Chiara Beccalossi

A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire

Preface Series Acknowledgements List of Illustrations 1 Introduction: The Cultural History of Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century Chiara Beccalossi, University of Queensland, Australia and Ivan Crozier, University of Edinburgh, UK 2 Heterosexuality: An Unfettered Capacity for Degeneracy Chad Parkhill and Elizabeth Stephens, both University of Queensland, Australia 3 Homosexuality: European and Colonial Encounters Sean Brady, Birkbeck College, London, UK 4 Sexual Variations Lisa Downing, University of Exeter, UK 5 Sex, Religion, and the Law: The Regulation of Sexual Behaviors, 1820-1920 Louise A. Jackson, University of Edinburgh, UK 6 Sex, Medicine and Disease: From Reproduction to Sexuality Chiara Beccalossi, University of Queensland, Australia 7 Sex, Popular Beliefs and Culture: Discourses on the Sexual Child Gail Hawkes, University of New England, Australia and R. Danielle Egan, St Lawrence University in Canton, USA 8 Prostitution: The Age of Empires Raelene Frances, Monash University, Australia 9 Erotica: Sexual Imagery, Empires, and Colonies Ruth Ford, La Trobe University, Australia Notes Bibliography Contributors Index

The origin of Italian sexological studies: female sexual inversion ca. 1870-1900

Before the term “sexual inversion” entered the vocabulary of the Italian medical community with the forensic physician Arrigo Tamassia’s case history of a male sexual invert in 1878, there already existed notions of female same-sex desires. These ideas linked female homosexuality to excessive sexual longing, virility, and specific women-only environments. This framework of understanding returned in later studies of female “sexual inversion,” but it assumed a more sophisticated conceptual form. The aim of this article is to map the debates around female same-sex desires that took place as Italian sexology developed by the end of the nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-century European psychiatry on same-sex desires: pathology, abnormality, normality and the blurring of boundaries

By interrogating the intellectual foundations of the normal and pathological within nineteenth-century European psychiatry, this article illustrates the extent to which same-sex desires were located on the borderline between the normal and the pathological. First, this article analyses the early-nineteenth-century French and British medical concepts of folie raisonnante, monomania and moral insanity, and their relationship with medical ideas of same-sex desires. It then considers mid-nineteenth century degeneration theory and the introduction of the category of sexual inversion in German psychiatry in the late 1860s. Finally, it deals with the late-nineteenth-century medical discussion about the presence of a latent bisexuality in all human beings at both embryological and psychological levels, and the impact that such debates had on psychiatric discourses about same-sex desires. It is argued that understanding same-sex desires in terms of mutually exclusive categories of the pathological and the normal fails to appreciate the unstable and fluid notions of sexual ‘abnormality’ and ‘pathology’ within the nineteenth-century European psychiatric debates.

Introduction: Female Sexual Inversion and other Medical Embodiments of Female Same-Sex Desires in Italy and Britain, circa 1870–1920

This woman is a cretin; she is fifty years old, and an inmate in the asylum of Pesaro, a small town in Italy. Her looks are rustic, and her appearance is mannish. She has a dolichocephalous skull, a wide forehead, badly implanted ears, dark skin, atrophic breasts, and abnormal genitals: at four times the normal size and nearly as hard to the touch as cartilage, her left lip is hypertrophic. Her clitoris is larger at the base [1885]. This woman is a spinster; she lives in Liverpool, England. Her body produces too much calcium and as a result her voice is low, man-like. She is also flat-chested. She has been masturbating since puberty, and her health has been bad ever since. The guilt over her own evil ways was so unbearable that her clitoris and labia were excised [1916]. This woman is a pretty middle-class teenage girl; she lives in a boarding school in Padua, Italy. Her face is pale. She is highly strung and has a restless temperament. Her attitude is masculine, and she is self-confident [1898]. This woman is single. She is forty-eight years old, and is an inmate at the Bethlehem asylum in London, England. She has no pubic hair and no breasts. The hands of this woman are like those of a man. She is very tall and broad, and has an overall masculine appearance. Her post-mortem examination revealed her uterus was like that of a child [1878]. This woman is a prostitute; she works in a luxurious brothel in Rome, Italy. Her hair is short, her clothes are fashionable.

Sexuality in Post-Risorgimento Italy and Victorian Britain

The list of international contributors to the pioneering Italian sexological journal Archivio delle psicopatie sessuali featured, amongst others, the British sexologist Ellis and the Franco-Russian poet and journalist Marc-Andre Raffalovich.1 Raffalovich had moved to Britain in the 1880s and, although he was not medically trained, he began writing on sexual inversion soon after. Unlike his literary works, which were written in English and printed in his new country, his material on sexology was never published in Britain. Rather, it had been published in French in the Archives de l’Anthropologie Criminelle [Archives of Criminal Anthropology] since the early 1890s, and in a monograph, Uranisme et Unisexualite [Uranism and Unisexuality], in 1895. In this monograph he argued that male sexual inverts who maintained their masculine characteristics were normal rather than diseased individuals; while it has never been translated into English, Uranisme et Unisexualite was promptly translated into Italian and reviewed in medical journals.2 In 1896 he published an article in the Archivio delle psicopatie sessuali about the current state of research on psychopathologies in England. Raffalovich lamented how difficult it was to write about such a subject in Britain, and castigated the British medical community for the backwardness of its research on same-sex desires. Raffalovich denounced the hypocrisy of British physicians when handling sexual matters.

Italy: The Fashionable Psychiatric Disorder of Sexual Inversion and other Medical Embodiments of Same-Sex Desires

In the second half of the nineteenth century, medical sexual knowledge was characteristically international, so that it was common for physicians to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in medical science from the United States and European countries. Despite such internationalism, each country formulated its own autonomous medical discourses. While it was not until the late 1890s that Ellis started to systematically study sexual inversion in Britain, the Italian case was completely different: Arrigo Tamassia had introduced the subject in the late 1870s, which triggered the publication of a considerable number of medical articles on the subject of sexual inversion between 1878 and 1890, plus numerous reviews of foreign and Italian works. From the mid-1880s onwards, the complex nosologies articulated by psychiatric treatises consistently referred to sexual inversion as a distinct mental disorder, so that same-sex desires were no longer interpreted as a symptom of other diseases, which had been the predominant interpretation in earlier decades. In the 1890s, this phenomenon was followed by an explosion of studies on sexual perversion, with numerous book-length scientific studies dedicated to the topic.1 Pioneering historical research such as that of Giovanni Dall’Orto and Nerina Milletti has identified a number of medical works from this period that engage with same-sex desires. Roughly half of these medical studies addressed the question of female same-sex desires.

Havelock Ellis and Sex Psychology

In 1897 Henry Havelock Ellis published Sexual Inversion, the first English monograph on homosexuality. It took him five years to collect all the data and case-studies; it also took two years of collaboration with a man of letters, John Addington Symonds, and help from various American and Continental medical writers, as well as his personal friends.1 Ellis’s aim in publishing his study of same-sex behaviour was to demonstrate that same-sex desires were just a ‘natural’ expression of the sexual instinct: he proposed that homosexuality was a common biological manifestation in human beings and animals alike. He also used examples from both anthropological and historical studies to show that homosexuality was present across a wide range of different cultures. Sexual Inversion’s radical proposition rested on the broader implications of the book: if sexual inversion was neither a sin nor a sickness, it followed that the difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality was simply in the choice of object of desire. Its argument that homosexuality should be treated as a natural phenomenon, subject to no religious or legal constraints, meant that Sexual Inversion was pitted against the morality of its time. It fostered sexual tolerance, proposing that individuals had a right to follow their sexual inclinations and desires.

Pasquale Penta, ‘First Class Sexologist’

If Lombroso’s Archivio di psichiatria was the first Italian publication to foster the study of deviant sexuality, it was one of his disciples, Pasquale Penta, who should be credited with establishing sexology as an autonomous medical discipline. Penta had originally been trained as a psychiatrist and criminal anthropologist and, in the course of his professional duties, he spent a great deal of time observing the behaviour of prisoners and investigating the extremes of human deviancy. Like Lombroso, Penta had initially endorsed deterministic arguments based on organic theories of degeneration, according to which irregular sexual activities should not be considered immoral choices, but the expression of innate characteristics. Very early in his career, however, Penta began to challenge Lombroso and to favour more psychological explanations of crime and deviant sexuality, thus turning away from the biological explanations for deviancy typical of Lombrosian criminal anthropology.

Cesare Lombroso and Italian Criminal Anthropology

Cesare Lombroso is best remembered as the founder of modern criminology and author of ‘odd’ theories of the ‘born criminal’ that strike modern sensibility as both ridiculous and horrific. However mocked, at the time of their inception, Lombroso’s descriptions of the physiognomic characteristics of criminals — their heads were meant to be asymmetrical, their upper lips thin, their ears large and protruding, their bushy eyebrows met over the nose, their eyes were deep-set, and even their toes were pointy — were neither unprecedented nor unique. By relying on constitutional explanations of deviancy, Lombroso, like contemporary British psychiatrists such as Maudsley, conflated crime and disease as part of the same phenomenon. Educated by positivism’s ideals, Lombroso followed the trend of Italian psychiatry of the last three decades of the nineteenth century and believed that there existed a continuity between phenomena like madness and normal physiological states, so that the passions of the insane person were considered an exaggeration of tendencies present in healthy people. Studying pathological behaviours was thus a way to gain a better understanding of the nature of ‘normal’ men.1 Nevertheless, Lombroso’s endless catalogues of deviancy appear to stand at odds with this assumption because his extensive lists of physiognomic markers made the abnormal visually distinguishable and separate from the ‘normal’. It was this last aspect of Lombroso’s research that made his theories very popular: the international medical community was the first to be seduced by it, and the popular imagination of places like Italy, Europe, and North and Latin America soon followed.

Britain: Oblique Discourses Surrounding ‘Lesbic Love’

British philosophical and scientific thinking had been enquiring into sexual matters since at least the end of the eighteenth century. In his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Thomas Robert Malthus rationalised and problematised procreative sexuality by linking it to economic and social issues. His main argument was that populations tend to multiply faster than the means required for their sustenance. The inevitable misery that would ensue could be avoided through sexual moderation: people should postpone marriage until they could support a family, and single people were expected to be strictly celibate. Although couples should not have many children, Malthus discouraged the use of artificial methods to limit reproduction because he considered them a ‘vice’.1 Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) reinforced the idea that sexual instincts were closely related to human developments. Paving the way for the study of sexual instincts as a‘natural’ phenomenon, Darwin raised sexual impulse to the status of driving force in human evolution, and contended that man has two main instincts: self-preservation and gratification of the sexual instinct.2 In some instances, members of the same species will fight each other to secure mates, rather than for food or living space.3