Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Irvine,
Jennifer Terry has written extensively on social, cultural, and scientific
discourses of gender and sexuality. She is the author of An American Obsession:
Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (1999) and co-editor of
Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (1997) as well as
Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular
Culture
In "Orders of Intercourse: Regulating Scopophilia at the Boundary of Sexology and
Pornography," Terry will explore the relationship between scientific discourses on
perversion and the politics of censorship. She will illustrate the scientific
study of variant sexual acts and identities (scopophilia).
As Terry describes her presentation: This lecture will illustrate how the scientific
study of variant sexual acts and identities is haunted by its proximity to illicit
practices of looking. Riffing off of Michel Foucault's theoretical insights from his
essay "Orders of Discourse," I will analyze the contrasting cultural institutions and
discursive avenues through which 'variant' sexuality has been represented at particularly
telling moments during the twentieth century in the US. Drawing on the travails of
Havelock Ellis, George Henry, Robert Latou Dickinson, and Alfred Kinsey, I note how the
invocation of 'objectivity' and 'rationality' has been used by sexologists to license a
penetrating gaze upon the otherwise illicit domain of 'perversion.' Yet, these men of
science were subject not infrequently to accusations of purience by socially conservative
moralists who relied upon anti-obscenity laws to prevent discourse about variant sexual
intercourse to be uttered aloud. In this manner, moralists, along with the scientists
whom then attacked, produced not one but many silences. As a defensive strategy, Ellis
et al. discursively situated themselves as detached and impartial in order to constitute
their scientific findings as legitimate. Consequently, even as they were dependent upon
the narratives and bodies of sex variants for their research, scientists' defense resulted
in casting other ways of representing variant sexuality into the shadows of illicit and
illegitimate knowledge. This especially included knowledge produced by queer people
themselves in languages of slang, double-entendre, and parody. However, the scientists'
strategy was not always effective in defending their published findings against censorship,
nor were they erotically unappreciative of the sexual variant people upon which they
focused their gaze. Underground accumulation and circulation of sex research amongst
'perverse' scientists and subjects indicates how the valence of scientific rationality
by no means precluded the appropriation of science for private and public pleasure-seeking.
This history reveals the tenuous boundary between erotics and rationality, and between
the desires of scientists and those of their objects of scrutiny.
Links to other 2005 speakers:
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