Apparatus XY

21The disciplinary consolidation of sexology began with a group of medical experts in the 1900s who shared a common scholarly goal of studying sex through a combination of scientific approaches. The Berlin physician Iwan Bloch opened his acclaimed The Sexual Life of Our Time (1928 [1907]) with the following proclamation:

For more than ten years the author of the present work has been occupied, both theoretically and practically, with the problems of the sexual life, and in his various earlier writings he has regarded these problems, not merely from the point of view of the physician, but also from that of the anthropologist and of the historian of civilization. He is, in fact, convinced that the purely medical consideration of the sexual life, although it must always constitute the nucleus of sexual science, is yet incapable of doing full justice to the many-sided relationships between the sexual and all the other provinces of human life. To do justice to the whole importance of love in the life of the individual and in that of society, and in relation to the evolution of human civilization, this particular branch of inquiry must be treated in its proper subordination as a part of the general science of mankind, which is constituted by a union of all other sciences-of general biology, anthropology and ethnology, philosophy and psychology, the history of literature, and the entire history of civilization. (ix)

What Bloch called for, and claimed his book to represent, was a comprehensive study of human sexuality that drew on various kinds of scientific inquiry, including biological, ethnological, psychological, and historical perspectives. With Bloch's declaration, the birth of modern sexology was now secured.

22In fact, the British independent scholar Henry Havelock Ellis and the Berlin doctor Magnus Hirschfeld had already published monographs and articles on the subject of homosexuality with a similar aim in mind. Ellis, trained in medicine, authored Sexual Inversion (1897)-the second volume of his encyclopedic series Studies in the Psychology of Sex-with the initial help of the poet and literary critic John Addington Symonds and subsequent assistance from the socialist romantic writer Edward Carpenter.[17]Ellis 1906. The first English edition was published as the first volume of the <em>Studies</em> in 1897, the second in 1901 as the second volume. The manuscript was translated into German by Hans Kurella and published in Leipzig in 1896 with J. A. Symonds' name included as the co-author. See Ellis and Symonds. In the process of writing his book, Ellis integrated the literary and historical information about homosexuality that Symonds and Carpenter had provided with his own medical and psychological insights.[18]John Addington Symonds to Havelock Ellis, Am Hof, Davos Platz, Switzerland, 20 June 1892, in Schueller and Peters, vol. 3 (1969), pp. 693-4. On Havelock Ellis, see Brome; Calder-Marshall; Collis; Draznin; Goldberg; Grosskurth; Robinson; and Rowbotham and Weeks. On John A. Symonds, I have relied on Pemble; Robinson; and Schueller and Peters. On Edward Carpenter, I have read Beith; Carpenter; Crosby; Mrs. Havelock Ellis; Lewis; Tsuzuki; and Rowbotham and Weeks. Shortly after, in Germany, Hirschfeld sent questionnaires to 3,000 male college students of the Charlottenburger Technische Hochschule in December 1903 and again to 5,721 metal-workers of the German Metal Workers Union in February 1904.[19]Charlottenburg is a district in Berlin where Hirschfeld resided. Based on this survey method, Hirschfeld reported 1.5 per cent homosexuals and 4.5 per cent bisexuals among the students, and 1.15 per cent homosexuals and 3.19 per cent bisexuals among the metal-workers.[20]Hirschfeld, "Das" (1904). Hirschfeld reported these numbers later again in Hirschfeld 2000, pp. 544-5 and 553-7. The first edition of this monograph was published in German in 1914, the second in 1920. These numbers are also cited in LeVay, pp. 25-6; and Wolff, pp. 58-9. In addition to estimating its prevalence, Hirschfeld researched homosexuality through another approach-conducting field work in locales of Berlin's homosexual subculture, the findings of which were documented in his Berlin's Third Sex (1904). Clearly, Ellis's collaboration with Symonds and Carpenter, as well as Hirschfeld's employment of statistical and ethnographical research methods, denoted a strong effort to expand the disciplinary boundary of scientific sexology to extend beyond medicine.

23Likewise, learned societies and disciplinary journals in sexual science were founded by this second generation of sexologists and not by earlier psychiatrists, who were more concerned with legitimizing their field of specialization within the larger medical profession. At his home in Charlottenburg, Hirschfeld formed the first sexological society in history, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (SHC), on 15 May 1897. He also managed the editorship of the Yearbooks for Sexual Intermediaries, published under the name of SHC from 1899 to 1923, which included articles by a variety of scientists, including biologists, psychoanalysts, and other physicians, with whom Hirschfeld often shared conflicting theories of homosexuality. His major purpose, though, was to promote professional communications and scientific conversations about problems in human sexuality, especially same-sex desire. Subsequently, the collaboration between Hirschfeld and Bloch, along with other physicians, resulted in the founding of the Medical Society for Sexology and Eugenics in Berlin on 3 February 1913. The founding of this larger and more eminent sexological society also revived the Journal of Sexual Science, which Hirschfeld had launched in 1908 by himself as a monthly publication but only lasted for a year, and which was now under the new editorship of Bloch and Albert Eulenburg with an elevated international status. In the summer of the same year that the Medical Society was established, Hirschfeld participated in the International Congress of Physicians organized by the British Medical Association from 6 to 12 August in London. At the Congress, he gave a presentation on hermaphroditic, androgynous, homosexual, and transvestite individuals that brought him immediate worldwide recognition. More importantly, his presence at the convention inspired the births of the first Viennese sexological organization in 1913 and the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology in 1914.[21]For a more detailed biographical account, see Wolff; and Dose.

24Having solidified his international standing in the field of sexual science, Hirschfeld did not pause for long before publishing his most definitive monograph on the topic of homosexuality, The Homosexuality of Men and Women (2000 [1914]), a meticulously researched piece of scholarship that distinguished him from other sexologists as the most qualified expert on the subject of his time. In revising Sexual Inversion for its third and final edition, for instance, Havelock Ellis had to familiarize himself with Hirschfeld's book, which was over 1000 pages in length and written based on 10,000 personal histories of homosexual men and women.[22]On Ellis' updating of his <em>Studies</em>, see also Crozier 2000, pp. 456-460. Having read the entire book, Ellis made careful references to Hirschfeld almost fifty times throughout the revised version of Sexual Inversion, in sharp contrast to the striking absence of any mentioning of Hirschfeld's work in the previous editions.[23]Ellis 1936, pp. 3, 4, 9, 13, 24, 27, 28, 35, 60, 61, 62, 72, 73, 83, 86, 90, 91, 196, 203, 210, 251, 255, 256, 261, 263, 265, 268, 273, 278, 280, 282, 284, 287, 289, 292, 301, 309, 315, 316, 320, 323, 325, 330, 331, 332, 334, 335, 341, and 353. According to my count, Ellis has cited Hirschfeld exactly forty-nine times in this third edition. Cf. Ellis 1906. "It is to Hirschfeld," Ellis now commented, "that we owe the chief attempt to gain some notion of the percentage of homosexual persons among the general populations" (1936, 61). Iwan Bloch, too, praised Hirschfeld's Homosexuality for its unequalled and authoritative qualities. By this time, as Hirschfeld's biographer Charlotte Wolff has rightly observed, "Nobody could deny that his knowledge of homosexuality was unsurpassed" (173). Five years after the publication of Homosexuality, Hirschfeld in 1919 officially opened his renowned Institute for Sexual Science, the very first of its kind in history.[24]On Hirschfeld's Institute, see also Dose.

25In this process of formalizing a comprehensive discipline of sexual science, the medical background of Bloch, Ellis, and Hirschfeld provided an opportunity for the pathologizing model of homosexuality initially articulated by first-wave nineteenth-century psychiatrists to be challenged. As John A. Symonds expressed in an 1892 letter to Edward Carpenter regarding his cooperation with Ellis on Sexual Inversion, to voice an effective alternative opinion about homosexuality that did not support most psychiatrists' neuropathic perspective at the time required such an opinion to come from a man with certain credentials: "I am so glad that H. Ellis had told you about our project. I never saw him. But I like his way of corresponding on this subject. And I need somebody of medical importance to collaborate with. Alone, I could make but little effect-the effect of an eccentric."[25]John Addington Symonds to Edward Carpenter, Am Hof, Davos Platz, Switzerland, 29 December 1892, in Schueller and Peters, vol. 3 (1969), p. 797. Since Ellis did not practice medicine, even though he received some medical training, Ellis had no patient case studies to anchor a scientific investigation of homosexuality. As such, the major advantage for Ellis in collaborating with Symonds was precisely that Symonds, himself a homosexual, would be instrumental for gathering homosexual life histories, which Ellis could then use as the data of his scientific analysis (Grosskurth 175-6). Although Symonds passed away long before the project was near completion, Ellis ultimately embraced Symonds' anti-pathological perspective of homosexuality and seriously doubted the value of "treating" same-sex desire. He concluded in Sexual Inversion that "[we] can seldom…congratulate ourselves on the success of any 'cure' of inversion…if we can enable an invert to be healthy, self-restrained, and self-respecting, we have often done better than to convert him into the mere feeble simulacrum of a normal man."[26]Ellis 1906, p. 202. It is also worth emphasizing here that the language of psychiatric discourse was no longer framed merely in terms of madness or insanity. As Elizabeth Lunbeck has demonstrated, at the dawn of the twentieth century, "Most significant was psychiatry's abandonment of the distinction between sane and insane that had structured nineteenth-century practice, and its concomitant reorganization around a metric concept of the normal. By the 1920s, the metric mode of thinking that psychiatrists first elaborated around psychopathy would be dominant within, and beyond, the discipline. The psychiatric point of view no longer dichotomously classed individuals as sane or insane but arrayed them on a scale, assessing their variations from what was thought normal" (306).

26As for the situation in Germany, Hirschfeld's medical training and committed field work experience allowed him to influence other physicians' view of homosexuality to a significant degree. In 1903, Hirschfeld brought Paul Näcke, director of the Saxon Mental Hospital of Colditz, to homosexual bars in Berlin, after which Näcke commented in an article that "I got the impression that effemination appeared only in a small minority of homosexuals," and "I find the expressions 'manly' and 'effeminate' extremely subjective. We don't know whether such qualities, if they exist, have a physical or mental origin" (cited in Wolff 52-3). After being criticized by Hirschfeld in 1903 for betraying an "objective" anthropological effort in understanding homosexuality, Iwan Bloch also reversed his initial position that conceptualized homosexuality as a diseased condition (Wolff 110). Not only did he eventually collaborate with Hirschfeld in organizing sexological meetings and publications, as mentioned earlier, Bloch explicitly stated in his widely circulated The Sexual Life of Our Time that "homosexuals are thoroughly healthy, free from hereditary taint, physically and psychically normal" (490). Hence, both the story behind Ellis' Sexual Inversion and Hirschfeld's impact on other doctors demonstrate that the pathological definitions of sexual variations originally propounded by the earlier psychiatrists simultaneously created an opportunity for a second generation of experts to transform the existing pathological definitions by participating in new scholarly endeavors under the name of science.

27In addition to questioning medical depictions of homosexuality as a mental disorder, sexual scientists in the early twentieth century also sought to undermine the criminal status of homosexual behavior. In England, for example, Ellis stated his liberal stance on the legal issue of homosexuality in Sexual Inversion: "I am of opinion that neither 'sodomy'…nor 'gross indecency' ought to be penal offenses, except under certain special circumstances. That is to say, that if two persons of either or both sexes, having reached years of discretion, privately consent to practice some perverted mode of sexual relationship, the law cannot be called upon to interfere."[27]Ellis 1906, p. 214. See also Crozier 2000, 2001. Similarly in Berlin, immediately following the founding of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897, Hirschfeld crafted the famous "Petition to the Reichstag," a petition for abolishing Paragraph 175 of the German penal code that punished sexual contact between men. Even though the law was not entirely eliminated until 1994, most sources confirm that during his lifetime, at one point or another, Hirschfeld was able to acquire thousands of signatures for the Petition-including the signature of Richard v. Krafft-Ebing.[28]LeVay, p. 25; Wolff, p. 43. For more on the early German homosexual movement, see Fout; Lauritsen and Thorstad; Steakley; Oosterhuis and Kennedy.

Sexuality and the Emergence of Sexual Freedom

28Thus far, I have traced the ways in which the late nineteenth-century discourse of sexual psychopathology represented a historically-specific psychiatric tendency to gradually move away from somatic explanations towards psychogenic accounts of mental disorder, at the same time providing the starting point for a succeeding generation of sexologists to both extend the disciplinary boundaries of sexual science beyond medicine and advocate sexual reform. Implicit in this transition from the mere "psychiatrization of sex" to a more general "scientification of sex," however, was a fundamental reconfiguration of the "conceptual space" that "determines what statements can and cannot be made with the concepts" of sex and sexuality (Davidson 136). Or to borrow Foucault's insight, "what has changed is the silent configuration in which language finds support: the relation of situation and attitude to what is speaking and what is spoken about" (1994, xi). Simply put, the psychiatric system of sexual knowledge that emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century had completely transformed the possible terms and conditions under which people understood this aspect of themselves.

29A crucial component of this psychiatric discourse was the categorization and pathologization of people's erotic inclinations, which allowed for a possible conception of personhood rooted in the psychological condition of one's sexual desire- a sense of sexual self (see Reed 2001). The homosexual now inhabited a sense of sexual self distinct from the fetishist based on the difference in their respective bodily involvements and mental characters of sexual pleasure; and the sadist now had a sense of sexual selfhood distinct from the masochist precisely for the same reason. Even though these different sexual personas may converge in a given individual, the point is that after the medical experts had created different sexual labels corresponding to specific types of erotic psychology, the ways individuals appropriated, resisted, and negotiated these labels would always function within an epistemological framework in which a complete separation of one's sexual desire from one's sense of self would no longer be possible.

30The effort of the second generation of sexual scientists, including Ellis and Hirschfeld, did not reverse this process of epistemic change but significantly relied upon it. The kind of "liberating impulse" captured in what they had accomplished both reflected and constructed the possibility for science -in addition to medicine, religion, and law- to speak about sexuality, which was now no longer exclusively defined around a medical conception of psychic condition, no longer understood in terms of a cause or an effect of behavioral outcome, and most certainly no longer perceived as a behavioral morphology in and of itself: sexuality came to be conceived as the conjuncture of all of the above. As a complex system of interaction between mental states and physiological expressions, and as a turn-of-the-twentieth-century product orchestrated through the exercise of the scientific power of sexology at the expense of psychiatric medical knowledge, sexuality was now something through which a sense of self-ownership, self-definition, and self-determination could be articulated. Only within a new regime of sexual scientific knowledge, through a new sense of sexual self, and under a new set of possible conditions, was it possible for an individual at the beginning of the twentieth century to experience a distinctly modern notion of sexual freedom that both decoupled sexual desire from the institution of marriage and procreation and intrinsically linked it to new modes of political struggle.

31I want to conclude by showing that the dissociation of sexual desire from heterosexual obligations represents an archeologically-unique mode of conceptualization, without which the feminist position for legalizing birth control would not have consolidated in the opening decades of the twentieth century.[29]I use "archeology" in the way that Foucault uses the term, the object of which I take to be discursive formations or knowledge ("savoir"). See Foucault 1972, esp. chap. 5. See also Davidson, chap. 8. When New Women like Margaret Sanger fought for birth control in the early twentieth century, they were also fighting for women's right to demand sexual pleasure.[30]Members of the early twentieth-century birth control movement emphasized that they were advocating for "birth control" (or "contraception") and not necessarily "abortion." The existing body of literature on the history of birth control is extensive. I have primarily relied on Brodie; Degler; Gordon 1990, 1992; Mohr; Reed 1978; Tone. I am aware that my following discussion is concerned with middle-class women almost exclusively as opposed to working-class women, whose history of sexual episteme, of course, deserves explication in its own right. But this latter aspiration, be it implicit or explicit, would not have been a possible candidate of feminist thinking prior to the psychiatric discourse of sexual pathology and the subsequent reworking of the psychiatric model by a second group of liberal sex reformers. Medical authorities like Krafft-Ebing first psychiatrized sex to give it both a psychical and a pathological dimension, with the result being that women's sexual interest appeared for the first time in history as a possible free-standing condition outside the heteronormative confinement of marriage practice. Sexual scientists like Ellis then challenged the pathologizing model of sex in their campaign for sexual liberalism-which involved consensual limits, mutual love and affection, and even reciprocal sexual satisfaction, but not procreation (such as demonstrated in their tolerant attitude towards homosexuality). As such, when the second generation of sexologists appropriated and modified the pathologizing model of sexuality articulated by the first-wave psychiatrists, the epistemological consequences amounted to an entirely new system of discursive knowledge about the sexual self.[31]This statement supports Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's claim that "To the later generations of New Women the new sexual vocabulary offered by Havelock Ellis and other liberal male sex reformers appeared as congenial-at times more congenial than the rallying cries of the older political feminists" (284). On the relationship between the New Woman and sexuality, see also Hall; Newton.

32This new system of discursive knowledge about sexual selfhood emerged precisely at the juncture in time where historians of gender and sexuality have located a shift in women's intimate experience. Prior to the twentieth century, same-sex romantic friendships between middle-class women were surprisingly tolerated in American society. These intimate bonds between women existed within a larger social structure that encouraged women to enter the institution of heterosexual marriage. Around the turn of the twentieth century, however, the desire to form intimate bonds with persons of the same-sex, sexually or not, became a focus of intense medical surveillance. In this "attack on 'romantic friendship,'" according to historian Lillian Faderman, "even romantic friendship that clearly had no sexual manifestations was now coming to be classified as homosexual. Medical writers began to comment on 'numerous phases of inversion where men are passionately attached to men, and women to women, without the slightest desire for sexual intercourse'" (1992, 49, emphasis original). The first-wave psychiatrists and their followers, therefore, did not merely clinically pathologize same-sex intimate relationships; more importantly, they sexualized such interpersonal relations. This turning point in the history of female same-sex relationship resembled a larger cultural shift in the conceptualization of the nature of female intimate experience: such a re-conceptualization secured the concurrent births of the New Woman, the modern lesbian, and the possibility of female sexual freedom.[32]On female same-sex relationships in the Victorian English speaking world, see Smith-Rosenberg; Marcus.

33The way many women had begun thinking about and experiencing a sense of self that demanded sexual enjoyment and its related political interests reveals the process of epistemic change-underscoring the shifting relations between systems of knowledge and forms of experience-that I have considered. This is why even though some historians have convincingly challenged Nancy Cott's conception of Victorian female "passionlessness" by showing that certain nineteenth-century female free lovers themselves had outwardly refuted such doctrine, the same historians have often failed to offer a meaningful interpretation of the fact that women in the nineteenth century, free lovers or not, lived in a historically-specific social apparatus, in which the idea of sexual desire was exclusively framed in relation to the institution of marriage and female sexuality was exclusively understood in relation to maternal interest (Cott).[33]Using Victoria Woodhull as an example, Ellen DuBois directly challenges Cott's interpretation: "As for female sexuality per se, Woodhull …believed in the existence, desirability and healthfulness of sexual passion, in women as well as men. She wholeheartedly refuted the doctrine of passionlessness which she called 'that unnatural lie,' by this time an idea that challenged male sexuality as well as female." On free love, see also Passet; Sears; and Stoehr. Jesse F. Battan's work (1992, 2004) on nineteenth-century free love focuses on the importance and power of language. On free love in the context of the lives of cultural anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, see Banner, esp. pp. 136 and 148. My analysis, then, suggests that the period between 1880 and 1920 marked a substantive transformation in the historical epistemology of sexuality from nineteenth-century free love to twentieth-century sexual freedom. To impose the modern concept of sexual freedom backward in time and apply it to historical contexts before the late nineteenth century, therefore, is to exercise an "application of concepts, as though concepts have no temporality, that allows, and often requires, us to draw misleading analogies and inferences that derive from a historically inappropriate and conceptually untenable perspective" (Davidson 41). It was not until the transition from the psychiatrization of sex to a more general scientification of sex around the turn of the twentieth century did women, for instance, gradually adopt and participate in the making of a modern notion of sexual freedom that demarcated sexual desire from marriage and child-bearing. This new sense of sexual self, positioned in a constant political struggle with its cultural legitimacy and intelligibility, would remain central to the idea of sexual freedom throughout the rest of the twentieth century.