Lecture Notes: 2

Transformation of Forms to Knowledge:

- 18th century
- Age of enlightenment, age of reason
- Period when science competes with religion
- Separation of church and state
- Belief that humans can take world in their own hands
- Thinkable that human beings are equal to one another
- 19th century
- Era of categorization
- Thinking you have knowledge
- Knowledge gives you power
- Control world around us
- Invention of new disciplines
- Birth of social sciences
- Psychology
- Sociology
- Anthropology
- Geography
- Discipline of english comes out of late 19th century
- Universities are inventing new fields of knowledge

Categorization of human beings:

- Class, social background and social status
- Determines much about persons experience and reality
- Race
- People were writing about race heavily in 19th century
- Gender
- Sexuality became one of these categories
- Part of shift towards human centre
- Looking at human being

Eugenics( from Greek: good/well)

- Francis Galton in 1883, inventor
- Influence: Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection
- Theory and practice of improving the genetic quality of the human population
- Social Philosophy: advocates improvement of human genetic traits through promotion of
higher reproduction of people with desires traits, and lower reproduction for those with
undesired traits

Victims of Eugenics
 - The disabled
- The sexually promiscuous
- Non- caucasian, non- christian peoples
- Sexual inverts

Phrenology:
- Pseudo-science developed by Joseph Gall at end of 18th century
- Detailed study of shape and size of cranium as supposed indicator of character, mental
abilities, criminality

Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis:

- Freud developed the modern theory of psychoanalysis
- He elaborates on idea of unconscious mind
- Acts and thoughts that the conscious mind represses
- Feud was generally tolerant of homosexuality
- He helped develop, theories of hysteria
- Particularly with regard to women

Birth of Sexology
- The study of sexuality
- 1837, first work of sex research conducted on prostitutes in Paris
- By Parent- Duchatelet
- Sex research always focuses on ‘abnormal’ or ‘deviant’ sexual behaviour
- Prostitution was pathologized, rather than seen as emerging from socio-economic
conditions
- Prostitution was not talked about but many people were obsessed with it

Richard Krafft- Ebing and Havelock Ellis

- 1886, Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis
- 1896,Havelock published Sexual Inversions
- Ellis did not see homosexuality as immoral or as diseases
- Ellis had a eugenicist view of races

What do these theories have in common?:

- Observation and the gaze
- Body like a map
- Unlocking key to race, sexuality and class
- “Normal” body against which deviant bodies can be measured
- Normal body: White, male, bourgeois and heterosexual

What are the effects of these theories?:

1) White heterosexual bourgeois male
 2) White married bourgeois female
3) Other races---working class---other sexuality

Interpreting the body:

- Body seen as site of “truth”
- However, ‘gaze’ is never neutral
- Act of observation creates binary division between ‘self’ and ‘other’
- Early science tended to confirm already existing prejudices
- Geological frameworks determine direction and motivation of scientific endeavours

Michel Foucault
- History of Sexuality
- We “Other Victorians”
- Era before advent of “Sexology”
- Sex not publicly discussed, era of modern repression
- The repressive hypothesis (against which Foucault is arguing)
- In the Victorian era, “On the subject of sex, silence became the rule”
- The function of repression
- “ Repression operated as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence,
an affirmation of non-existence and, by implication, an admission that there was nothing
to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know”
- Accepted argument: repression of sex, coincides with rise of industrial capitalism and the
capitalist work ethic
- Sexual practices were freer under aristocratic rule (17th century)
- For Foucault, sex is always political: whether or not we talk about it; how we talk about it;
what is allowed and forbidden
- Repression of “sex” led to more institutional discourses about ‘sex’
- According to Foucault, the focus on sex increased rather than decreased
- Sex becomes pathologized and medicalized
- Foucault on psychoanalysis and the concept of ‘therapy’
- “Ours is,after all, the only civilization in which officials are paid to listen to all and
sundry impart the secrets of their sex”
- Foucault argues that we have “ turned sex into discourse”
- Foucault’s counter-argument to the ‘repressive hypothesis’:
- The Victorian repression of sexuality in fact coincided with an increased
discourse on sexuality

Sexuality in Victorian Era

- Institutional spaces(hospitals)
- Illicit spaces(brothels)
- Sex outside of domestic sphere
From Christian Confession to Psychoanalysis:
- Sex is now in the hands of authority figures
- Doctors
 - Analysts
- Academics etc.
- Turning ‘sex into discourse’ may not be as liberating as we think it is
- There is a continuity, rather than a rupture, between the christian confessional, and the
analyst’s couch

3 Questions Foucault asked (key):

1) “Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact?”
2) “Is power only expressed through repression, prohibition, censorship?”
3) “Was there really a historical rupture between the age of repression and the critical
analysis of repression?”

Sex and Power:

- For Foucault, talking about sex is also a way of exercising power
- “Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said about it?
What were the effects of power generated by what was said”
- “The object, in short, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that
sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world”
- Foucault is trying to break down the binary logic of repression/liberation,
censorship/freedom, etc
- Forms of power include both silence and speech, censorship and incitement to
discourse etc.
- Foucault is interested in the “polymorphous techniques of power”
- Scientia Sexualis
- Western model of knowledge has turned SEXUALITY into a SCIENCE rather than a
PLEASURE
- It has focused on CATEGORIZING, and PATHOLOGIZING sexual behaviours, thereby
creating NORMATIVE (i.e acceptable) and NON-NORMATIVE(i.e deviant) models of
sexuality

Scientia Sexualis
- Scientific discourse around sex “concerned itself primarily with aberrations, perversions,
exceptional oddities, pathological abatements, and morbid aggravations”
- Sexual ‘aberrations’ become coded as dangerous for the individual and for society
- This coincided with a new discourse around HYGIENE, and with EUGENICS

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis

- Part of body of work in the field of SEXOLOGY
- Title was chosen in Latin to discourage lay readers
- It is a forensic reference book for psychiatrists, physicians and judges
- One of the first books about SEXUAL PRACTICES that studied
homosexuality/bisexuality
- It became the leading medico-textual authority on SEXUAL PATHOLOGY
Krafft-Ebing and Sexual Normalcy
- Male+Female = Heterosexual Procreation

Krafft- Ebing’s Theory of Sexuality:

- Goal of sex= PROCREATION
- All other sex acts= PERVERSION
- HOMOSEXUALITY= vice induced by masturbation
- MAN= sexually active principle
- WOMAN= sexually passive principle

Sexual Inversion
- “Masculine soul” in female body + “Feminine soul” in male body ---- sexual invert
- SEXUAL INVERSION- an inborn reversal of gender traits
- “The masculine soul, heaving in a female bosom” (Krafft-Ebing)
- The INVERT became a SEXUAL IDENTITY
- Way of “explaining” homosexual desire

Logic of Inversion
- Sexual inversion---sexual identity--- sexual pathology

The Case of Count Sandor

- Gynandry (Hermaphroditic;intersexed)
- Count Sandor was a woman living as a man, who was eventually arrested for “forgery of
public documents” in 1889
- What is Count Sandor’s class background?
- What is his family’s medical history?
- How is socio-cultural discourse mingled with Sandor’s medical diagnosis?

End of Century Class Conflict:

- ARISTOCRATIC CLASS: decadent, ‘diseased’, eccentric, perverse sexuality, amoral,etc
- BOURGEOISIE: hard-working, thrifty, modest, family values
- CATEGORY OF INVERTS: drawn mostly from ARISTOCRACY and the WORKING
CLASSES

Characteristics of INVERTS:
- Sexually deviant
- Morally inauthentic
- Fraudulent behaviour
Count Sandor...
- What characterizes Krafft-Ebing’s discourse in his description of Count Sandor?
- How does Krafft- Ebing establish the ‘rules’ of gender in his analysis?
- How does he describe Count Sandor’s MASCULINITY?
- Is gender something fluid or fixed for Krafft-Ebing?
 - Count Sandor is described through two discursive formations: GENDER and
SEXUALITY
- Count Sandor presents as MALE, what is his SEXUALITY
- MARRIAGE is important to Sandor; why?

Radclyffe Hall, The well of loneliness (1928)

- Hall is author of one of the most famous 20th century books in English
- Hall had read the sexologists and saw herself as a “congenital invert”
- She had 3 important female lovers: Mabel Veronica Batten, Una Troubridge, and
Eugenia Souline
- Havelock Ellis agreed to write a preface to the first edition of The Well, to give it scientific
validity
- Although The Well contains no overt scenes of lesbian sex, it was put on trial for
obscenity and banned in the U.K
- Famous writers such as Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster offered to speak up in its
defence, but were never called on
- Hall lost the obscenity trial, and The Well was banned until 1948. It became a huge
underground bestseller
- By 1929 in paris, it had undergone 6 print runs

Extract from The Well of Loneliness:

- Stephen Gordon is the protagonist, a classic invert, as described by the sexologists
- Stephen is a very Christ- like figure, she is born on Christmas eve ( St.Stephen is the
name of the first Christian saint)
- Hall uses the language of “God” and “nature” to make her case in favour of the “invert”.
The novel is full of biblical phrases
- Stephen is also an aristocrat living on a country estate called Morton
- Stephen is presented as having all the qualities of chivalrous masculinity, she is the
perfect “man”
- As a woman, according to the rules of gender during this period, she is an aberration
- As a result, Stephen is rejected by her mother, forced to leave her beloved countryside,
and to become part of a seedy urban life
- In this extract, Stephen writes a love-letter to her first serious lover, Angela Crossby
- Angela shows the letter to her husband, who shows it to Stephen’s mother
- Stephen’s mother calls her daughter in for an interview, and asks her to leave Morton
- Stephen goes to her deceased father’s study, and finally ‘discovers’ what she is by
reading Krafft-Ebing
- Stephen goes into voluntary exile with her ‘sympathetic’ maid, Puddle