Apparatus XY

by Howard H. Chiang, Princeton University, USA [1]The author wishes to thank Elizabeth Lunbeck and especially Alan S. Yang for their careful and insightful comments on earlier versions of this research article, which is a slightly revised version of an earlier paper that first appeared under the same title in the <em>Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians</em>, vol. 16 (2008): 35-76

Introduction

1 Historians have retrospectively grouped the scientists and medical doctors who studied and wrote about sexuality dating from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century under the general rubric of "sexologists." Many scholars have gone a step further and interpreted these sexologists' assignment of pathological meanings to non-heteronormative erotic desires merely as a one-way function of medical authority. Although there is some validity to this popular strand of historical interpretation, it is nonetheless an overly simplistic perspective that fails to acknowledge the expert heterogeneity within the sexological discourse itself. Based on my review of the existing body of literature in the history of sexuality, not a single author adequately differentiates and analyzes the parameters of science and medicine in turn-of-the-twentieth-century sexology.[2]I am referring to an extensive body of scholarship that analyzes the writings of the early sexologists without distinguishing "medicine" from "science" in a sufficiently explicit manner. Most historians, for example, interpret Richard v. Krafft-Ebing's degenerationist view of homosexuality the same way they interpret Havelock Ellis' writings on sexual inversion, and it is my intention in the following pages to demonstrate the problem with this de-contextualized method of analyzing historical sources. Oftentimes, historians erroneously characterize the writings of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century sexologists merely as a "medical" discourse. I will show that it is more correct to identify the work of some sexologists as constituting a "scientific" discourse, even if they received medical training. For the body of historical scholarship that I am challenging, see Angelides; Banner, esp. pp. 118-23; Bland and Doan; Bullough; Chauncey 1989, 1994; Crozier 2000; D'Emilio and Freedman, esp. pp. 171-235; Dixon 1997, 2001; Duggan 1993, 2000, esp. chap. 6; Faderman, 1978, 1981, 1992; Garber; Greenburg, esp. pp. 397-433; Hatheway; Katz, esp. pp. 137-74; Newton; Rosario 1997, 2002; Smith-Rosenberg, esp. pp. 245-96; Somerville; Terry; Weeks, 1977, 1981, esp. pp. 96-121, and 1985, esp. pp. 61-95; Eder, Hall, and Kemka. For more literary-oriented accounts, which are even less sensitive to the distinction between medicine and science, see, for example, Breger; Doan and Prosser; Halberstam; Noble; Prosser. More sensitive approaches can be found in Conrad and Schneider, pp. 172-214; Crozier 2008; Hansen; Herm; Schmidt; and Sengoopta. Historians of sexuality who have written about the sexologists to date, therefore, have risked leaving unexamined critical tensions and issues of historicism that exist at the intersections of medicine and science in the history of sexology.[3]See n. 2 above. The only exception that I have come across is an endnote in Lunbeck. Lunbeck shows how historians have tended to overlook sociologically-oriented sexual scientists and only rely on the writings of medical experts, or vice versa, when discussing sexologists' view of homosexuality. Thus, in comparison to the scholars cited above, Lunbeck is much more attuned to the delicate boundaries of science and medicine in sexology. See Lunbeck, pp. 410-411, n. 2. Although Oosterhuis does a promising job in contextualizing Krafft-Ebing's work against a historical background of psychiatric professionalization, by focusing on medicine alone Oosterhuis also does not explicitly acknowledge the complicated relationships between science and medicine in turn-of-the-twentieth-century sexology. Likewise, by focusing on science alone LeVay is similarly a one-sided account. Sengoopta might be the only other exception that adequately approaches the relation between science and medicine in fin-de-siecle central Europe, but Sengoopta focuses on Hirschfeld and primarily on the ways his biomedical theory of homosexuality interacted with Eugen Steinach's work. It is my intention in these pages to emphasize the sexological <em>enterprises</em> of Hirschfeld and other early twentieth-century sexual scientists (rather than their <em>theories</em> of sexuality), and, accordingly, to illuminate the differences between this "scientific" undertaking from the late nineteenth-century "medical" discourse of sexual pathologization.

2 In order to develop a historical analysis that attends to the complex interactions and distinctions between medicine and science, I divide the early sexologists into two waves, acknowledging that there remain exceptions to this strategic chronological organization.[4]I have intentionally excluded Freud from my analysis primarily because Freud had never identified himself as a sexologist: he was trained as a neurologist, became the founding father of psychoanalysis, and was ambitious enough to see his project as always larger than a systematic scientific study of sexuality. Though many historians regard Freud as one of the most influential turn-of-the-twentieth-century sexologists, others have made the careful differentiation. C.f. Zaretsky; Sulloway, chap. 8. The first wave includes doctors, all of whom specialized in mental diseases and published mostly in the last two decades of the nineteenth century-such as psychiatrists Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll, and August Forel. A careful contextualization of their writings in the history of medicine reveals that their intention in categorizing, labeling, and theorizing about sex was more about establishing the autonomy of psychiatry (away from neurology in particular) within the larger medical profession, rather than presenting themselves as pioneers of an entirely new scientific discipline of sexuality.[5]The most notable exception to my periodization is Albert Moll, whom I group under the first-wave sexologists in this paper. Moll was actually very much involved in the second wave sexological movement, and, next to Hirschfeld and Iwan Bloch, was considered by many as one of the "founding fathers" of modern sexual science. By the early twentieth century, he became an explicit opponent of Freud and Hirschfeld and established the International Society for Sex Research in 1913 as a rival organization to Hirschfeld and Bloch's Medical Society for Sexology. It should be noted that my periodization does not completely ignore the impact of non-medical sexological authors, such as John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter. Their influences take a particular presence in the second stage of my periodization: see section 3 below on "sexological impulse, 1900-1920." In addition, while most historians of medicine have attributed the increasing prevalence of psychoanalytic practice among post-1920s psychiatrists to Freud's turn-of-the-century legacy, my analysis provides an alternative explanation: the new subject of therapeutic intervention, namely sexual psychopathology, especially following Krafft-Ebing's publication of Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886, both reflected and induced the decline in biological psychiatry and the rise in psychiatrists' psychogenetic emphases from 1880 to 1920.[6]On Freudian legacy, see, for example, Ackerknecht 1968, chap. 10, and 1982, p. 207; Alexander and Selesnick, pp. 181-265; Duffin, pp. 286-8; Harrington, p. 252; Kennedy, p. 401; Lunbeck; Millon, chap. 7; Porter 1999, pp. 514-9, and 2002, pp. 183-98; Shorter, chap. 5.

3 Moreover, following the birth of this new topic of psychiatric intervention, to quote Michel Foucault (1994), "What is modified…is the more general arrangement of knowledge that determines the reciprocal positions and the connection between the one who must know and that which is to be known…It is not a matter of the same game, somewhat improved, but of a quite different game" (137). I would stress that psychiatrists came to this "quite different game" in and through their attempt at improving their old game. Subsequently, what took shape was an entirely novel organization of the relationship between the psychiatrist ("the one who must know") and their new object of clinical knowledge: sexual perversion ("that which is to be known"). Without this "recasting at the level of epistemic knowledge," through which sexuality acquired a psychopathological definitional status for the first time, and after which the separation between one's sexuality from one's sense of self was no longer tenable, the modern notion of sexual freedom would not have emerged (Foucault 1994, 137).

4 The second generation of sexologists consists of sex reformers, all of whom were trained in medicine, frequently voiced anti-pathological claims about variations in human sexuality, and published most extensively in the first two decades of the twentieth century-including Iwan Bloch, Henry Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld. These sexologists' advocacy of sexual liberalism, I propose, can be viewed as a sequential reaction to the psychopathological model of sexuality propounded by their psychiatric predecessors. By forming a professional network of sexology through, for example, the founding of disciplinary journals, learned societies, and conference meetings-something that the previous generation of psychiatrists had not done, Hirschfeld and other second-wave sexual scientists hoped not only to expand sexology beyond medicine, but more importantly to achieve social reform through sexual science itself (Crozier 2001). It was through the effort of these sexologists that we can trace the first sign of a modern notion of sexual freedom.[7]One should note that, apart from Moll, none of the earlier psychiatrists who wrote about sexual pathology from a medical perspective exclusively participated in this "new generation" of sexology, the formation of which largely depended on something similar to the three technologies of scientific disciplinization that Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer referred to in their famous work on the debate between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle over the air pump (namely, a material technology, a literary technology, and a social technology). For the specific definition of each as used in the context of the debate, see Shapin and Schaffar, pp. 25-6.

5 By a modern notion of sexual freedom, I simply mean the ability to conceive of, articulate, and enact a sense of sexual self-definition and self-agency without subsuming sexual desire under heterosexual obligations (such as marriage and procreation). This definition fits nicely with what historian Sharon Ullman has called the "modernization of sexuality," by which she means

the twentieth-century redefinition of sexuality as a means of self-realization rooted in pleasure and unconnected to reproduction. A new value system revolving around desire and sexual fulfillment became prominent; sexual discourse emphatically entered the public realm, and the entire framework for sexual understanding came loose from religious and proscriptive moorings. This dramatic revisioning made sexuality central to personal identity and even to the definition of a successful life. (3)

In creating an unprecedented type of discourse about sexual perversion towards the end of the nineteenth century, the first-wave psychiatrists entered a fresh realm of medical knowledge in which they claimed for themselves exclusive expertise. But if we take Michel Foucault's contention that "where there is power, there is resistance" seriously, this new technique of medical surveillance facilitated the possibility for successive sexologists to appropriate the language of sexual perversion in a "reverse discourse" that would then displace its initial pathological meanings by making new claims for its normalcy (Foucault 1990, 95 and 101). Between 1880 and 1920, I argue, sexual freedom emerged from two fundamental stages of historical periodization: first, the psychiatric implantation of sexual psychopathology around the 1880s and 1890s that gave sexuality for the first time in history both a psychological and a pathological character under the name of medicine; and second, the subsequent sexological impulse in the 1900s and 1910s to deploy the existing notions of perverse sexuality in a new system of normalizing and liberalizing scholarly endeavors under the name of science.