This critical version of
psychoanalysis
was championed vigorously in the work of Sabine Prokhoris, which, inspired by the genealogical perspectives of Neitzsche and Foucault, updated the historicity of the “norms of existence.” In them, the fundamental hold enjoyed by the heteronormative imposition of the “difference between the sexes” in the life of humans is meticulously dismantled. To this effect (to use Lacan’s formulation), “man, woman, and child are nothing more than signifiers,” and one can begin to explore the explosive consequences, starting with this: it becomes impossible to base these signifiers on a “symbolic order” constituting humanity’s ultimate nature, and impossible to found a “normal and realized” sexuality based solely on the anatomical differences between men and women.
Finally, the American theoretical and political movement that has developed around queer theory, as illustrated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s famous work
Epistemology of the Closet
, has also contributed to the deconstruction of the evidence of the sexual division. One could even speak of a paradigm of transvestism to designate the multitude of invented conducts and strategies—notably sexual—that invalidate the pertinence of identity based on the difference between men and women. The transvestite then does not embody a confusion of genders, but rather serves to help understand that the status of sex as incarnated into a role is simply that: a role, one interpretation among many. This deconstruction of the difference between the sexes is a small part of the much greater movement refusing dualistic classifications, which includes the homo- and heterosexual opposition—even though “circumstances” have allowed gays to mount a struggle for acceptance, by taking part in the “politics of identity,” they are still playing by the rules of their adversaries. The realm of the minority is more creative, and much more suited to the dissolution of inherited identity barriers. Herein can be found one of Foucault’s grand themes which attempts to disentangle the (political) knots between sexuality and identity. It is well known that this same Foucauldian perspective on the subject of
perversion
was developed in
The History of Sexuality
. But Foucault extended it to gender differences in a book he edited in 1979 entitled
Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite
which highlights how the uncertainty of gender is so unbearable to those in power, despite the fact that even “nature” herself has provided anatomical proof of this indiscernibility.
—Jean-Manuel de Queiroz
Agacinski, Sylviane.
Politique des sexes
. Paris: Le Seuil, 1998.
Bersani, Leo.
Homos
. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998.
Borrillo, Daniel, Eric Fassin, and Marcela Iacub, eds.
Au-delà du PaCS, l’expertise familiale à l’épreuve de l’homosexualité
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999.
Butler, Judith.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Deleuze, Gilles.
L’Ile déserte et autres textes
. Paris: Minuit, 2002.
———, and Félix Guattari.
Mille plateaux.
Paris: Minuit, 1992. [Published in the UK as
A Thousand Plateaus
. London: Athlone Press, 1987.]
Eribon, Didier.
Papiers d’identité. Interventions sur la question gay
. Paris: Fayard, 2000.
Foucault, Michel, ed.
Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B
… Paris: Gallimard, “Les Vies parallèles,” 1978.
———.
Histoire de la sexualité
. Vol. I : “La volonté de savoir.” Paris: Gallimard, 1976. [Published in the US as
The History of Sexuality
. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.]
Héritier, Françoise.
Masculin, féminin
. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996.
Kosofsky, Sedgwick Eve.
Epistemology of the Closet
. Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1990.
Laplantine, François.
Je, nous et les autres
. Paris: Ed. du Pommier, 1999.
Prokhoris, Sabine.
Le Sexe prescrit, la différence sexuelle en question.
Paris: Champs Flammarion, 2000.
Weston, Kalh.
Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship
. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991.
—Anthropology; Essentialism/Constructionism; Feminism (France); Heterosexism; History; Marriage; Otherness; Parenting; Philosophy; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Sociology; Symbolic Order; Transphobia; Universalism/ Differentialism.
GENETICS
The historical links between homosexuality and genetics can be divided into three phases. The first, before 1940, was generally based on the formulation of a formal genetic hypothesis on homosexuality. Certainly, the existence of morbid hereditary aspects of homosexuality had been accepted since the days of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the nineteenth-century German psychiatrist who wrote
Psychopathia Sexualis
, his famous study on sexual perversity; however, this idea did not pervade French, English, or American discussions on eugenics. Next, this situation changed after 1940 in the United States, when studies of homozygote and heterozygote twin siblings led to a consideration of the idea that homosexuality could be transmitted from generation to generation, raising the alarming possibility—in pre-
Stonewall
, pre-gay rights American society—of the forced sterilization of homosexuality. And the third phase occurred after the 1970s, the link between homosexuality and genetics was raised again, but this time by gays themselves (at least in the United States), as an attempt—in the heady days of gay liberation, and in response to the politically conservative forces who opposed them—to prove the genetic “naturalness” of homosexuality. In this sense, genetic research is prone to paradox, in that the same scientific claims regarding homosexuality can be used on one hand to eradicate or “prevent” it and on the other to emancipate or legitimize it.
The idea of “homosexual” heredity is founded in the
degeneracy
theory, which describes the hereditary transmission of mental diseases, leading to the progressive degeneracy of a lineage. It is within this concept, in fact, that Krafft-Ebing released
Psychopathia Sexualis
. From then on, homosexuality was widely thought to contribute to the weakening of the “race,” on the same level as alcoholism or nervous disorders. As a consequence, as early as 1904, Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin—who in 1933, joined the Nazi committee on heredity as overseen by Heinrich
Himmler
, and who ultimately became director of the foremost eugenics research in Nazi Germany—recommended the sterilization of homosexuals as a means to protect the race. Outside the Nazi context, however, the question of the link between homosexuality and genetics remained largely unexplored by eugenists in other countries during this time.
A few years later in the US, it was a student of Rüdin’s, Franz Kallmann, who made significant claims based on his research into genetic causes of homosexuality. Rather ironically, Kallmann, a militant eugenist who was evidently sympathetic to Hitler’s regime, was forced to flee Germany in 1936 due to his partial Jewish lineage. Kallmann was one of the first to study the potential genetic basis of psychiatric disorders. In the 1940s, he began a series of studies on sets of twins; the number of matches in sexual orientation between twins led him to the conclusion that homosexuality was genetically determined. Without explaining the long-term objective of his research (which was probably mass sterilization of those with “disorders” such as homosexuality), this study led Kallmann to demand world-wide public health measures designed to “protect” future generations.
Paradoxically, Kallmann’s work, from a methodological point of view, directly influenced studies conducted since the late 1980s by a number of geneticists (e.g., the team of J. Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard; and Dean Hamer) supporting the idea of genetic causes for homosexuality that were, in fact, supported by gays and lesbians. Hamer’s 1993 study, which caused a great deal of controversy, identified the existing of a “gay gene,” leading some to conclude that homosexuality was predetermined and thus inevitable in some. In spite of numerous critics who denounced these findings, the fact remained that for many, the genetic determinism of homosexuality was now “proven,” which, on one hand, provided justification for wider acceptance of homosexuals, but on the other, suggested the potential for new, homophobic forms of eugenics in which homosexuality may be identified through prenatal diagnosis.
—
Pierre-Olivier de Busscher
Allen, Garland. “The Double Edged Sword of Genetic Determinism: Social and Political Agendas in Genetic Studios of Homosexuality, 1940–1994.” In
Science and Homosexualities
. Edited by Vernon Rosario. New York/ London: Routledge, 1997.
Dorais, Michel. “La Recherche des causes de l’homo-sexualité: une science-fiction?” In
La Peur de l’autre en soi, du sexisme à l’homophobie
. Edited by Michel Dorais, Pierre Dutey, and Daniel Welzer-Lang. Montreal: VLB Editeurs, 1994.
LeVay, Simon.
Queer Science
. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Schuklenk, Udo. “Is Research Into the Cause(s) of Homosexuality Bad for Gay People?”
Christopher Street
, no. 208 (1993).
———. “Scientific Approaches to Homosexuality.” In
Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia
. Edited by George E. Haggerty. Vol. 2. New York/London: Garland Publishing Inc., 2000.
—Biology; Degeneracy; Endocrinology; Fascism; Medicine; Medicine, Legal; Psychiatry; Sterility; Treatment.
GERMANY
From its Origins to 1871: Sodomy, from the “Crime Against God” to “Crime Against Nature”
The repression of homosexuality among the ancient Germanics is not well documented. The majority of the known laws do not mention it, even if Tacitus (56–117 CE) of the Roman Empire, which at the time included Germania, affirmed that the “loathsome ones” were drowned in the marshes. It would appear, in fact, that this type of punishment only applied to “passive” or “effeminate” men who did not conform to the duties of warriors. Homosexual relations, when they did not threaten the hierarchies related to sexual roles, were not punished by law and were only subject to the judgment of families. Lesbianism was never mentioned.
Starting in the fifth century, following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the first Germanic kingdoms were established. The Germanic codes, written in Medieval Latin between the fifth and ninth centuries, applied to the territories that stretched from present-day
Portugal
to Germany. Inspired by the Roman model, Germanic law was progressively influenced by Christian morality, which considered sodomy to be both a sin and a crime. Starting from the sixth century, a series of laws were drafted, such as those of King Kindasvith (650) and King Receswinthe (654) in Spain, which called for sodomites to be punished by castration. In Portugal, the Code of Alaric II (506) added public ostracism, head shaving, lashing, and the death penalty to the list of punishments. The Sixteenth Council of Toledo (693), under the influence of King Egica, provided for the defrocking of bishops, priests, and deacons guilty of sodomy. In the Visigothic kingdoms, however, the repression of homosexuality remained limited until the sixteenth century, even if there were examples of men condemned for “sodomy” in the Germanic states of the German and Italian territories. Such men were hanged in Souabe in 1328, while in 1409 in Augsburg, at the instigation of Bishop Eberhard, a tanner and a clergyman were burned alive. Two other men convicted of sodomy, Ulrich Frey and Jakob Kiess, were suspended from a tower, their hands and feet bound; they remained there without food for six days before being hanged. The exact definition of the word “sodomy” during this time is, however, difficult to determine, as it could as easily refer to homosexual relations as to heterosexual relations, bestiality, or
heresy
. Starting in the sixteenth century, homosexuality as a “crime
against nature
” is mentioned in the
Constitutio Criminalis Bambergersis
of 1507 and again in the
Constitutio Criminalis Carolina
of 1532. Enforced in the empire of Charles Quint, which spread over Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, the
Carolina
called for death by fire for the crime of sodomy. Thus, it was in 1731 that the King of Prussia, Frederick William I, condemned a sodomite by the name of Lepsch to burning.
While executions remained rather infrequent, demonstrations of homophobia took on other forms. For example, the accusation of sodomy was often used to discredit a religious or political adversary. In the thirteenth century, Emperor Frederick II was the object of such attacks, incited by the popes who were hostile toward him, while in the sixteenth century, Luther alluded to numerous instances of homosexuality among the Catholic clergy. Even though lesbianism did not fall under the province of the law, some women were, in very rare cases, tried for “sodomy,” including Catharina Margaretha Linck and Catharina Margaretha Mühlhahn in Halberstadt, Prussia in 1721. Linck, disguised as a man, had joined several army divisions before marrying an unsuspecting Mühlhahn in 1717; Linck used a leather penis to make her partner believe she was a man. Linck was condemned to death, whereas Mühlhahn was condemned to three years’ imprisonment and banished, given that she continued to have sexual relations with her “husband,” even after having discovered the truth.
Under the influence of the Enlightenment (Aufklärung), legislators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought to establish a “natural law,” more respectful of human nature; as a result, the death penalty was progressively abandoned. In 1794, Prussian law began to punish “sodomy and other crimes against nature, which cannot be named here because of their abominable nature,” with a penalty of forced labor accompanied by beating. It was, however, the adoption of the Napoleonic Code, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which proved to be decisive. As a result, many German states began to revise their penal codes along the lines of the French model that, since the revolutionary laws of 1791, did not provide for the criminalization of sodomy. Bavaria, which in 1751 still punished sodomy by condemnation to the stake after beheading, abolished the laws that condemned homosexual acts between consenting adults in 1813; Württemberg followed suit in 1839, and Brunswick and Hanover in 1840. In the Baden region, only those acts committed in public were punished, and in Saxony, Oldenburg, and Thüringen, the maximum punishment was one year in prison. This evolution remained intact until the much more restrictive Prussian Criminal Code of 1851 came into play, which would serve as the basis for the German Criminal Code. Applied initially to Hanover, annexed in 1867, then to the Confederation of Northern Germany in 1869, it was imposed over the entire Empire in 1871.