3 Scientific Racism
Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body, Siobhan Somerville, 1994
Key Ideas and Terms to Know:
- Accessibility vs inaccessibility (of bodies)
- Normal vs abnormal bodies
- Excess (of appendages)
- Natural vs unnatural
- Perverse
- Eugenics
- Miscegenation
Overview:
In her piece on scientific racism, Somerville discusses how science is employed as a tool to legitimize racism and homophobia. She provides an entry point for considering how gender, sexuality, and race (and racialization) intersect by centering the body and science as a site for analysis/critique. She offers “speculations on how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses of race and sexuality might be not merely juxtaposed, but brought together in ways that illuminate both” (246).
Somerville prefaces the piece with an important connection to Foucault and writes:
“As Michel Foucault and other historians of sexuality have argued, although sexual acts between two people of the same sex and had been punishable through legal and religious sanctions well before the late nineteenth century, they did not necessarily define individuals as homosexual per se. Only recently, in the late nineteenth century, did a new understanding of sexuality emerge, in which sexual acts and desires became constitutive of identity. Homosexuality as the condition, and therefore identity, of particular bodies is thus a production of that historical moment” (243-244).
Main Point 1: Comparative Anatomy
Anatomical investigations were driven by racial ideologies that already existed. Black women’s bodies were viewed as accessible and excessive versus white women’s bodies as pure and normal.
“The racial difference of the African body, implied Flower and Murie, was located in its literal excess, a specifically sexual excess that placed her body outside the boundaries of the ‘normal’ female” (252).
“Flower and Murie constructed the site of racial difference by marking the sexual and reproductive anatomy of the African woman as “peculiar’; in their characterization, sexual ambiguity delineated the boundaries of race” (252).
Main Point 2: The Mixed Body
Somerville explores the discourse surrounding mixed-race people and also the mixing of different races in sexual relationships.
“The new field of eugenics worked hand in hand with growing antimiscegenation sentiment and policy, provoked not only by attempts for political representation among African-Americans but also by the influx of large populations of immigrants” (257).
People “found in eugenics the scientific reassurances they needed” to affirm their assumptions about mixed race people. Historically, there was racist and “nativist” fear that white Americans would decline in population as they had children with people of color.
Somerville then argues that “The beginnings of sexology, then, were related to and perhaps even dependent on a pervasive climate of eugenicist and antimiscegenation sentiment and legislation” (258).
Main Point 3: Sexual “Perversion” and Racialized Desire
“I suggest that the structures and methodologies that drove dominant ideologies of race also fueled the pursuit of scientific knowledge about the homosexual body: both sympathetic and hostile accounts of homosexuality were steeped in assumptions that had driven previous scientific studies of race” (247).
“The concepts within racial science were so congruent with social and political life (with power relations, that is) as to be virtually uncontested from inside the mainstream of science” (250).
“Black was to white as masculine was to feminine”
“Using the medical language of perversion to naturalize and legitimize the dominant cultural myth of the black rapist, this account characterized interracial desire as a type of congenital abnormal sexual object choice” (262).
by Jane
Eugenics is a racist study of arranging human production. This views certain genetic characteristics as desirable- especially whiteness. This was developed largely by Sir Francis Galton, and has since been discredited since the Nazi party in the 20th century took on Eugenics doctrine in their genocide of Jewish people and other minority groups (Oxford Languages). This term is “loaded with historical significance and a strong negative valence. Its literal meaning – good birth – suggests a suitable goal for all prospective parents, yet its historical connotations tie it to appalling policies, including forced sterilizations, selective breeding programs in North America and Asia, and horrifying concentration camps and mass exterminations in Nazi Germany” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In this course, we REJECT all racist ideologies of “good breeding” or reproduction. We COMMIT to expand ideas of what families look like beyond a white family with a mother and father.
by Jane
Merriam Webster Dictionary defines Miscegenation as:
“A mixture of races”
“Especially: a marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race”
They leave this note under their definition:
“NOTE: The word miscegenation is associated especially with historical laws against interracial marriage. In the United States, such laws were declared unconstitutional in 1967.”
Oxford Languages defines Miscegenation as:
“Sexual relationships or reproduction between people of different ethnic groups, especially when one of them is white.”
Note: they include a “derogatory” warning for this term.
This term is important to know before reading Siobhan Somerville’s piece “Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body.” It seems intentional that Somerville used this word to describe sex between people of different ethnicities, as the piece is situated in a conversation around scientific racism. By using a term that has derogatory connotations, rather than writing “interracial relations,” Somerville intentionally unmasks how inter-race sex was looked down upon (in a big way).
Durba Mitra writes that “sexuality is a term used to describe the state of being sexual and sexual activity as an expression of sexual interest, especially when seen as excessive.” Sexuality can be used to express one’s specific desires, preferences, or orientation. Mitra expands this definition beyond what is deemed “biological” or “natural” by some and describes how the interdisciplinary field of knowledge that studies sexuality can push beyond white and heteronormative spaces, instead providing outlets for liberation and critique. Our class is called History of Sexuality because we set out to study this phenomenon, feeling, and term through classic Greek texts.
See Angela Davis, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Gloria Anzaldúa, for examples of works that discuss colonialism (see colonialism definition), exploitation, and history as they relate to feminist scholarship.
See core questions of our course on the welcome page: Is sexuality a modern construct that didn’t exist in the premodern past? Why does ancient Greece occupy center stage in so many artistic, literary, philosophical, and scientific explorations of sexuality? How might the study of sexuality in the ancient Greek world enable us to better understand our own experiences?