Название: A Companion to Global Gender History
Автор: Группа авторов
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Управление, подбор персонала
isbn: 9781119535829
isbn:
Inevitably, what began as a regimen for bourgeois self‐ and class‐improvement became, in the course of the nineteenth century, a set of biomoral criteria used by the respectable classes to justify intervention in the lives of sexual “others.” These “others” were initially the traditional class rivals of the bourgeoisie: vice‐ridden and profligate aristocrats, drunken and disorderly proletarians, and bestial peasants. New public health and educational officials believed each class “type” could profit, in its respective way, from exposure to bourgeois values and hygiene; the earliest welfare state ventures for the poor, single mothers, and abandoned children dished out bourgeois moral precepts along with other forms of support. Sexual segregation and differentially gendered curricula became the rule in the new public schools, paralleling developments in society at large.
Additional sexual “others” were located. Chief among these were prostitutes, who had always been considered a moral scourge, but who were now accused of spreading venereal disease throughout respectable society. Some continental European states regulated and medically segregated prostitutes; even liberal Britain experimented with obligatory inspections in mid‐century. Only a few outspoken women, such as Josephine Butler and Christabel Pankhurst, pointed out that there would be no prostitutes if there were no male clients for them. European Jews escaped from the ghetto into citizenship in the nineteenth century only to find that they were demonized as sexual predators with abnormal erotic tastes and appetites. Indeed, ethnic minorities in all populations were presumed to be the most likely recruits for the brothel or perpetrators of violent rape. Finally, to an extent and with a zeal moderns find extraordinary, masturbators were diagnosed as mental or hereditary defectives whose habits were leading them to certain doom, and whose progeny, if they could have any at all, were certain to be born defective. Medical advice in this instance supplemented traditional religious suspicions of sensuality by fiercely indicting this solitary behavior that circumvented “normal” procreation. Doctors were known to prescribe electrified penile rings or clitoridectomies to worried parents as ultimate solutions.
One of the most sinister aspects of the construction of sexual “others” in nineteenth‐century Europe was the way that notions of race and ethnicity helped constitute both the ideals of virtuous sexual self‐mastery and the negative stereotypes of depravity and loss of control. Western colonialism had been supplying cultural representations from less “civilized” parts of European empires for centuries, but in the nineteenth century, coeval with the development of Darwinian and other biological notions of organic evolution and race, Europeans made racial distinctions part of their conceptions of moral and sexual respectability, selfhood, and citizenship. Ann Laura Stoler has written persuasively about the ways that ideas of sexual purity and the avoidance of external pollutions – a central feature of bourgeois moral self‐discipline – were paired with binary opposites constituted by the presumed depravity and uncontrolled eroticism of colonial people of color. The long Western fascination with the harem, and the actual practice of otherwise respectable colonial officials keeping “native” mistresses, fueled the imaginations of colonizers and European administrators worried about their nationals “going native.” They were encouraged to write laws for their colonies that segregated colonizers and colonized peoples, denied citizenship to non‐Europeans or people of mixed race, and prescribed family and pedagogical regimes for colonists of an archetypal “Dutchness,” “Frenchness,” or “Englishness” that existed nowhere in the home country, but that became, for everyone, models for comportment (Stoler, 1995: 107–11).
The materiality of race and its palpable appearance in Europeans of mixed parentage helped establish a representational benchmark in the European imagination of the virtues of purity and the consequences of pollution. When racial stereotypes were conflated together with middle‐class notions of sexual self‐control, competence, and citizenship, we can better understand why people of color, whom Europeans otherwise reviled as lazy and irresponsible, seemed, as sexual beings, to pose a direct threat to the sexuality of Europeans. The phobic anxieties of Europeans about race and race‐mixing, and their resistance to extending full rights to native peoples over the long run of Western imperialism, was an integral aspect of the history of sexuality.
The most important conceptual revolution in the history of sexuality took place in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries. We still live today with the consequences of the discovery of the “perversions,” as a nomenclature of sexual variations and as identities that possess the power to encompass selfhood. The men who described and catalogued the varieties of sexual life were medical experts whose work coincided with one of the historic crests in the prestige and power of science. The vocabulary they used was the pathological terminology of the clinic, and though many of them were deeply sympathetic with their patients, believing penal sanction inappropriate for most of them, the discourse of pathology and norm they employed exerted a powerful influence over popular belief and usage.
Perverse behavior, obstinate and against the grain, is as old as humankind. Some of this has inevitably taken the form of sexual contrariness, but it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that such behavior came to be regarded as a “perversion” enacted by a “pervert,” in other words a behavior that became a kind of natural identity, whether inherited or acquired. Part of the explanation for this development lies in the social history of modern cities, in the explosion of modern consumer culture, and the evolution of new forms of individualism. Tastes, knowledge, and pleasures previously reserved for elites were now available for more general consumption. But the invention of the perversions was not a banal classificationism run amok; it was a systematic effort to distinguish “normal” from abnormal beings and to police the boundaries of respectability.
In the medical schemata of the era, perversions were excesses or deficiencies of normal organic functions. Excessive heterosexual libido led to nymphomania in women, satyriasis in men. Sadism (named by the sexologist Richard von Krafft‐Ebing after the Marquis de Sade) was an exaggeration of normal sexual aggression and dominance; masochism – pleasure taken in being dominated – was its contrary, passive expression. Deficiencies in what was believed to be the innate aim of sexual libido – to have intercourse with the opposite sex – produced attractions to inappropriate objects or bizarre actions that fell well short of full heterosexual intercourse. This list was long indeed, including all varieties of fetishism, exhibitionism, bestiality, and particularly inversion, which was the preferred term for an unnatural attraction to someone of the same sex. Inversion, which eventually came to be known as homosexuality, was the perversion that aroused the greatest concern among specialists and the general public. It is not surprising that the pathologization of same‐sex sexuality coincided with its criminalization almost everywhere in the West and, where Western science and medicine were admired, elsewhere as well. Indeed, Japanese and Chinese modernizers in this era lauded Western sexologists like Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld and praised the “invaluable impact they had had on the social system, the arts, and the sciences in Western countries” (Frühstück, 2003: 84).
There are two notable things about this classificational system. First is the fact that the desired norm against which all the perversions were measured was procreative heterosexual intercourse, which, as we already know, had an ancient religious and scientific genealogy. Second, СКАЧАТЬ