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  • Kinsey—An Inquiry into American Sexual Identity
  • Gabriele Linke (bio)

Body and Nation

The use of the body metaphor—as in the "body politic" of the Mayflower compact—to conceptualize abstract and complex social organizations or institutions not only has a long tradition but has recently been analyzed and explained by cognitive linguists such as Zoltán Kövecses (209). Therefore it is not surprising that questions of sexuality, and the sexologist Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894-1956) as well as the 'Kinsey Reports' of 1948 and 1953 in particular, have recently been considered to be "at the heart of the concept of national character" (Simmons 201). Miriam G. Reumann argues that because of the changes in sex talk and the sexualization of public discourse, sex can no longer be seen "as merely a private or individual matter" (201) but has been more closely linked to the public order than in earlier eras. In the national-sexual discourses of the early Cold-War period, the perceived decline of the male-breadwinner family and male power was read as a sign of the decline of the virility of the nation, a hypersexuality much needed to resist communism—the pattern recurs in the war against terrorism in the 2000s. On the other hand, women's active sexuality and engagement in pre- and extramarital sex have often been seen as tainting not only individual but national purity; and, of course, homosexuality has been linked to weakness and the loss of (national) character. Recent texts abound with body metaphors that give Kinsey's work a national scope, as in "undressing America" (Ansen 58) or exploring America's silenced other half, the lower abdomen (Hüetli 158).

Alfred Kinsey, Past and Present

If one considers the parallels between the moral-political situation in the 1950s and in the early 2000s, it comes as no surprise that Alfred Kinsey's life and work have recently witnessed a surge of attention in various forms, such as biographies by J. H. Jones (1997) and Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy (1998), the biographical novel The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle (2004), the biographical film Kinsey (2005), and the substantial re-appreciation of the 'Kinsey Reports' by Miriam [End Page 138] G. Reumann (2005), to name just a few. Several reviews of the film refer explicitly to those parallels, observing a similar backlash against the tolerance of sexual difference (for example, Felperin 38) and a similar political and moral climate during McCarthyism and the Culture Wars under the second Bush administration (for example, Munro 3476). The battle over Kinsey and his legacy has been, in both eras, a metaphorical battle over the American character, over what is and is not American, and over the balance between diversity and normativity, freedom and control. In the debates, as in the film, some of the unresolved contradictions of American life are laid out in the open; nevertheless, I am arguing, the film Kinsey remains true to Hollywood in that many scenes and dialogues appear liberal and provocative on the surface, yet some less obvious aspects of the film convey a more moderate political message and render its ideological standing more ambiguous. The film's (re)presentation of the bodies of the actors, the sex history of the nation, and its own generic hybridity are significant and instructive sites of such ambiguities.

Kinsey—the Film

Kinsey is a product of Fox Searchlight Pictures, a subdivision of 20th Century Fox, a company characterized by George Custen as one of the leading producers of biopics in the classical Hollywood era, at the time portraying mainly conventional elites (83-84). Still pursuing this tradition, Kinsey features, I shall argue, a clearly centered protagonist who is characterized as an innovative scientist and pioneer of sexology and who bears all the signs of the conventional cinematic hero (Petrakis 35). Kinsey can be viewed as a character in the tradition of the "cinema of sacrifice" (Taylor 17) since he exploits not only others but also himself, indeed, sacrifices himself to his life's work—"he died for our pleasure," as David Denby puts it (173). Adhering to conventional biopic plot structure, the film commences in medias res (Custen 151), that is, at...

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