Capítulo II. El impacto de la teleserie Rompiendo el Silencio, al respecto de la
2.5 Impacto de la teleserie “Rompiendo el Silencio” al respecto de la violencia
Before focusing on the debates on homosexuality in Britain in the late nineteenth century, I will briefly introduce the first authors who originated and developed sexology in Germany because their work constitutes the main influence on British discourses. I will rely on a recent study by Heike Bauer, which combines the current scholarship on sexology with a particular focus on the important role played by translation in the transmission of ideas on the theorization of sex from the German context into Britain and Joseph Bristow whose study of effeminacy in late Victorian England I find very useful to understand issues of sexuality.2
1 Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994, 28.
2 Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology. Translation of Inversion, 1860-1930, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 and Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoeroticism After 1885, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
While looking at the reasons that made Britain particularly receptive of ideas on sexology and the contribution of women to such narratives, Bauer also makes some important points on the specificity of British society and its cultural domain, which helps us to understand the contextualization of the debates on sexology, or – as she prefers to call it – scientia sexualis.3
As Joseph Bristow defines it, “sexology initially designated a science that developed an elaborate descriptive system to classify a striking range of sexual types of person […] and forms of sexual desire”.4 The first theorization of sex, alongside a proposed taxonomy of sexualities, took place in Germany as part of a larger project aimed at describing a society in its process of transformation. In other words, as Michel Foucault has argued, it was an instrument through which the State exerted its control over the citizens. Bauer emphasises the close connections between the emergence of sexological ideas and the notions of nation, law and citizenship and she underlines that some of the fundamental contributions to the theorization of male homosexuality are located in the domain of “anti-governmentality” insofar as they aim to “resist dominant state ideology”. 5
The German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-95) is an example of such a resistance as his theorisation of male ‘inversion’ was born in response to the new ideas of nation and of a unified state of Germany in the 1860s and 70s and as a reaction to the legal system, which criminalized same-sex acts.6
Ulrichs created a detailed taxonomy of sexual types, which listed several sexual diversities and, at the same time, created a specific vocabulary based on a terminology borrowed from Plato’s Symposium. “Uranian love” was the name Ulrichs used to refer to same-sex love, from the Greek god Uranus, and the people who lived this love were called “Urnings”. He conceptualized the “invert”
– a term which gradually replaced “Urning” – as a third sex in which there was no correspondence between body and soul. His political agenda aimed at
3 Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 8.
4 Joseph Bristow, Sexuality, London: Routledge, 1997, 13.
5 Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 24.
6 Ulrichs started his career in Hanover where the Code Napoleon, which did not record any laws against same-sex acts, was inforce. After the invasion of Prussia, whose legal system listed criminalization of sodomy, he took part in the resistance against such a law. Bauer stresses that sodomy was condemned with imprisonment but also with a possible revocation of the civil rights, hence the close connection between the social body and national body. See Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 18-30. For further readings on Ulrichs see Bristow, Sexuality, 19-25.
fighting the criminalization of same-sex acts and he advocated the dissociation of sexual activities from sexuality, body from soul. His famous dictum “anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa” (a woman’s soul enclosed in a male body) explains his understanding of same-sex desire in terms of gender inversion and, according to Bauer, “reinforced the non-corporeal qualities of sexuality”.7
As Bauer suggests, the success of Ulrichs’ ideas for the theorization of same-sex desire lies in his use of Greek philosophy, which helped him to propose a binary model based on the idea of “attraction to an opposite pole”8 – a notion easily understood in a Western cultural domain also because it is endowed with cultural prestige. By borrowing from Greek philosophy Ulrichs was also creating a cultural discourse characterized by a transnational essence and at the same time was refusing the pathological nomenclature of same-sex relationships. If Ulrichs’ taxonomy originated in his activism, in the same years other discourses were produced from scientific sources in order to offer a cataloguing of both sexual activities and sexualities. The psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) reflects this scientific investigation in his Psychopathia Sexualis published several times with additions and revisions between 1886 and 1902.
Part of the present scholarship agrees in understanding sexology at its origins as an interactive discipline, one that involved a dialogue between patients and doctors,9 but that was also influenced by the political and social changes of that time. Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing took part in this wide process of shaping a cultural domain, which involved a continuous game of interaction between personal “experience and discourse”.10 Bauer expands this point and analyses how the translation of Psychopathia Sexualis into English is revealing of cultural influences and of “the nationally-specific formations of the scientia sexualis”.11 She argues that the first English translation by Francis Joseph Rebman of Psychopathia Sexualis “anglicised the German text”12 and she investigates what impact it had on the shaping of cultural debates in Britain
7 Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 26.
8 Bristow, Sexuality, 24.
9 Bauer mentions other scholars who share this idea, such as Lucy Bland, George Chauncey Jr., Lisa Duggan and Harry Oosterhuis. See Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 31.
10 Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 31.
11 Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 31.
12 Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 31.
about same-sex desire.13 Bauer interestingly notes that the translator’s choices of vocabulary correspond to his plan to adapt the German discourses to the contemporary British context. Thus the English text deploys concepts intrinsically connected to the scientific theories of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. For example, when the relation between sex and society is analysed, the German text’s idea of primitive society’s selection of the most beautiful of the opposite sex becomes in English a selection of the ‘fittest’, echoing Darwin’s theory. The concept of fitness was then adapted to serve Imperial purposes and linked to the development of an “imperialist masculine identity of the male subject”14 and then used to label those who lacked fitness as effeminate and degenerate, especially after Oscar Wilde’s trials in 1895.15
Another important adaptation of the original text concerns, according to Bauer, the influence of Protestantism, which led the translator to dismiss the sections exploring the bodily aspect of sexuality; while Krafft-Ebing insisted on an analysis of the individual, the English translation was more concerned with community. The discrepancy between the original text and Rebman’s translation according to Bauer “reinforces that the emergence of sexology as a scientific discipline was closely tied in to nationally-specific cultural discourses of the time”16 and underlines the essence of translation as “an authentic cultural production”.17
My reason for drawing attention to the first German theorists of sexology is to give an account of what was at stake when Symonds and Carpenter started their research and their theorization of same-sex desire in Britain. By following Bauer’s idea I want to stress the importance of the transferral of ideas as fundamental to understanding how the British sexological discourses were shaped. Bauer claims that scientia sexualis is “shaped as much by literary contributions as it is by the more familiar scientific and political contributions”18 especially in the case of Britain where the medico-forensic discourses which
13 She analyses the translation by Francis Joseph Rebman dated 1899 and based upon the tenth edition of the German text. See Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 35.
14 Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 36.
15 Bauer notes for example that the original mention of civilization in general becomes in Rebman’s translation a specific reference to the British spirit of colonization.
16 Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 41.
17 Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 42.
18 Bauer, English Literary Sexology, 8.
characterized German theories are somehow replaced by a more literary specificity. British sexology is presented in diverse literary genres such as poetry, biographies and memoirs and, according to current scholarship, it differentiated itself from “Continental sexology” for the absence of medico-forensic perspectives. In other words the framework for the debates on scientia sexualis was social and political rather than scientific.