LHMP #582e Linton 2022 Unmaking Sex Chapter 4

As usual, the chapter opens with an illustrative example: a real-life case that reflects the literary themes to be discussed. An aristocratic family line pins their hopes on a child who is first classified as female, then reclassified at adolescence when masculine characteristics emerge (both anatomical and behavioral). But the heir had undescended testicles and was understood to be incapable of reproduction. A marriage was arranged, a false pregnancy was created, and a baby was obtained to continue at the family line. The deception ended unhappily. The wife died “of a broken heart,” the child was later repudiated, and the intersex person at the center of the schemes dies of venereal disease—labeled “depraved and degenerate” by the doctor reporting the case.

Toward the end of the 19th century, the motif of intersexuality as a result of hereditary “degeneracy” enters both the medical and literary discourse around intersexuality. “Doubtful sex” became associated in the imagination with mental illness, intellectual disability, and an attraction to debauchery.

The chapter examines these connections in the context of Zola’s novel La curée. Doctors were no longer focused on determining “true sex” but on diagnosing the consequences for society of the presence of such persons. The image of hereditary degeneracy covered a wide variety of contexts, including sexuality, criminality, and poverty. These theories held that “degeneracy” was caused by a combination of heredity and societal factors. (This is a pre-Darwinian time when genetics was not well understood.) In Zola’s novel, the environmental factors included participation in homosexual relationships in school (by characters of both sexes).

Zola (in a different novel) describes a “hermaphroditism” that encompasses anatomy, sexuality, and behavior. A similar view is found in medical writing, where things such as hysteria and “sexual inversion” or traced to hereditary defects in the patient’s family.

The societal interest in intersexuality shifted from viewing it as an individual curiosity to one of a whole range of symptoms of the decline of civilization, alarming in particular in how it affected the birthrate. (France’s birthrate declined consistently between 1825 and 1939. While other European countries saw similar declines in the 19th century, they were recovering by the turn of the century.)

Zola was not alone in considering that single sex boarding schools were a major cause of homosexual tendencies, which then would lead to other forms of degeneracy. Medical writers also identified “innate” sexual inversion, in addition to this situational cause. [Note: We are in the middle of the development of sexology at this time, though the author doesn’t really touch on that larger picture—possibly because France wasn’t at the center of the sexology movement.]

One aspect of “degeneracy” theory was that undesired behaviors—however acquired—could imprint themselves on the person’s genetics and be passed to future generations. Thus the treatment of such persons, some suggested, should not focus on “curing” them and returning them to ordinary society. While many early German sexologists focused on destigmatizing variant sexuality, suggesting the creation of a “third sex” category, French authors took a more negative view. [Note: All of this was focused primarily on people assigned male.] French theory associated inversion with effeminacy, impotance, and intersexuality. This tendency contributed to sidelining French thought from the mainstream of sexology.

Within this milieu, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire stood out as contrary, arguing for the analogy of male and female anatomy (a “one-sex” view) and for the impossibility of determining a “true sex” in some doubtful cases. He also rejected “degeneracy theory” and saw no connection between intersexuality and mental illness or homosexuality. Although Saint-Hilaire demonstrates the variety of French thought, he was also very much in the minority.

In viewing homosexuality as involving mixed gender characteristics (e.g., “a woman in a man’s body”) the fields of intersexuality and sexual preference were intertwined within the larger concept of hermaphroditism.

As noted previously, the conflation of anatomy and behavior under “degeneracy theory” was reflected in an increasing interest by doctors in the psychology and family history of their patients, not simply their physical anatomy. Several case studies are presented that show how degeneracy theory distorted the analysis of intersex cases. Whereas previously the goal had been to establish a “true sex” and reassign the person to that category, now any anatomical ambiguity was treated as a symptom of a general mental and moral flaw, and diagnosis could mean exclusion from society entirely. The patient’s preferences and goals, rather than being taken into account, were treated as evidence of duplicity.

Beliefs that maternal experiences could be “imprinted” on a developing fetus meant that mothers could be blamed for any abnormalities in a child, including intersexuality—a motif that occurs in both medical writings and literature. [Note: this idea had a very long history, but was brought to the fore by a focus on family histories of intersex people.]

The rest of the chapter is deep literary criticism of Zola’s novel.

Epilogue: The Nineteenth-Century Roots of Contemporary Resistance to “True Sex”

This section discusses the history of medical interventions to “correct” intersex bodies and how 19th century attitudes and practices continued into the 20th century, including the increasing preference by doctors to withhold information from patients and their families. The chapter also covers how minority medical resistance to “true sex” ideas served to inform shifting attitudes within the 20th century.