Sexuality

Joseph Bristow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136859236
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Theories of sexuality and desire are commonly used in literary and cultural studies. In this illuminating study Joseph Bristow introduces readers to the fundamental critical debates surrounding the topic. This fully updated second edition includes:

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• a historical account of sexuality from the Victorians to the present
• discussions of the most influential theorists including Freud, Lacan, Bataille, Baudrillard, Cixous, Deleuze, Irigaray and Kristeva
• a new and extended discussion of queer and transgender theory, race, ethnicity and desire
• a new preface summarising changes in the field since the first edition
• a new glossary, annotated further reading section and bibliography.

Considering all of the major movements in the field, this new edition is the ideal guide for students of literary and cultural studies.

1
SEXOLOGICAL TYPES

SEXUAL CLASSIFICATIONS

Enter any major bookstore in the industrialized world and you are likely to find several shelves (if not more) devoted to studies of sexual behaviour. Such books might be found in the psychology section but the chances are they will be grouped together under a more specialized heading: sexology. Here you will discover a range of works, including updated editions of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), that give popular advice on sexual techniques for same-sex and other-sex partnerships. Especially in the 1960s, the number of ‘how to’ manuals offering guidance on sexual practices and the improvement of sexual pleasure proliferated as never before. Such writings have been popular since at least the time of Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties (1918) by Marie Stopes (1880–1958). This best-selling book was among the first to broaden common knowledge of human sexual potential, and it remains an open question whether such works are ultimately liberating or oppressive in their repeated insistence that sexual satisfaction is a fundamental human need. Similar kinds of guidance on sexual matters circulate perpetually in the mass media, from advice columns in magazines aimed at young people to live ‘adult’ radio talk-shows. Given the ample opportunities that now exist to obtain information about many aspects of eroticism, it is perhaps hard to appreciate how dangerous this kind of knowledge was often thought to be when sexology – the science of sexuality – first made its appearance in the late nineteenth century.

According to Janice Irvine, sexology currently serves as ‘an umbrella term denoting the activity of a multidisciplinary group of researchers, clinicians, and educators concerned with sexuality’ (Irvine 1990: 2). These days, conferences devoted to sexology bring together a vast range of people with very different skills, from promoters of safer sex to medical doctors working in genito-urological clinics. But this was not always the case. Sexology was first associated with the controversial work of scientists examining aspects of sexual disease. Known in German as Sexualwissenschaft, the word sexology is attributed to the German physician, historian and sex researcher Iwan Bloch (1872–1922), among whose works is a rather zany but none the less fascinating study of the sexual habits of the English (published 1901–3). Sexology initially designated a science that developed an elaborate descriptive system to classify a striking range of sexual types of person (bisexual, heterosexual, homosexual and their variants) and forms of sexual desire (fetishism, masochism, sadism, among them). Bloch’s The Sexual Life of Our Time (1908) is one of several prominent works that sought to provide a distinctly scientific explanation of various sexual phenomena. Yet, like many such studies that drew on scientific authority to uphold its claims, his work met with considerable hostility in many quarters of society. So great was the mismatch between the scientific intent and the moralistic reception of many sexological texts from the 1880s through to the 1920s, it would be fair to claim these weighty tomes drove at the centre of a major anxiety in Western culture. For there was a constant struggle among those who saw themselves as respectable people to hide what sexology, in all its scientific authority, was determined to uncover.

It was certainly for this reason that copies of one of the most detailed sexological studies, Sexual Inversion (1897), written by Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) in cooperation with critic and poet John Addington Symonds, led to the arrest of a London bookseller who sold a copy to an undercover policeman in 1898. This was hardly an auspicious time to bring before the world an array of case studies that revealed complex patterns of same-sex desire. It was, after all, only three years after the Irish author Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) had been notoriously vilified in the press, and subsequently sent to serve a prison sentence of two years for committing ‘gross indecency’ with other men. Such ‘gross’ homosexual acts were outlawed – both in public and in private – by the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. Never since the day of its seizure has Ellis’s liberal-minded exploration of homosexuality ever been published again in Britain – a sign, I think, of the severe prohibition on serious public debate about same-sex desire in a country that only partly decriminalized male homosexuality, first in 1967 and again in 1994. (In the United Kingdom, it remains the case there is still not full legal equality for lesbians and gay men. Although the Civil Partners Act [2004] grants same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexual married partners, it still does not recognize same-sex couples as married. By 2006, however, the provisions of the Equality Act have meant that it is illegal to withhold the provision of goods, facilities, services, education and public functions on the basis of a person’s sexual orientation.)

Sexological writings have been renowned for making discoveries about sexual behaviour that many of the more conservative sections of modern society would prefer not to hear. In the mid-century, for example, the first Kinsey Report, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948), brought together an imposing mass of statistical detail to show that 37 per cent of the adult male population in the United States had achieved orgasm through homosexual contact. Such data flew in the face of what had by that time become a virulently homophobic American culture. Several decades later, the appearance of The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (1976) caused a sensation when it divulged that most American women did not reach orgasm through heterosexual intercourse – a point many earlier sexological works that did not become bestsellers also took pains to note. Newspapers, women’s magazines, as well as specialized academic periodicals were quick to respond to Shere Hite’s findings. Sexological works of this kind are a curiosity because they have increasingly attracted popular attention, even though they rally huge quantities of information that most people, unless trained in statistical analysis, could not possibly compute. (Social scientists have pointed out that Hite’s research methods were highly questionable.) Presented as monumental ‘Reports’, these works seek to give an official stamp of approval to the disclosure of unpalatable sexual truths that society often is at first reluctant to accept. In many ways, the bulk and weight of such surveys gives the definite impression that, if researchers keep amassing ever-increasing quantities of data, then the more they will be able to know about it.

Since its inception, sexology has left modern society with a contradictory legacy. On the one hand, it has played a major role in enabling sex to be debated more widely and seriously at all levels of society, at times providing useful technical advice on how to solve sexual problems at both the emotional and physical level. On the other hand, sexology often remains worryingly insensitive to the historical contingency of the scientific methods it employs to estimate sexual adequacy or inadequacy, deviancy or normativity. Time and again, one finds sexological writings – all the way from the 1890s to the present day – seeking to produce some everlasting truth about the sexual capacity of human beings. Such works are habitually filled with deceptive ideas about what is supposed to constitute average performance, in terms of frequency and intensity of erotic sensation, implying there is a common standard against which our sexualities might be measured. Sexological writings are frequently so preoccupied with the quantification of data regarding sexual behaviours and functions that they rarely pause to consider how or why sexuality might resist the structures of categorization that sexual science multiplies at an exponential rate.

One only has to look at a mightily compendious work such as The Social Organization of Sexuality, published in 1994, to see the confidence with which social scientists present their statistical evidence as ‘accurate information’. Although the writers insist that theirs is not an ethical task to make ‘judgements about what people “should” do sexually’, they assume that sexuality is a perfectly recognizable category that subsumes all forms of ‘sexual conduct’ (Laumann et al. 1994: xxx–xxxi, 31). Assuming that sexuality means sexual activity, they group facts under headings such as frequency of sexual partners, sexually transmitted infections, sex and fertility, and normative orientations towards sexuality. Hardly ever do they question the biases that have for more than a century been inscribed in their methods for organizing this material. So it remains difficult for their readers to gain insights into the cultural conditions and ideological pressures that gave rise to the idea of sexuality in the first place.

The critic who has produced the most incisive accounts of the sexological tradition is Leonore Tiefer, who has extensive professional experience in genito-urological medical practice. Closely acquainted with the research of Alfred C. Kinsey (1894–1956) and his heirs, Tiefer complains that studies of this kind repeatedly fail to identify exactly what might plausibly fall within the field of analysis:

The most basic, and also most difficult, aspect of studying sexuality is defining the subject-matter. What is to be included? How much of the body is relevant? How much of the life span? Is sexuality an individual dimension or a dimension of a relationship? Which behaviours, thoughts, or feelings qualify as sexual – an unreturned glance? any hug? daydreams about celebrities? fearful memories of abuse? When can we use similar language for animals and people, if at all?

(Tiefer 1995: 20)

Tiefer’s call is for modern sexology to deliberate carefully about the assumptions, biases and downright prejudices it has inherited from a highly developed tradition of research that seldom interrogates the limits to what might or might not be construed as sexual. Her point is that the models often employed by sexologists may well be inappropriate to the phenomena they are attempting to explain. She notes how sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon, in Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality (1973), adopted ‘the metaphor of dramatic scripts to draw our attention to learned, planned, external sources’. The trouble is that such metaphors, like the common usages of ‘drive’ and ‘instinct’ to describe sexuality, ‘direct the attention of researchers, scholars, and readers to distinct possibilities’ (Tiefer 1995: 20–21). Viewed as ‘innate’, the sexual ‘drive’ would seem to follow a path to a specific goal, depending on external stimuli. In using such loaded terms, Gagnon and Simon’s Sexual Conduct does not take pains to scrutinize the assumptions that underwrite them. Tiefer argues that countless studies of this kind remain unaware of the mismatch between the theoretical model in place and the sexual phenomenon under discussion. In her view, this type of disparity was most astounding when one recalls the battles that took place in the American Psychiatric Association during 1973. During that year, concerted efforts were made to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. As Tiefer says, the normality or abnormality of a particular sexual behaviour, identity or style depends largely on the interpretative lens through which it is observed.

To amplify some of these general remarks, I shall first of all explore some of the more striking problems that beset a handful of notable early works of sexology. Although the first sexologists may well feel to us like relics from the distant past, their conceptual and narrative structures in many ways endure to this day. In these founding texts of sexology, one sees an exhaustive effort being made to derive natural truths from cultural phenomena. Rather than advance the idea that Western society developed customs and practices that emerged from specific historical conditions, these writers often believed that their culture provided a wholly intelligible map for interpreting human nature. To this end, they employed devices that were thought to provide transparent access to the indisputably natural state of sexuality. Above all, they scrutinized bodily behaviours to derive the essential core of desire that erupted from within each human subject.

Particularly important in sexological research is the genre known as the case history. Here the subject of research plots the biographical facts of her or (more usually) his psycho-sexual development. This notable discursive form frequently resembles a confession in which women and men testify to the often shameful inner truth of their sexual being. It is uncommon indeed to find sexologists pondering how the case history is itself a structure of representation that shapes and manipulates information according to generic and narrative conventions. Sexologists rarely hesitate to question whether the subject under investigation might be swayed towards certain conclusions. After all, the conventions used by sexologists to some degree determine what can and cannot be said within the linear and developmental form that characterizes the history containing each case.

The case history, however, is not the only heuristic device that sexologists employ to extract supposedly natural facts from cultural phenomena. Early sexological writings also substantiate their claims by drawing widely – one might say, promiscuously – on a dazzling assortment of data taken from comparative anthropology, an academic discipline that established itself in the 1860s. Here, too, one can see a marked tendency in such writings to align the cultural manifestation of sexual behaviours with what are presumed to be natural conditions. In one study after another, sexologists strive to show the primitive nature of sexual instinct: a word that explains sexuality in terms of social Darwinism. Developed by the English writer Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), social Darwinism emphasized the ‘survival of the fittest’, a doctrine that proved hugely influential from the 1870s through to the 1930s. Even when not pursuing arguments about the primitive core of civilized society, sexologists often draw amply on biological data to make observations about copulation, mating and reproductive aims. In this respect, it is perhaps no accident that Kinsey – one of the most distinguished sexologists to emerge in the twentieth century – began his academic career as a zoologist; his early research was into the gall wasp.

So with these issues in mind, let me begin by examining several noteworthy aspects of four different works that fall within the general field of sexual science. Starting with the courageous research of the German sexual liberationist, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–95), I move on to contrast the assumptions upon which the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing built Psychopathia Sexualis (first published in 1886, and revised and expanded in many successive editions). Two further German works open up the complexity of sexological thinking within this period: first, Iwan Bloch’s The Sexual Life of Our Time (1908), and second, Sex and Character (1975 [1903]) by Otto Weininger (1880–1903). Since much of this writing displays considerable confusion about female sexuality, my discussion proceeds to two notable women writers: Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), who drew on aspects of contemporary scientific thought in the name of a progressive politics of social change; and Radclyffe Hall (1883–1943), whose banned novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) drew partly on sexological thought to represent the dignity and integrity of lesbianism. Schreiner’s vision, if sharing with the sexologists a number of similar assumptions about sex and race, provides an alternative perspective on women’s desires in an era when sexuality was for the first time the subject of extensive research and speculation. Likewise, Hall’s controversial fiction reveals how and why a woman’s desires might not conform to dominant heterosexual conventions. Given the emergence of fiction, plays and poetry by feminist New Women (such as Sarah Grand [1854–1953]) and Aesthetes and Decadents (such as the aunt and niece who collaborated as Michael Field [1846–1914 and 1862–1913], and Oscar Wilde) with a strong interest in same-sex desire, the period in which sexology emerged has been aptly characterized by Elaine Showalter as one of ‘sexual anarchy’ (see Showalter...