This article explores the medical references in the writings of the German jurist and activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs as a means of breaking new ground in diverse fields (including history of medicine, history of sexuality, and gender history). It demonstrates that the theory of bisexuality has a much deeper and more textured genealogy than has been hitherto appreciated and that dual-gendered bodies and minds must be better recognized as important through the nineteenth century. Specifically, it demonstrates that classifications and rhetoric of hermaphroditism, and other dual-gendered categories (e.g., sexual dualism and anatomical bisexuality), were deployed in diverse contexts through the period, often with little or no reference to the occurrence of genital ambiguities. Important discourses in embryology, utilized by Ulrichs, suggested that all individuals, in the earliest stages of fetal development, were hermaphroditic. In making an analogy among the ontogeny of sex anatomy, hermaphroditism, and the development of erotic preferences, Ulrichs sought to naturalize homoeroticism, rendering social and legal prohibitions untenable. His advocacy, however, was counterbalanced by the Prussian forensic expert Johann Ludwig Casper who had made some conceptual maneuvers similar to Ulrichs only couched in the rhetoric of pathology. Ulrichs was equivocal in his use of forensic works such as Casper's, condemning their authors but recognizing similarities with his own gender schema.
Charles Darwin’s published and unpublished writings contain a plethora of references to sex variations, including intersexualities (‘hermaphroditism’), transformations of sex and non-heteronormative sexual behaviours. Marking the 150th anniversary of his major sexological work The descent of man, this historical review examines a range of strategies that Darwin deployed in order to accommodate such variations within his evolutionism, while simultaneously attempting to mitigate the potential for condoning sexual phenomena that were feared and reviled in Victorian bourgeois society. Although he moved to cast sex-variant animals, human and non-human, as biological misfits and failures, Darwin’s commitment to the principle of primordial intersexuality (dual-sexed origins) nonetheless occasioned some of the queerest evolutionary narratives of the 19th century. Similarly, his construal of the ‘unnatural crimes’ of indigenous peoples was contained within a hierarchical narrative of the backwardness of ‘savages’ and civilizational supremacy but was readily subject to challenge and queer reinterpretations, not least with reference to the ‘extreme sensuality’ of the classical Greeks. Despite working to subdue the queer potentialities of his evolutionism, Darwin nonetheless laid the foundations for a new, modernist sexology to emerge, a situation that was exploited by a cohort of Darwinist sexologists, Sigmund Freud chief among them, who followed in his path.
Beginning in 1834, entomologists across Europe began reporting same-sex copulatory activity in a variety of insect species, sometimes between species or genera. Most communications concerned male-male couplings of the common cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha, syn. M. vulgaris). These reports offer a unique snapshot of how nineteenth-century naturalists responded when they were required to explain precisely what was natural in their observations. Initial communications of same-sex couplings were mainly accompanied by exclamations of surprise and the rhetoric of disapproval. Such activity was explained either by the assumption that one of the parties must in some way have a female anatomy or that blind or excessive lust compelled more virile individuals to force copulation upon weaker ones. As these explanations were questioned, more complex and controversial theories founded in fashionable evolutionary theories were forwarded as means of assimilating the phenomenon within hegemonic constructions of sexuality. These came from both within entomological circles and from outside observers whose primary interest was in theorizing human eroticism. This article follows a particularly intense dispute which erupted following the claim by one of France's leading naturalists, Henri Gadeau de Kerville, that the homoerotic activity demonstrated by male cockchafers evidenced the existence of a distinctly “homosexual” instinct. By 1900 no single taxonomy of non-human homoeroticism dominated intellectual discourse on the subject. Although zoological observations of same-sex eroticism continued to be made through the twentieth century, Melolontha were left in relative peace.
The hegemony of the two-sex paradigm in the European scientific imagination and wider culture did not automatically equate to the hegemony of two discrete genders. In fact, two sexes facilitated a variety of gender choices: two singular and a number of double or otherwise intersexed (most commonly referred to as "hermaphrodite" or "bisexual" in its anatomical sense). This article explores some key British medical and allied scientific texts, with reference to associated Continental literature, as a means of illustrating the complexity of the two-sex paradigm and the unexpected transformation of gender possibilities that it helped produce through the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. Discourses surrounding the first direct observations of the earliest development of fetal urinogenital anatomy were pivotal. The prevailing view that the incipient embryo was sexually undifferentiated (a paragon of the one-sex paradigm) was challenged by the Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox, initially as he sought to bolster his professional reputation at the height of the Burke and Hare "body-snatching" scandal. Knox suggested that every embryo began life in an essentially dual-sexed state, an individual's sex anatomy depending on the greater or lesser development of component female and male structures. Greater clarification on the contested status of the homology-hermaphrodite distinction was achieved with the discovery of the early co-existence of the excretory duct of the Wolffian body (mesonephric duct) and the Müllerian duct (paramesonephric duct), an observation that made anatomical bisexuality difficult to ignore. The nineteenth-century's greatest champion of primordial hermaphroditism was Charles Darwin who was pivotal in phylogenizing the principle and establishing the premise that (in his own words) "Every man & woman is hermaphrodite," a foundation stone of late-nineteenth-century sexology.
Looking beyond the notorious “Brideshead” aesthetes and homoeroticism of 1920s Oxford, this article explores the queer sensibilities of the university's male undergraduates and their associates through the 1930s. Steadily through the decade, Oxford's unique brand of queer aestheticism and same-sex love affairs became embroiled with wider debates about the hegemony of socialism and communism and the supposed degeneracy of standards at Oxford. At the same time, the assimilation of medicalized concepts of perversion and homosexuality increasingly made Oxford's aesthetes and same-sex love affairs objects of critical scrutiny, effeminophobia, and homophobia. For many of the university's queer male undergraduates, the Oxford University Dramatic Society provided a safe haven and a platform for queer expression both in Oxford and beyond. A group of images by the Russian émigré photographer Cyril Arapoff provides further insights into the male homoerotics of 1930s Oxford. Situated within the context of Arapoff's life in the city between 1933 and 1939, his extraordinary photographs of nude and seminude young men offer glimpses into the queer lives and loves at Oxford in a period when such experiences were rarely articulated in written form. The images include the spaces the young men inhabited and their interconnections to London's vibrantly queer dance and theater scene. Such insights help establish more firmly interwar Oxford as an important hub of queer modernism, with national and international import for the course of modern queer history.
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