EACs 56

Archetype

• What: Romantic-era idea (Goethe, Schelling) that all animals in a group share one ideal underlying form. The slides list radiata, articulata, mollusca, vertebrata.

• Why it matters: It’s the bridge from Enlightenment classification to evolution. Nature goes from a fixed ideal, to gradual development, to having a history (Darwin, Haeckel). It also rejects the mechanistic worldview of the Scientific Revolution.

Phrenology

• What: 1820s-era claim that the brain is the organ of the mind, divided into 27-40 “faculties” you could read from the skull.

• Why it matters: Spurzheim and the Phrenological Journal used it to say men’s and women’s mental powers differ by nature. It’s an early case of science giving biological backing to gender inequality, and it led to skull measurement.Evolution (Lamarck vs. Darwin vs. Haeckel)

Evolution (Lamarck vs. Darwin vs. Haeckel)

• Lamarck: Coined “biology” and argued for inheritance of acquired characteristics.

• Darwin: Origin (1859). The mechanism is natural selection, and Descent of Man (1871) added sexual selection (males competing for females).

• Haeckel: Recapitulation, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” An individual’s development replays its race’s evolutionary history.

• Why it matters: The 19th century was the “century of evolution,” and these theories were used to rank sexes and races. Haeckel’s version got applied to women, who were compared to children and “savages,” and to homosexuals, who were seen as arrested at a primitive stage.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing

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• What: Psychiatrist, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). He framed homosexuality as nervous degeneration, hereditary and congenital.

• Why it matters: It’s the medicalization of homosexuality (sin/crime becomes sickness). Because it was involuntary, he argued for treatment over punishment. He also signed the Reichstag petition.

Hottentot Apron

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• What: European accounts (Le Vaillant, 1798) of African women’s genitalia, called the “apron.” “Hottentot” is a colonial slur for the Khoikhoi.

• Why it matters: It shows sexual difference being racialized. European science used African women’s bodies as the “abnormal” contrast to define normal European femininity. It ties together race, sex, and empire. (Saartjie Baartman is the well-known case, but check whether your class covered her.)

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-95)

• What: Early German writer who argued homosexuals were a distinct class, urning (male) and urningin (female). He also theorized the bisexual embryo, a split between the sex of the body and the sex of the mind.

• Why it matters: Predecessor to Hirschfeld. Kertbeny coined “homosexual” in a letter to him (1868). He’s a key example of the shift from acts to identity

Magnus Hirschfeld

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• What: Berlin physician and sexologist who moved to Berlin in 1896. He founded the SHC (1897) and the Institute for Sexual Science (1919). He wrote The Homosexual (1903) and helped make Different from the Others (1919).

• Why it matters: He argued sex and sexuality are multidimensional (“intermediate stages”) and used science to fight for decriminalization. The Nazis burned his books on May 10, 1933. He’s the central figure of “trans-Atlantic crossings” because he inspired U.S. activists (Gerber, Hay).

Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (SHC, 1897)

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• What: The first homosexual rights organization, founded by Hirschfeld.

• Why it matters: It drove the petition to repeal Paragraph 175, signed by Krafft-Ebing, Einstein, and the Manns. The petition argued the law conflicted with science (homosexuality as a constitutional predisposition). It’s the model for using science for political change

Committee for the Study of Sex Variants (1935-41)

• What: New York committee, started after Jan Gay approached gynecologist Robert Dickinson (1934). It produced George Henry’s Sex Variants (1941).

• Why it matters: It’s the American, medical-psychiatric counterpart to Hirschfeld’s work. It shows the Atlantic crossing: European sexology reaching the U.S. through medicine, not activism.

Paragraph 175 vs. 51 (51 isn’t in your slides)

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• 175: German law criminalizing sex between men.

• 51: As far as I know, the clause on not being criminally responsible when acting under compulsion or impairment.

• Why it matters: These are two legal strategies. Fight 175 head-on (repeal), or argue homosexuals can’t help it and fall under 51, which fits the born-this-way, “don’t punish, treat” approach. Verify 51 against your notes.

Jorge/Marta (not in my materials)

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Sigmund Freud (slides cut off before this)

Sigmund Freud (slides cut off before this)

• What: Founder of psychoanalysis. He treated sexual desire as developmental and shaped by the psyche, not simply a hereditary defect.

• Why it matters: He shifts homosexuality from degeneration (Krafft-Ebing) to psychology. American analysts later made it a pathology to be cured. Send the rest of Lecture 5 and I’ll tighten this.

Essentialism

• What: Sexual categories are innate, biologically hardwired, natural human kinds.

• Why it matters: One side of the course’s central debate. It supports the argument that homosexuality existed across history (e.g., Ancient Greece), and it’s the logic behind the 1990s biological studies (LeVay, Hamer).

Social constructionism

• What: Sexual categories are social human kinds, produced by particular times and cultures.

• Why it matters: The course’s framework. Key names: McIntosh (1968), Foucault (1976), Weeks, Halperin, Vance. It argues “homosexual” (identity) is a modern invention, distinct from sodomy (an act). It’s about knowledge (epistemology), not causation like nature vs. nurture.

Capitalism (D’Emilio, 1983)

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• What: Argues homosexual identity emerged with capitalism, especially the free labor system, which let people live outside the family.

• Why it matters: The classic materialist version of constructionism. It refutes the “myth of the eternal homosexual” and shows behavior does not equal identity.

Cultural (vs. social) history

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• Social history: “History from below,” recovering patients’ voices (Conrad’s “medicalization of society”). Focus on hegemony and experience.

• Cultural history: Focus on power and representation, how meanings get made.

• Why it matters: It’s the methods shift behind body history. The body becomes a site where meaning is contested, not just a biological fact.

Veiling

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• What: Qajar Iran (1785-1925) debates over women’s veils and unveiling.

• Why it matters: Unveiling was tied to modernity (the veil as “backwardness”), but women held varied views into the 1920s-30s. The “modernist veil” argument is that desegregating men and women also worked to erase same-sex practices.

Amradnuma

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• What: An adult man who makes himself look like an amrad (a beautiful, beardless young man).

• Why it matters: Part of the male side of the Iran case. Europeanized dandies created sexual anxiety, and modernists had to forget the amrad figure. It shows how modernization reorganized gender and sexuality.

Local biology (Margaret Lock)

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• What: Bodies and biological conditions vary by culture and are shaped by local circumstances.

• Why it matters: It’s the middle ground between essentialism and constructionism. The review question asks what changes if you say “local culture” instead (hint: it loses the body’s materiality).

Natural history

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• What: Systematically naming, describing, and classifying animals, plants, and minerals to find the order of nature.

• Why it matters: It’s the Enlightenment’s way of ordering the world, tied to empire and to religious vs. secular worldviews. The course’s point is that it was “deeply shaped by gender ideology and sexual politics.”

Carl Linnaeus (1707-78)

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• What: Swedish botanist-physician. Systema Naturae (1735), binomial nomenclature, and an artificial system based on sexual parts (stamens = andria, pistils = gynia).

• Why it matters: The “heterosexualization of plants.” He read human marriage (“bridal beds”) into flowers, so nature appeared to confirm male/female complementarity. Contrast him with Buffon’s natural, secular, historical system.

One-sex / two-sex model

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• What: Laqueur’s argument. The Galenic one-sex model saw women as inverted, less perfect men (Vesalius’s drawings). In the 17th-18th centuries it gave way to a two-sex model of radical, complementary difference.

• Why it matters: It shows sexual difference is historically produced, and that the shift to “materialist” science set up republican motherhood and the Enlightenment idea that nature dictates social roles.