: Siobhan Somerville. “Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body” in Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality
The Link Between Racial Questions and the Question of Sex
Havelock Ellis’s provocative statement: “I regard sex as the central problem of life.” This was in the general preface to Studies in the Psychology of Sex, signaling a bold, almost audacious link between sexuality and broader social problems, including race.
Ellis argued that religion and labor problems were (in his view) settled or practical, but the problem of sex—and the racial questions that rest on it—stood before coming generations as the chief problem for solution.
The chapter asks: what did Ellis mean by “racial questions”? How is the relationship between racial questions and the “question of sex” to be understood within late 19th/early 20th century medical literature on sexuality?
Focus: “expert” literature on sexuality (physicians, sexologists, psychiatrists) as a key site for historical construction of heterosexual and homosexual identities; these texts are embedded within racial ideologies even when race is not foregrounded.
Method: close reading plus contextual analysis to trace how race and gender discourses buttressed or competed with one another in shaping notions of homosexuality.
Core claim: the structures and methodologies of dominant race ideologies fueled the pursuit of knowledge about the homosexual body; both sympathetic and hostile accounts relied on racial assumptions.
Goals: map how race and gender discourses interacted to produce models of homosexuality; not to prove a direct lineage from racial science to sexual models, but to show mutual reinforcement.
Historical claim: the emergence of medical/sexological discourse coincided with, and was shaped by, racial categorizations and segregationist ideologies in the United States and Europe.
The Emergence of Sexology in the United States
Sexology develops in conversation with late 19th‑century European developments (notably Germany).
Key aim: move the diagnosis/definition of sexual “abnormalities” away from juridical discourse and into medical science; thus behaviors once criminalized become medical or pathological issues.
Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) popularized a range of sexual “pathologies,” including same‑sex attraction; its US reception began with translations and excerpts such as the 1888 English “Perversion of the Sexual Instinct.”
The 1880s–1890s saw terms like Urnings/Uranism (Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, 1864), and the term “contrary sexual feeling” (Carl von Westphal, 1869) circulating in medical journals as ways to describe variations in sexual desire. Medicine, not law or religion, would adjudicate society’s response.
Havelock Ellis’s influence in the US: his work entered the American medical world in 1895 with a notable article on “Sexual Inversion in Women,” followed by Sexual Inversion (1900). Ellis sought to establish homosexuality as a congenital physiological abnormality rather than a crime, aligning with naturalist authority.
Ellis’s approach was hybrid: blending comparative anatomy (bodily measurements) with early psychological methods; he aimed to legitimize homosexuality as an abnormal but natural phenomenon.
Ellis’s work faced censorship and controversy in England (Sexual Inversion banned as “lewd, wicked, scandalous libel”) but found an audience in the US, including case studies supplied by James G. Kiernan (secretary of the Chicago Academy of Medicine).
Edward Carpenter and The Intermediate Sex (US reception 1911) offered an alternative model: invert as an intermediate type on a continuum between male and female; celebrated as a more nuanced, less degenerative view of same‑sex desire.
Freud’s psychoanalysis (circa 1910s) offered a contrasting framework: sexuality as part of everyone’s range rather than a discrete minority; a universalizing model that often challenged the minority‑pathology frame of earlier sexology.
Nonetheless, Freud’s views did not fully displace early sexology; universalizing accounts and minoritizing accounts coexisted and even reinforced each other, in part due to race-linked anxieties embedded in somatic theories.
The author emphasizes that sexology and race discourses were not neatly separable; even where race was not named overtly, sexual categories were structured by the racial ideologies of the day.
Pre‑Twentieth Century Scientific Racism
In the US, “race” was a contested term and could refer to geography, religion, class, or color; in 19th‑century science, it lacked a stable meaning.
Two major schools of thought on racial origins:
Monogeny: all races descend from a single origin; differences largely environmental; white supremacy still common within monogenist belief; e.g., Samuel Stanhope Smith argued whites were the original race.
Polygeny: different races are distinct species with separate origins; the “American school” of anthropology popularized polygeny (Morton, Nott, Agassiz); warned of racial mixture and degeneration.
Both monogenists and polygenists shared methods (empiricist, comparative anatomy, anthropometry) and assumptions that anatomy could reveal intelligence and behavior; biology used to justify social hierarchies (slavery, segregation).
Darwin’s Origin (1859) encouraged continuity between humans and animals; while this could complicate strict racial hierarchies, polygenists adapted Darwinian ideas to preserve racial hierarchies (e.g., blacks as an incipient or inferior species).
Evolutionary hierarchies reinforced by recapitulation: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; adult forms of “inferior” races aligned with earlier stages of evolution; such analogies linked race to gendered hierarchies (e.g., white male adulthood vs African American or female stages).
The recapitulation logic, already used by comparative anatomists (e.g., Vogt), would later underpin racialized characterizations of sexuality, by equating development with “progress” and by tying sexual maturation to evolutionary rank.
Anthropometric reading of bodies as texts: surface differences (skin color, skull shapes, brain mass) used to claim deeper differences in intelligence and morality; race science thus legitimized social orders (slavery, segregation, empire).
The broader claim: science during this era was deeply entangled with race and gender ideologies; physical measurements served as a vehicle for political and economic power, with “racial difference” readings often mirroring gendered expectations and biases.
Visible Differences: Sexology and Comparative Anatomy
Comparative anatomy provided sexologists with visual methods to locate difference; race and sex discourses shared the habit of reading the body for signs of difference.
Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (early US usage) explicitly used “Race” as a category; in the chapter on “The Nature of Sexual Inversion,” Ellis states: “All my cases, 80 in number, are British and American, 20 living in the United States and the rest being British. Ancestry, from the point of view of race, was not made a matter of special investigation”; but he lists national ancestries (English, Scottish, Irish, German, French, Portuguese, Jewish, etc.) and notes that race was, in part, biologically meaningful but less central than national origin.
The racial/indexical tie between race and sexuality is shown through two main lines:
First, the way anatomy (especially female reproductive anatomy) was used to classify sexuality; the female body was routinely examined for signs of inversion (with a focus on hymen, clitoris, labia, vagina) because female sexuality was considered more ambiguous and therefore more revealing of distinctions between “normal” and “inverted” states.
Second, the iconography and language of anatomy borrowed from racialized descriptions; early anatomical writers highlighted features such as exaggerated genitalia or “peculiar” differences as markers of racial difference and thus of sexual abnormality.
Flower and Murie (1867) on the Bushwoman (Khoe) and the focus on genitalia: the “protuberance of the buttocks” and “remarkable development of the labia minora” used to explain racial difference; the account also included secondhand reports describing multiple generations; these sources were used to argue for racial boundaries and sexual excess in African women, linking gender ambiguity to race.
The tradition of locating race in female sexual anatomy continued into sexology; sexological readers often used female anatomy as the primary diagnostic site, while human difference in male bodies was less central in such accounts.
Ellis’s case histories place heavy emphasis on female anatomy: the explicit, procedural listing of internal and external sexual organs for inverted women demonstrates how “normal” versus “abnormal” was read through bodily detail; the repeated use of terms like “normal” and “irregularity” signals the evaluative gaze that marks difference as pathology.
The iconography of anatomy—particularly the clitoris—became a favored site for racialized readings of difference:
Some post‑19th century medical literature argued that African American and lesbian bodies displayed an abnormally prominent clitoris; this language tied sexual difference to racial difference and to judgments about civilization and progress.
The “cult of True Womanhood” framed white women's sexuality as pure and controlled, while racialized readings suggested African American women’s sexuality was more accessible or “promiscuous.”
Darwinian progress rhetoric was used to explain differential sexual development: greater sexual differentiation was equated with evolutionary progress; inversions or deviation from this path were cast as throwbacks or less evolved states.
The broader implication: sexology used comparative anatomy not only to describe sexuality but to naturalize racial and gendered hierarchies; the body served as a measurable, legible text for social order.
Eugenics, Sexology, and the Mixed Body
Eugenics defined by Francis Galton (Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, 1883) as “the cultivation of the race” and “the science of improving stock”; eugenics sought to regulate reproduction to favor certain lines of blood.
In the United States, eugenics fused with race hygiene and antimiscegenation sentiment; fears of white decline (white “race suicide”) drove policies and popular culture that sought to control heredity and reproduction.
The mulatto became a focal figure: mixed race as a site of anxiety (both as a real population and a symbolic object) and as a tool in arguments about purity, heredity, and social order.
Key eugenic voices and figures:
Edward Byron Reuter’s The Mulatto in the United States (a quantitative, comparative study of the mulatto population) used racial taxonomy to argue for boundaries between white and Black ancestry.
Charles Davenport and other leading eugenicists argued that miscegenation threatened white “purity” and produced socially inferior or unstable populations.
In sexology, eugenics provided rhetoric and policy language for pathologizing homosexuality; statements such as homosexuality being a sign of degeneracy tied sexual difference to social reproduction concerns.
William Robinson, a prominent sexologist, used eugenic rhetoric in his 1914 article My Views on Homosexuality, describing homosexuality as a pathological deviation that threatens the race.
Ellis’s engagement with eugenics is notable: he wrote on race regeneration and participated in eugenic organizations; he even corresponded with Galton about incorporating eugenic sensibilities in his work. This links Ellis’s “racial questions” in sex to broader racial science and policy agendas.
The terminology of sexuality itself reflected anxieties about mixed heritage: the term homosexual was celebrated as a common descriptor but was viewed with unease by some scholars who wanted a less racially loaded or mixed-origin term (Ellis and Carpenter’s debates over “homosexual” vs. “inversion” or “intermediate sex”).
The overall point: the early emergence of sexology did not occur in a vacuum; it grew within a climate that was deeply saturated with eugenic thinking,miscegenation anxieties, and a broader program of racial legislation and segregation.
The intertwining of race and sexuality also produced rhetorical tools that could be used to legitimize or challenge social norms: some writers used race‑based metaphors to argue for a continuum of sexuality (as with Mayne and Carpenter’s “intermediate sex”) while others used mixed-race imagery to reinscribe pathologies on nonwhite bodies.
Evolving language around sexuality: the term “homosexuality” itself emerged from a heterogeneous set of terms (Ulrichs’s Uranian, Westphal’s contrary sexual feeling); Ellis, Carpenter, and others debated terminology because they sought to present a “colorless” taxonomy even as the mixed origins of the term highlighted the racial tensions embedded in the vocabulary.
Sexual Perversion and Racialized Desire
By the early 20th century, models of sexuality increasingly emphasized sexual object choice (who one desires) rather than inversion alone; this shift coincided with changes in scientific theories of race.
Boas and others challenged strictly biological models of race, but even as biological claims weakened, racialized thinking persisted in cultural belief; scientists sometimes tied interracial desire to pathological readings of sexuality.
Margaret Otis (1913) analyzed interracial desire in the context of all‑girls reform schools and boarding schools; her article A Perversion Not Commonly Noted linked interracial and same‑sex desire, a fusion of racial difference with sexual transgression.
Otis observed “love‑making between the white and colored girls” and described how reform institutions responded with segregation and surveillance.
Her line of argument: “The difference in color, in this case, takes the place of difference in sex” suggests race can substitute for sex as the principal marker of difference in erotic relations; this is a telling articulation of how racial difference could organize perceptions of sexuality in a segregated world.
The Otis account illuminates how color lines were eroticized in early 20th‑century culture; public panic about interracial sexual mobility intersected with the legal and political structure of segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson era).
The race‑and‑desire linkage also appears in discussions of inter‑racial erotic fantasies and racialized gender roles (reconfiguring masculinity/femininity through racialized optics).
Critics like Ruby Rich have suggested that racial difference can operate similarly to gender difference in structuring lesbian desire (e.g., butch/femme paradigms), though scholars like Biddy Martin caution that race also helps secure specific gendered roles within lesbian networks.
Nochlin’s commentary on Orientalist and racialized iconography points to visual cultures that often sexualized racial difference; Otis’s account mirrors a broader pattern in which racial difference served as a visible signifier of transgressive sexuality.
The racialized reading of interracial sexual behavior in medical literature extended into other areas, such as the 1903 Southern physician’s claim that interracial desire was a “perversion” that could be framed as congenital or naturalized through evolving models of sexual orientation; this rhetoric was used to uphold racial hierarchies by pathologizing nonwhite sexual agency.
Overall: the early 20th century tied interracial impulse to sexual perversion in ways that reinforced segregationist norms while also prompting debates about the spectrum of sexuality; the models of desire that emerged (interracial, same‑sex) were read through a racialized lens, with desire itself becoming a field of bureaucratic control and scientific scrutiny.
The Visual Turn: Cinema and the Visualization of Race and Sex
The rise of cinema as a new visual technology intersected with sexology and racial science in powerful ways.
In 1896, the public exhibitions of Thomas Edison’s vitascope projected motion pictures onto a white screen in a darkened hall, bringing visual culture increasingly into the everyday life of Americans.
The text suggests that cinema would magnify the visibility of racial and sexual identities, reinforcing or reinterpreting the scientific emphases on embodied differences. In other words, as cinema trained eyes to read bodies on screen, medical and sexological discourses gained a new audience for their body‑centered claims about race and sexuality.
The author foreshadows that the next chapter will explore how cinema and popular culture reshaped public understandings of race and sexuality, making scientific categories more legible and more contested in everyday life.
Three Broad Models Linking Race, Sexology, and Homosexuality (Synthesis of the author’s framework)
Model A: Comparative anatomy as method and iconography
Race difference is read through visible anatomical differences (e.g., skulls, brain size, sexual organs). Sexology borrows this logic to identify physical markers that allegedly distinguish homosexual bodies from heterosexual bodies.
The body acts as a legible text: surface features are read as indicators of deeper psychological or sexual dispositions; race provides a template for what differences mean.
Model B: The mixed body as a paradigm for sexual inversion
The nonwhite body (mulatto) and the nonheterosexual body (invert) become analogs in a system of reading difference; each stands as evidence of a larger spectrum of deviation from white, heterosexual norms.
The mulatto figure bridges racial categories and is used in arguments about evolution, heredity, and biological variety; inversions are similarly read as “between” states within a spectrum rather than as discrete disorders.
Model C: Perversion as a political and reproductive category
Interracial and same‑sex desires are linked within the concept of sexual perversion; “unnatural” desire becomes a site where race and sexuality converge, enabling justifications for segregation, marriage laws, and eugenic interventions.
This model emphasizes how perversion discourse is deployed to regulate not just individuals but the social order with regard to race, reproduction, and citizenship.
Intellectual and Ethical Implications
The unity of race and sexuality in late 19th/early 20th‑century science contributed to the pathological framing of both nonwhite bodies and non‑heterosexual desires, reinforcing segregation and racial hierarchies.
The reliance on anatomy and physiology to classify moral categories (normal/abnormal) reveals how medical knowledge can function as social control rather than neutral truth finding.
The intertwining of eugenics and sexology shows how concerns about heredity and reproduction were mobilized to justify coercive policies (sterilization, immigration restriction, anti‑miscegenation laws).
Freud’s universalizing claim that sexuality is a dimension of everyone’s life coexisted with and sometimes countered the minoritizing medical models; the tension between universal and minority models mirrored broader debates about race and difference.
The diffusion of these ideas into popular culture (new media, sensational reporting, and eventually cinema) meant that scientific rhetoric about race and sexuality moved from the clinic into everyday imagination, shaping social attitudes and public policy.
The ethical takeaway for today: historical study reveals how “expert” talk about sexuality can be entangled with racial ideology; critical scrutiny helps us distinguish empirical inquiry from ideological project, and it cautions us against equating visibility with truth in measurements of human difference.
Key People, Terms, and Concepts to Remember
Ellis, Havelock: central figure in early sexology; author of Sexual Inversion (1900) and influential articles (e.g., 1895 US publication on Sexual Inversion in Women).
Krafft-Ebing: Psychopathia Sexualis (1886); introduced terms like “perversion” and discussions of diverse sexual behaviors; US reception in the late 1880s.
Ulrichs: Urning/Uranism; early models of difference in sexual orientation.
Westphal: “contrary sexual feeling”; influences later sexology terminology.
Carpenter: The Intermediate Sex; argued for a continuum of gender; emphasized nonpathological interpretations of same‑sex desire; offered a counter‑narrative to the pathologizing frame.
Freud: psychoanalytic perspective; emphasized sexuality as a universal dimension, not a discrete minority; shaped debates about congenital vs. acquired homosexuality.
Galton: founder of Eugenics; framed race improvement through selective reproduction; linked to race hygiene and miscegenation debates.
Davenport, Morton, Nott, Agassiz: polygeny and “American school” racial theories; supported hierarchical racial classifications.
Otis, Margaret (1913): A Perversion Not Commonly Noted; linked interracial desire and lesbianism within reform schools; famous for the line about color substituting for sex.
Mayne (Xavier Mayne): pseudonym for Edward Stevenson; used racial analogies to describe “intermediate” sexual types.
Flower & Murie (1867): dissection of a Bushwoman; early racialized anatomical depiction; linked to Hottentot Venus traditions.
The mulatto figure: a contested symbol of mixed heritage used in eugenics and sexology to discuss difference, heredity, and social order.
The “cult of True Womanhood”: racialized gender ideology shaping the expectations of white women’s sexuality.
Notable Dates, Concepts, and Formulations (cash‑out as references)
: Labouchere Amendment in England; criminalized “gross indecency,” shaping later sexology debates.
: Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis; a foundational text for sexology and clinical taxonomy of sexual “pathologies.”
: English translation of Krafft-Ebing’s work in the US context.
: English translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis; intro of sexology into English-English medical discourse.
: Ellis’s “Sexual Inversion in Women” published in the US; key early American case studies.
: Sexual Inversion (volume 1 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex) published in the United States; a seminal (though contested) text in sexology.
: Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas circulate in the United States; a competing framework to sexology.
: Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex; US reception as an alternative to inversion‑based models.
: Otis, Margaret; A Perversion Not Commonly Noted; link between interracial and same‑sex desire in all‑girl institutions.
: William Robinson’s My Views on Homosexuality; explicitly connects homosexuality to degeneracy and race concerns.
: Second/expanded edition discussions of Sexual Inversion; continued debates about terminology and classification.
: Medical literature claims about clitoral anatomy in Black women; example of ongoing racialized genitalia discourse.
Connections to Earlier Lectures and Real‑World Relevance
The chapters echo a broader historiography that situates the “invention” of heterosexual/homosexual identities within medicalized discourses tightly woven with race and gender ideologies, rather than as purely neutral scientific findings.
The analysis shows how scientific, legal, and cultural structures reinforced segregation and social control while also producing alternative visions of sexuality (e.g., intermediate types) that contested rigid categories.
In contemporary context, the chapter offers a methodological warning: do not take medical/psychiatric language about sexuality at face value; examine how racial ideologies shaped what counts as evidence, what counts as normal, and what counts as pathological.
The text also foreshadows later debates about representation and the politics of knowledge production, especially around how media (cinema) and popular culture disseminate expert claims about race and sexuality.
Summary Takeaways
The emergence of sexology in the United States did not occur in a social vacuum; it was deeply entangled with contemporary racial ideologies and eugenic thinking.
Three interlocking modes linked race and sexuality: (1) anatomical/iconographic readings of the body; (2) the use of mixed‑race concepts (mulatto) as analogies for sexual ambiguity; (3) the framing of interracial and same‑sex desire as perversion, with implications for social policy and racial control.
The shift from inversion to sexual object choice as the organizing concept of sexuality in the early 20th century happened within a climate of evolving racial theories (from polygeny toward more nuanced, but still racially inflected, models).
Visual culture, especially cinema, would later magnify these dynamics by making racial and sexual identities more visible and more contestable in public life.