Arnold I. Davidson's "Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality" from _The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts_

Arnold I. Davidson

The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts

Harvard UP 2001

Chapter Two: Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality

[n.b. this chapter is not on my comps list, but there is some useful information nonetheless and so I'll briefly poach from it here. It's a fascinating chapter, but I'll perforce, deal only with a few pieces of it.]

Davidson sees deep congruence between Krafft-Ebing's terms and those of our contemporary the DSM's discussion of "gender identity disorders" (36)

_____re "sex-change" and it's impossibility BEFORE

"So-called sex-change operations were not only technologically impossible in earlier centuries; they were conceptually impossible as well. Before the second half of the nineteenth century persons of a determinate anatomical sex could not be thought to be really, that is, psychologically, of the opposite sex. Anatomical sex exhausted one's sexual identity…" (36)  "Our current medical concept of sex reassignment would have been unintelligible or incoherent since it could not cohere with the style of reasoning about sexual identity."(36)

On one level this makes sense, right? If there was not yet a notion of the 'psychological self' current in the culture, then how could one be thinking of it, much less feeling that it was at odds with the body one has? But at the same time, I have to question whether it makes sense to assume that, until a term is defined, that what it refers to is impossible for thought. For example, Freud gives us the notion of The Uncanny, and part of the success of this idea - or so it seems to me - is that we have felt this, we have encountered this uncanny thing and now that Freud has described it so carefully, the word has taken off as a designation of this. Immediately below, Davidson will invoke 'dynamic nominalism' as a problematic of sorts, but if there is anything problematic about it, it would seem to be the suggestion that these 'types' of people exist only because of the effect of the nomination. But is that true of The Uncanny or is it not? Can we be sure?

So to bring this back to those who might feel mis-aligned when considering how they understand themselves and the body that they have. Whether or not the conceptual scaffolding was present to make sense of this in the way that Davidson is discussing, or not, can we truly feel that it is certain that no one felt this disjunction before such time as this particular way of speaking about it was coined? 

Gratuitous, but whatever - sue me.

___________the idea of "dynamic nominalism"

"This shift from the emergence of a concept ("perversion") to the emergence of a kind of person (the pervert), to return to an issue I have already mentioned, is underwritten by the doctrine that Ian Hacking has called 'dynamic nominalism.' Hacking argues that in many domains of the human sciences, 'categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two-way interactions between these processes.' Dynamic nominalism shows how 'history plays an essential role in the constitution of the objects, where the objects are the people and the ways in which they behave,' sine the human sciences 'bring into being new categories which, in part, bring into being new kinds of people.'" (57)

"Connected with this new focus is the face that nineteenth-century psychiatry often took sexuality to be the way in which the mind is best represented. To know a person's sexuality is to know the person. Sexuality is the externalization of the hidden, inner essence of personalty. And to know sexuality, to the know the person, we must know its anomalies." (63)

"Sexuality individualizes, turns one into a specific kind of being - a sadist, // masochist, homosexual, fetishist. This link between sexuality and individuality explains some of the passion with which psychiatry constituted the pervert. The more details we have about the anomalies of perversion, the better we are able to penetrate the covert individuality of the self. Only a psychiatrist, after meticulous examination, could recognize a real pervert. Or, to be more accurate, it was also thought that there was one other kind of person who could recognize a true pervert, even without meticulous examination: as if by some kind of hypersensitive perception, a pervert could recognize one of his own kind." (63-4)

"It's not that medicine simply took over the study of what has once been a part of morality; moral deviation did not merely transform itself into disease. Instead, the moral phenomenon of the perversity of the will furnished a point of reference that both opened the way for and provided an obstacle to the medical constitution of perversion."(64)

still from a Lucio Fulci film
One on Top of the Other [1969]
Google Image -> "Perversion"