An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society / Edition 2

by Jennifer Terry

Overview

Drawing on original research from medical texts, psychiatric case histories, pioneering statistical surveys, first-person accounts, legal cases, sensationalist journalism, and legislative debates, Jennifer Terry has written a nuanced and textured history of how the century-old obsession with homosexuality is deeply tied to changing American anxieties about social and sexual order in the modern age.

Terry's overarching argument is compelling: that homosexuality served as a marker of the "abnormal" against which malleable, tenuous, and often contradictory concepts of the "normal" were defined. One of the few histories to take into consideration homosexuality in both women and men, Terry's work also stands out in its refusal to erase the agency of people classified as abnormal. She documents the myriad ways that gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities have coauthored, resisted, and transformed the most powerful and authoritative modern truths about sex. Proposing this history as a "useable past," An American Obsession is an indispensable contribution to the study of American cultural history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226793665
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/15/1999
Series:	Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology Ser.
Edition description:	1
Pages:	551
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Modernity and the Vexing Presence of Homosexuals
Chapter 2: Medicalizing Homosexuality
Chapter 3: The United States of Perversion
Chapter 4: Progressive Science in Search of Sexual Normality
Chapter 5: Fluid Sexes
Chapter 6: The Committee for the Study of Sex Variants
Chapter 7: Sex Variant Subjects
Chapter 8: Policing Homosexuality
Chapter 9: Disease or Way of Life?
Chapter 10: Parents, Strangers, and Other Dangers
Chapter 11: Fear of a World Conspiracy
Chapter 12: Discerning Allies and Enemies
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

By examining an array of medical and scientific texts published over the last two centuries, Terry (comparative studies, Ohio State Univ.) offers a detailed history of how it came to be that "Homosexuality, while socially stigmatized, has acquired a symbolic centrality in American culture, figuring as a scandalous transgression against which notions of normalcy, in a vast array of domains, are defined." Beginning with European scientific classificatory practices of the mid-1800s--which rendered homosexuals medically inferior--this "historian of effects" demonstrates the ways in which scientists shaped modern American ideas about the acceptable and the transgressive. She concludes with "a consideration of the legacy of etiological theories" of homosexuality. Terry's provocative account consistently goes beyond issues of race, class, gender, education, and politics to analyze the agendas of various groups and the implications of their obsession for all Americans. Recommended for subject collections.--James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

An encyclopedic history of how the American medical and scientific communities' perceptions of homosexuality constructed it as "abnormal" rather than as part and parcel of "the normal." Terry (comparative studies/Ohio State) confesses in her Introduction to an obsessive personality which stimulated her throughout the writing of this mammoth tome, and it may well take a similarly addled reader to wade through this text, its 80 pages of endnotes, and its 40-page bibliography. Obsessions, however, are not always without their rewards, and the reader who can match the author in zealous devotion to the topic will be amply recompensed. Through historical analysis breathtaking in its sweep and scope, Terry fractures scientific claims of objectivity in analyses of homosexuality to uncover the ideological and cultural agendas implicit in such work. Moving from such late 19th-century sexologists as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis to 20th-century figures like Alfred Kinsey, Terry deflates the cultural baggage which these scientists brought to their studies with her pinpricks of common sense and rational discourse. In her considerations of medical texts, psychiatric case histories, legal cases, personal narratives, and journalistic accounts, Terry exposes with patience (and, at times, with resigned humor) the ways cultural bias infects the supposedly objective arena of science. The anecdotes commonly underscore the demonization of the gay individual and community, making Terry's work itself a testimony to the importance of contesting cultural narratives. Terry is no dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants but a giant herself, towering over the misperceptions of past medical dwarfswith their insidious visions of homosexuality.

Kirkus Reviews