Feminine Sexual Pathologies

Abstract

Th e a i m o f t h i s s p e c i a l i s s u e is to produce a set of detailed studies of so-called feminine sexual pathologies over the course of the long nineteenth century and its immediate prehistory and to explore a range of genres and media, including literary, medical, and philosophical texts. Just what conditions or practices came to be counted as pathology is, of course, the object of critical attention throughout. The collection highlights the complex and often intermittent history of “pathologies” such as hysteria, frigidity, nymphomania, lesbianism, and erotomania as well as treating the heavily gendered discourses surrounding “perversions” such as sadism and masochism and delinquent behaviors such as murderousness. The shift in perception of “abnormalities” from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century is an underlying concern of this volume. First, the eighteenth century entertained wide discrepancies in discourse according to generic locality: medical writing often presented graphic descriptions of such distempers as nymphomania accompanied by dire warnings, while libertine fiction typically sought to present unusual sexual behaviors as diverting or amusingly eccentric matters of “taste,” able to be momentarily transformed in the course of erotic contests. The nineteenth century, by contrast, tended to produce a more narrowly convergent understanding: such behaviors were fixed into the categories of sexual perversions, as Michel Foucault famously argued in 1976. 1 Second, eighteenth-century accounts of pathology were often bound up with material understandings of human physiology as constitutionally natural (that is, based on humoral differences between bodies), whereas the nineteenth century witnessed the adoption of medical and philosophical theories of instinct and then of desire to account for these sexual behaviors. (Caroline Warman’s article lays the groundwork for a discussion

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