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Styling Flesh
Published in Phillip Joy, Megan Aston, Queering Nutrition and Dietetics, 2023
Queer and trans people negotiate the physicality of a perceived gender binary in daily life. This isn't to say that cisgender or heterosexual people are less impacted than queer or trans people by the constructed opposition of masculinity and femininity. Rather, trans and queer people embody identities that disrupt the expectations of such an opposition. Historically, homosexuality and identities to which we now refer to as transgender were somewhat conflated under the term “sexual inversion” (Prosser, 1998; Stryker, 2006). Transness was eclipsed by homosexuality until the later studies of “transvestism” and “transsexualism” in the field of sexology (Hirschfeld, 1991; Benjamin, 1966). These “deviances” were grouped together for a shared failure to adhere to the expectations of masculinity and femininity. Such an opposition lies at the ontological root of Western homosexuality and transgender identity (against which the concepts of heterosexuality and cisgender identity were defined and established as dominant). Queer and trans people may have reactionarily internalized these binary characteristics in ways that impact their relationships to their physical bodies.
The Sexual Body
Published in Roger Cooter, John Pickstone, Medicine in the Twentieth Century, 2020
The first of Ellis’ Studies in Psychology of Sex, Sexual Inversion (homosexuality), was prosecuted for obscenity in 1898. Though leading medical journals agreed that his subject fell within the medical purlieu, not a single doctor joined the campaign for the book’s defense. Subsequent volumes of the Studies were published outside the UK, and while the medical press increasingly conceded Ellis’ importance as an authority in his “peculiar field,”7 he was very much a lone figure. Though doubtless regarded as the authority on sexual functioning from the 1890s to the 1950s, Ellis’ actual influence on medical thinking and practice was limited; like other pioneers he was not in the mainstream of the medical profession, a marginalization not uniquely British.
cacheros and Locusts (chapulines)
Published in Jacobo Schifter, Public Sex in a Latin Society, 2013
When sexuality is centered in the body and not in the mind, or in some invisible ethereal personality, homosexuality is determined by the organs and their functions. For a locust, a homosexual is someone who allows his body to be invaded. Although homosexuality can be inherited and people can be born homosexual, practice can also lead the body toward a “sexual inversion.” In this respect, their views are no different from the nineteenth-century doctors who, as Margaret Gibson points out, believed that homosexuality was inscribed in the body but, like the plague, could be acquired through practice.13 Locusts believe in hereditary factors but also in the notion of a vulnerable body. Nobody should let his guard down, because at any moment danger can strike: like a virus, homosexuality can invade.
Academic LGBTQ+ Terminology 1900-2021: Increasing Variety, Increasing Inclusivity?
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2023
Mike Thelwall, Tracey Jayne Devonport, Meiko Makita, Kate Russell, Lois Ferguson
The term homosexual is of particular interest due to its early appearance and continued academic use despite its heteronormative and negative connotations (Cameron & Kulick, 2003; Motschenbacher, 2021). For example, the prominent Journal of Homosexuality retains it in its title to convey its lineage although the term is outdated and misleading about the journal’s scope (Marinucci, 2020). The word homosexual seems to originate from German in the second half of the nineteenth century (Janssen, 2021) in the context of new sodomy laws and reflecting an increased desire of the state to control reproduction. At a similar time, academics discussed “sexual inversion,” investigating possible reasons for homosexuality (Taylor, 1998), but homosexuality has since been employed as a medical category applied by (often unsympathetic) outsiders (Cameron & Kulick, 2003). Before this, the emphasis was on practices rather than the natures of the people employing them. Globally, LGBTQ+ terminologies such as hijra, muxe, and two-spirit (niizh manidoowag, see: Ristock, Zoccole, & Passante, 2010), a First Nations’ term, already existed, however.
Topology of the Closet
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2022
If the mask of heterosexuality has changed since Wilde’s time, the differences are in the details. Then as now, it obeys the same deceptively plain imperative: act like a man (Smith, Kippax, & Chapple, 1998, p. 56; Trumbach, 1989, 1998). The logic of this command, which even today circulates as common sense, was bolstered in the late nineteenth century by the then-dominant scientific theory of homosexuality. Following a logic of strict gender differentiation that had developed over centuries (Laqueur, 1990), the diagnosis of “sexual inversion” interpreted a male person’s attraction to other men as a sign of incongruity between outward and inward sex (Ellis & Symonds, 1897/2008). On this view, markers of femininity in men weren’t just portents of an erotic disposition contrary to natural order; they were disclosures of an inner gender contrary to physiological sex and social identity. These inferences reflected a common set of assumptions, historically specific but hardly novel (Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England, 1728, Chap. 2; Sinfield, 1994; Trumbach, 1989, 1998).
“The third sex is here to stay”: Rhetorical reconstructions of lesbian sexuality in Vice Versa
Published in Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2018
Medical theories of sexual inversion, made popular by the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, centered on supposed physical and mental abnormalities of gender presentation and sexual partner choice. The assumption was that lesbians were inverted in their identities and desires; because they desired women, they were likened to men in both their gender identity and their sexual orientation. The model had a difficult time accounting for feminine lesbians who dressed and acted in many ways like “normal” women but desired women sexually. Instead, it tended to assume that all lesbians were essentially masculine. While categorizations of lesbians as sexual inverts originated in medical literature, they were reinforced through early- and mid-twentieth-century books, plays, films, and journalism, which provided heterosexual and homosexual public audiences with stereotypes of lesbians as mentally and physically abnormal and ill.1 But something important happened in the brief period between 1947 and 1948, when an intrepid 26-year-old lesbian by the name of Lisa Ben (anagram for “lesbian”) decided to start Vice Versa, an underground magazine aimed at questioning these stereotypes for readers who she thought might have been most affected by them.