing wifely duties to fully complicit lesbian

Question 7

Chauncey: How was knowledge on inversions/homosexuality used by institutions and the public?

Answer 7

To explain in a non-threatening way and stigmatize homosexuality as well as the women’s movement as deviant behavior, responding to anxieties the public had about the changing social order. Thus, used to justify women’s subordination to men by asserting its biological determination

Question 8

Chauncey: What is degeneration theory?

Answer 8

Krafft-Ebing: Sexual deviance is a sign of social and biological degeneration -> homosexuality threatened civilization

The Victorian sexual order, which did not tolerate such lust, represented the pinnacle of civilization and the necessity of its survival

Question 9

What is the main conceptual insight that Somerville adds to Chauncey?

Answer 9

The structures and methodologies that drove dominant ideologies of scientific racism also fueled the pursuit of scientific knowledge about the homosexual body

i.e., Categorization of white/black and heterosexual/homosexual were very similar

Question 10

Somerville: What are the 3 ways in which discourse of sexuality seem similar to discourse of scientific racism?

Answer 10

1. Comparative anatomy attempted to locate discrete physiological markers of difference to classify and separate types of humans (for example, size of women’s genitalia)
2. Anxieties about “mixed” bodies. Just as racial “mixing” (miscegenation) provoked social panic and was framed as a threat to racial purity, homosexuality was also viewed as a form of “mixing”—a blurring of gender roles and sexual norms.
3. Shift away from biologized notions of sexuality and race to understanding “unnatural” desire (interracial or homosexual) as a marker of perversion - an “abnormal” sexual object choice

Question 11

Somerville: What other theories also impacted both racism and homophobia?

Answer 11

1. Darwinism: Natural selection -> greater signs of differentiation between sexes. Lesbian or African-American women’s bodies were seen as less sexually differentiated, thus less civilized
2. Eugenics: Both black people and homosexuals seen as inferior
3. Degeneration theory
4. Mute body: We can look at nothing but the mute body and discover the truth

Question 12

Somerville: what was one divergence between racial and sexual science?

Answer 12

The use of the case study of homosexuals, which challenged the tendency of scientific writers to position the individual as a mute body whose surface was to be interpreted by professionals. Led to a move away from comparative anatomy

Question 13

Somerville: What is the role of comparative anatomy today?

Answer 13

Recent wish to discover a biological key to the origins of homosexuality -> more updated and technologically sophisticated form

Question 14

Fausto-Sterling asks us to challenge what?

Answer 14

Dualism, specifically:
1. Sex/gender
2. Nature/nurture
3. Man/woman, male/female
4. Real/constructed

Question 15

Fausto-Sterling: Can we separate sex and gender?

Answer 15

No! Labelling someone a man or a woman is a social decision, where you can use scientific knowledge to help make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender can define sex. Furthermore, our beliefs about gender affect what kind of knowledge scientists even produce about sex in the first place

Question 16

Fausto-Sterling: Role of science and truth

Answer 16

Scientists create truths about sexuality, which are then incorporated into our bodies to confirm then, which in turn refashions our cultural environment - facts are rooted in specific histories, practices, languages, and peoples

If the idea is that there ought only to be male and female, then the knowledge developed will maintain this and work to normalize bodies to fit within this narrative

Question 17

Fausto-Sterling: When and with whom did our modern concepts of sex and desire appear?

Answer 17

19th century with Krafft-Ebing and Ellis’ transfer of homosexual behavior to medicine

Question 18

Fausto-Sterling: two approaches to history of sexuality

Answer 18

1. Assuming sexuality is universal and biologically determined
2. Assuming sexuality is entirely socially constructed and can carry different meanings in different cultures

Question 19

Fausto-Sterling: How does she relate to Foucault?

Answer 19

Uses Foucault’s ideas to argue that as we grow and develop, we not only discursively but literally construct our bodies, incorporating our experiences into our very flesh

Question 20

Fausto-Sterling: What is the Möbius strip?

Answer 20

Idea to think about nature/nurture - our body consists of the inside of the strip, but culture and experience is the outside, and we can move from one to the other without lifting our feet

Question 21

Fausto-Sterling: What is Developmental Systems Theory?

Answer 21

Theory that denies that there are two fundamentally different kinds of processes (one guided by nature, the other nurture) -> they work in tandem at the same time to shape us. Thus, you cannot separate nature and nurture

Question 22

Fausto-Sterling: Is science/biology then real?

Answer 22

Yes, we do have material bodies (biology does matter) and real scientific understandings of them, but the knowledge of this is constructed and bears the marks of specific historical and cultural contexts

Question 23

Fausto-Sterling: How can we challenge a dualism?

Answer 23

By acknowledging that the two are not opposites, but connected and shaping each other