The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (review)

Is it possible any longer to consider writing a history of modern sexuality that does not, in some sense, wrestle with the ideas of Michel Foucault? Just as a generation or two ago obligatory references to Freud would have seasoned any such history, Foucault's often cryptic writings and comments on the history of sexuality and his thoughts about "technologies of the self" have established a line of questioning that now serves as a center of intellectual gravity for research in the field: one might be drawn to it or feel compelled to resist it, but it is a force that cannot be ignored. So what then can the historian do with this Foucauldian research agenda?

Arnold Davidson's collection of essays is an attempt to answer this question. Davidson, like his counterpart Ian Hacking, is a proponent of Foucault's vision, a philosopher interested in the processes by which people and categories of people are historically fashioned. This places him out of step with most of his colleagues in the American philosophical community, who remain doggedly wedded to their ahistorical, analytic methods. Thus Davidson has always tended to find his most sympathetic audiences among critical theorists, historians of science, and cultural historians, and this is the circle of readers who are likely to get the most out of this book.

The title, The Emergence of Sexuality, is somewhat misleading, since sexuality is the central focus of only the first four essays and a brief appendix. The final four chapters have more to do with the subtitle of the volume, addressing methodological questions in historical epistemology. Still, there is a cohesiveness to the collection in that all the essays concern themselves with problems in the study of subjectivity and personhood.

Davidson's central thesis about sexuality is a familiar one to cultural historians: "sexuality" is a modern conception, first imagined only in the nineteenth century. He traces the development of the concept by examining the changing scientific and medical understanding of perversions. In early modern Europe, pathological anatomy considered sexual perversions to be diseases of the reproductive or genital organs. With the rise of neurology in the nineteenth century, perversions came to be seen as abnormalities of the sexual instinct. As it became increasingly difficult to find lesions to account for such abnormalities, however, perversions were conceptualized as purely functional deviations and viewed and treated at a psychological level.

Davidson is right to identify the functional understanding of sexuality as the pivotal moment in the modern history of ideas about sexuality. And no one's work demonstrates this point better than that of Richard von Krafft-Ebing. As Davidson argues (and Harry Oosterhuis has recently and most convincingly demonstrated), Krafft-Ebing's project of breaking down functionally deviant sexual behaviors into discrete categories helped literally to create new types of persons by understanding such conduct as reflecting the character of the individual. Whereas premoderns only spoke of the "pervert" as someone who turned from good to evil, Krafft-Ebing made it possible to speak of perversions such as masochism and sadism as distinctive ways of being a person. It is not, however, that earlier perceptions of the pervert as sinful were lost; rather, it is that they came to valorize modern psychiatric notions with moral values that have proven hard to disentangle from clinical conceptions.

This is a point Davidson makes convincingly in his most insightful chapter, "The Horror of Monsters." The history of monsters and teratology is a topic that has already been well covered by Katharine Park, Lorraine Daston, and others, but Davidson's innovation is his attempt to explore the history of the fear and disgust provoked by such prodigies. Comparing early modern with nineteenth-century representations of monsters, Davidson finds a common thread in that monsters have consistently been seen...