English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930 (review)

English Literary Sexology is an important contribution to fin-de-siècle cultural studies, the history of sexology, and contested histories of sexuality and gender more broadly. Heike Bauer offers a careful intellectual and historical tracking of the European cosmopolitan origins of what Michel Foucault called the scientia sexualis that marked a significant transformation in the ways sexuality emerged as a powerful strand in the version of sovereignty that is biopolitics.

Chapter 1, “Disciplining Sex and Subject: Translation, Biography and the Emergence of Sexology in Germany,” makes an interesting case for national variations in the production of a broader European consensus on sexology. Bauer’s careful tracking of the various revisions and translations of Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) usefully establishes how Krafft-Ebing’s text was anglicized. Not surprisingly, as an English language version of the complete works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs only appears in Michael Lombardi-Nash’s translation of 1994, the influence of Ulrichs is more difficult to track, and Bauer has to concede that most English sexologists “acquired knowledge of Ulrichs’ ideas in less traceable ways” (29).

Chapter 2, “How to Imagine Sexuality?: English Sexology and the Literary Tradition,” explores the generic and disciplinary messiness of English sexology—its concatenation of philosophical, political, artistic, and scientific discourses. This chapter documents John Addington Symond’s intellectual debts to Ulrichs and ponders the omission of explicit considerations of so-called female inversion in the figures it discusses: “It was only Ellis’s overtly sexological endeavours that added an explicit consideration of female inversion to English literary sexology rather then [sic] allow her a voice of her own” (81).

Chapter 3, “When Sex is Gender: Feminist Inversion and the Limits of Same-Sex Theory,” is the most original and powerful chapter in the book. In the discussion of three texts by fin-de-siècle women, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), and Edith Ellis’s Attainment (1909), turn-of-the-century feminism and sexology are brought in conversation with each other in ways that mark a rethinking of both these intellectual and social enterprises. “The feminist invert substantially complicates our understanding of the intersection between feminist, lesbian and sexological history,” Bauer argues, “shifting the focus from the making of sexual identities to the making of sexual theory itself” (110).

The final chapter on Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) celebrates Hall as an experientially grounded, theoretically sophisticated, and politically transforming voice of female inversion: “to identify Stephen Gordon as a female sexual invert meant to transport a concept that had largely been associated with the male sphere out of the medico-scientific realm, and to make it known that the female invert was strong, healthy and desirable” (127).

English Literary Sexology is strongest when considering the import of sexology’s privileging of the male invert—questioning why, for example, the section on female inversion is cut from the first English translation of Psychopathia Sexualis and considering how Hall’s Stephen Gordon comes to embody a kind of insurgent apotheosis of the discourse of inversion. The book, unfortunately, ignores a huge cluster of components in the emergence of English sexology—both literary and scientific. As early as 1988, Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien note that “the European construction of sexuality coincides with the epoch of Imperialism and the two interconnect” (“Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity: A Dossier” in Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, edited by Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford [1988], 106–07). All the English writers that English Literary Sexology discusses read widely in the anthropological literature of their time, and deploy racial analogies and engage racialized discourses of primitivity and degeneration in their representations of sexual inversion—male and female, stigmatizing and celebratory. Siobhan Somerville documents this web of connections brilliantly in a transatlantic context in Queering the Color Line (2000). Greg Thomas in The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power (2007...