Conceiving Sexuality

Approaches to Sex Research in a Postmodern World

Richard G. Parker, John H. Gagnon, Richard G. Parker, John H. Gagnon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135215798
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1995. After widespread neglect over many years, the study of human sexuality has recently come to the forefront of many of the most important debates in contemporary society and culture. The continued development of feminist theory, the emergence of gay and lesbian studies, and the impact of the international AIDS pandemic have combined to focus new attention on the ways in which gender and sexuality are shaped in different social and cultural settings, and on the complex interactions betwen sexuality and health in the late twentieth century.

Edited by two of the leading figures in contemporary sex research, ConceivingSexuality brings together the contributions of writers from a wide range of social science disciplines and cultural traditions who are working at the cutting edge of contemporary sex research. Focusing on key areas of concern such as gender power relations, the formation of sexual identities, the dynamics of sexual desire, and the social construction of sexual risk, the essays in Conceiving Sexuality provide an important overview of the most pressing topical and theoretical issues currently shaping debate in international and cross-cultural research on sexuality.

Part One

HISTORIES OF DESIRE

1

La mise en discours and Silences in Research on the History of Sexuality

Karin Lützen

NINE O’CLOCK AT NIGHT THE TWENTY-EIGHTH OF AUGUST 1889, the forty-year old, unmarried Alfred-Hippolyte P. was arrested at a bus station in Paris. In his hand he was carrying a long pigtail, and in his pocket he had a pair of scissors. In the crowd at the bus station he had seized the occasion to cut off the pigtails from a young girl’s head. Following a search of his house, sixty-five pigtails and pony tails in different nuances were found—all secretly cut off from young girls’ heads. After his arrest Alfred-Hippolyte underwent a mental examination performed by three doctors who published his confession, together with their statement in a medical journal.

“For about three years,” he had told them, “I have often been overwhelmed by restlessness when I was alone at night in my room. It began with anxiety and dizzyness and then I got the idea to touch women’s hair. I can’t say how I managed it the first time, but when I was holding the pigtail in my hand I felt such voluptuousness that I immediately got an erection and without a touch, yes, without even rubbing myself against the young girl, I got an ejaculation. I went home ashamed of what had happened, but when I thought about it the same sensations returned. Then I got the idea of possessing this hair that gave me such hitherto unknown feelings of voluptuousness. I had been to bed with women, but had never felt anything similar together with them—they repelled me more than they attracted me. But as soon as I saw loose hair I was obsessed by the idea of touching it. Soon that was not satisfying enough. I wanted to possess it and one evening I cut off a pigtail with my knife. I was holding it in my hand all the way home and at the moment I got inside my room I was overwhelmed by the same excitement as outside. I buried my hand in the hair, I let it slide over my body, I twisted it around my genitals and sensed the most lively sensations.” And like that he went on cutting off sixty-six pigtails more until he was finally arrested (see Motet 1890:337).

The question now is: can these acts and the impulse provoking them be characterized as sexual? At first glance you would answer yes, because these acts included erection and ejaculation. But is that sufficient explanation? Couldn’t it just as well be an expression of an uncontrolled craving for beauty—a delight in touching and admiring the long, shiny hair. Or could it be a collection mania that accidentally had pigtails as objects but equally well could have included coins or tin soldiers? Or could it be a desire for “playing hairdresser,” which, without voluntary playmates, unfortunately had to result in theft?

In 1889, when Alfred-Hippolyte was examined, it was not the sexual aspect the doctors emphasized. They paid attention instead to his “pathological obsession” and classified it as a sign of degeneration. Thereafter they concluded that since he was insane, Alfred-Hippolyte couldn’t be held responsible for his acts—therefore he should be sent to a lunatic asylum for some months and not go to prison.

Such a decision marks a growing humanization of those offenders who seem to be driven by an uncontrollable need and who previously had been sent to prison. Many such men were now presented to the scientific world, especially by French and German legal experts, and common to all of them was that they had been arrested several times because they behaved strangely and disturbingly. One of the cases was of a German who in 1871 had pursued young women, forced them into a corner and finally urinated on them (Arndt 1872). An Austrian was arrested in 1878 because he had stolen a handkerchief out of a woman’s handbag. When his house was searched, fifty stolen handkerchiefs were found (Zippe 1878). A Frenchman was arrested in 1892 because he touched women’s silk dresses (Gamier 1893). Two years later another Frenchman was arrested because he stabbed women’s buttocks, and the year after yet another Frenchman was arrested for throwing ink and acid on women’s dresses (Gamier 1990).

Within twenty years the attitude towards such acts changed completely. From having been considered sheer legal offences they were now understood as an expression of insanity, but the focus soon shifted from the pathological obsession to the fact that erection and ejaculation always were a part of the acts. Around the turn of the century these acts were isolated from other obsessions and classified as sexual perversions.

The Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing collected forty-five cases like these and published them under the title Psychopathia Sexualis. The collection was widely distributed, and in 1903 the twelfth edition was published, containing 238 cases collected from various medical journals— the above mentioned Alfred-Hippolyte, for instance, became case number one hundred. The greater the attention towards this behavior the more cases were created. Herewith, a special group of mankind was invented. Very soon it was divided into sub-groups that each got its own name and in time developed a mutual solidarity of the species. The sexual perverts had come to light—but the question is whether they actually had the sexual in common.

In 1986, Jeffrey Weeks wrote: “I am suggesting that what we define as ‘sexuality’ is an historical construction, which brings together a host of different biological and mental possibilities—gender identity, bodily differences, reproductive capacities, needs, desires and fantasies—which need not be linked together, and in other cultures have not been (Weeks 1986:15).

As the cases concerning Alfred-Hippolyte and company show, a range of acts and impulses can have quite a different point of departure but end up being poured into the same melting pot of definitions and coming out again as homogenous sexual perversions. The sexual scientists of the time looked at Das Ding an sich—at every case as an isolated phenomenon. Together with the other isolated phenomena they certainly formed a community, but in turn they were torn out of their social, historical and cultural context.

The classification zeal of medical science should be seen in connection with natural science’s zeal for systematizing everything. At that time, physiology was created, since vivisection made it possible to elucidate the function of the organism. Bacteriology was developed as well, and one microbe after another was isolated and named. It seems almost as if medical science itself was stricken with an irresistable impulse to classify everything under the sun. When the science of Psychopathia Sexualis is viewed in connection with the development of these other classifying disciplines of the time, its appearance thus seems more understandable. The consequence of the medical classification of certain acts was that what was criminal now became humanized, what was unexplainable now was explained, and what was not quite so obviously sexual now became sexualized.

The above mentioned inclinations—the desire to cut off women’s pigtails, to urinate on women, to steal women’s handkerchiefs, to paw women’s silk dresses, to stab women’s buttocks or to throw ink or acid on women’s dresses can all only take place in the anonymous crowd of the metropolis. Urbanization contributed to the creation of modernity and the city became a liberating place for all those who were looking for independence and alternatives. In the bourgeois world view, the big city had at the end of the nineteenth century a very special function. It was the embodiment of the drawbacks of industrialization, with slum areas, drunkenness and immorality. In the light of the city’s dangerousness, the bourgeois home seemed all the more secure, and its function as the safe harbor of the family was reinforced. When you were leaving this home, you should be on guard because you were not only threatened by homeless children, beggars, drunkards, and streetwalkers, but also by sexual perverts. The big city was thereby further sexualized.

In addition, all these perversions were performed by men towards women. At that time, the women’s movement strove to expand women’s sphere of action and to create more possibilities for middle class women’s employment and consequent economic independence. In moral reform movements, women argued against the bourgeois double standard and demanded instead that men learn to control themselves sexually. These women wanted a society pervaded with self-control, because it would allow women to move around in the world without fear of men’s outrages. The creation of the sexual perverts acted from here as still another threat that women should pay attention to when they left home. Yet, as soon as a new danger was discovered and proclaimed, its dangerousness was weakened by the definitional encirclement. By being dissected and named and treated at a lunatic asylum, the perversions became less threatening.

When studying sexual phenomena—historical as well as present—it is therefore important to examine what has caused certain acts, desires, and life stories to be classified as sexual. A phenomenon such as the etiology of homosexuality can with advantage be studied as a cultural construction rather than as a truth of natural science. If it is examined through “indirect reading,” it is possible to go behind the text and decode medical science’s perception of which acts constitute a good life and which a bad life.

Homosexuality has not only been explained as having a sexual origin, but as having a negative one. It has been assumed that people become homosexual because they have been arrested in their development, have had a shocking sexual experience with the opposite sex, or have a distorted sexual hormone or gene.

If not only the etiology of homosexuality but also homosexuality itself is viewed as a cultural construction, attention may be shifted from the phenomena pulling people away from heterosexuality, to what pushes people towards homosexuality. And that could be conditions that do not have a sexual origin at all, such as the fact that the homosexual way of life allows you to transgress traditional gender roles or the fact that, by living as a homosexual, you avoid marriage, or the fact that you keep an identity as deviant—which for some people is experienced as an advantage. These suggestions are just as usable in explaining why certain people prefer to arrange their life around homosexual identity

When studying sexual phenomena it is important, morever, to notice their cultural connection. Do they have special functions as demarcations of one culture from another, one class from another, or one gender from another? Or can these sexual phenomena be considered bugbears, stimulations, or creators of order?

To summarize: the point in mentioning Alfred-Hippolyte and the creation of the category “sexual perversion” is, quite simply, that in research on sexuality and sexual behavior it is important to throw light upon the origin of the characterization of a phenomenon as sexual.

My next point concerns discourse and silence, as it is viewed by ethnologists and historians of mentality. Michel Foucault introduced the concept La mise en discours, suggesting that sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century was put into discourse through the classifications of sexual science and through the debates of the moral reform movements. Inspired by this viewpoint, many discourse analyses of exactly these historical texts have been made which, together, elucidate explicit attitudes towards sexuality.

But sexuality is—just like death—one of the phenomena in cultural history that, separated from the public discourse, is wrapped in silence. It is very interesting to see what historical personages said about sexuality, but it is at least as interesting to look at what they didn’t say. Silence must in certain instances be interpreted as exacdy silence. With silence as a track, one must reconstruct the attitude causing the refusal to talk (see Floren and Persson 1985).

The French historians of mentality have emphasized silence in writing about the study of death. Michel Vovelle has recommended that icono-graphic and archeological sources get just as important a place as written ones. The aim should be to find out what was expressed but not said about a certain topic (Vovelle 1982).

Still another method to apply in analysing the unsaid is what the Swedish ethnologist Orvar Löfgren calls “symbolic inversion” (Löfgren 1987:111). He points out that cultural identity is built up through contrasts. The nineteenth century’s middle-class, for example, created its own class’s culture in contrast to the culture of both the aristocracy and the proletariat. According to Löfgren, symbolic inversion is an important technique in performing cultural analysis. It means that you map out the culture pattern of a certain group by studying its stereotypes and conceptions about “the others”—the culturally different.

This method implies, for example, that middle-class conceptions of the proletariat aren’t a reliable source of knowledge about the living conditions of this class. Instead, such material can offer excellent knowledge of middle-class self-knowledge. Changes in bourgeois self-knowledge can therefore be studied in the bourgeoisie’s changing images of working class culture.

These methods I will apply here in analyses of Magdalene Home—a rescue home for fallen women founded in Copenhagen in 1877 by Indre Mission—a large Christian fundamentalist organization. Magdalene Home was a place where women who voluntarily wanted to leave their occupation as prostitutes could seek shelter. Here they would be re-educated, that is, learn new virtues and discard old sins. Since this was a home that centered around sexual behavior, it is interesting to notice how sexuality was talked about—or how it was silenced. For this purpose I want to look specificaly at how sexual relationships between women were viewed.

In her pathbreaking article from 1975, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” Carroll Smith-Rosenberg showed that devoted and passionate love relationships between middle-class women were an important part of women’s culture in the nineteenth century (Smith-Rosenberg 1975). As far as is known, these relationships did not include sexual desire, but if the strength of their feelings is therefore belittled, a foolish anachronism is committed.

In women’s studies there has been a long international debate concerning the riddle: “Did they or didn’t they?” In other words, did these romantic, middle-class friends have sex or didn’t they? This truly is a riddle, since sexual relationships between two women do not result in pregnancy—a silent proof, in itself, of sex between a woman and a man. Two women together don’t beget such telling evidence, and their sexual practice is therefore almost impossible to detect. Though it is an anachronism to judge the strength and depth of love relationships between these women from the occurrence of sex, it is an interesting source of silence. Middle-class spinsters praised desirelesssness in their public discourse, but privately they might have experienced passion and desire. Though they are silent about their own practice, they perhaps knew and talked about sex between women from another social class—women they met in their philanthropic rescue work.

In nineteenth century philanthropy, asylums and other institutions of former times were replaced by rescue homes established with the bourgeois home as an ideal. Most of the rescue homes couldn’t afford to provide single rooms and had to let the residents sleep in dormitories. But in Magdalene Home, where the residents should be rescued from an immoral life, it is noteworthy that they were separated at night. By applying discourse analysis to the public arguments for establishing these single rooms and by using silence as a track, it might be possible to say something about sexual experiences between women.

The arguments are varied. Pastor Blume stated in 1902 that Magdalene Home made it possible for the women to feel what it was like to live in a real home (see Blume 1902). They had without doubt previously lived with their families crammed into a one-room apartment and now they got a chance to experience one of the privileges of the middle-class, that is, privacy. The residents should not only learn what a good bourgeois home implied—they themselves should also practice the upkeep of a home.

For this purpose single rooms were—so to speak—preliminary drafts, which the Principal, Miss Thora Esche, explained in her memoirs in 1920: “It is impossible to give you an ample idea of what a blessing each little girl’s cozy room with bed, table, chair, washstand, mirror and picture on the wall—yes, and then the two flowers in a flower pot that always were my first gifts to her—has been to my dear wards. The two flowers that had to be tended to were usually followed by more. These small rooms were the sanctuaries that contributed to making the Home into a home for each of its residents” (Esche 1920).

Since Magdalene Home was run by Indre Mission it meant that the rescue work was two-sided. On the one hand, the women should both be saved from their immoral existence and be guided into a decent way of life, but at the same time they should be “saved for the Lord”—that is, become good Christians. Single rooms were therefore presented as a kind of religious closet, a fact which Pastor Blume also mentioned: “The little room is of enormous importance for the rehabilitation and salvation of the young girl; here she can, should she want to, without being mocked, go down on her knees and seek help where help is to be found; here she can fight her fights, and should she want to do harm, here she can injure only herself” (Blume 1902:18).

Miss Thora Esche had herself been thinking about something of the sort when she in 187...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Histories of Desire
• Part Two: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity
• Part Three: Gender Power
• Part Four: Social and Sexual Networks
• Part Five: The Social Construction of Sexual Risk
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Bibliography