“Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body” by Siobhan Somerville

Outside of its main purpose, Siobhan Somerville’s piece “Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body” acts as a reminder that race and sexuality have been entwined for over a century. Even though I technically knew how race and sexuality are historically connected, Somerville addresses various ways in which these two concepts have characterized one another, and having it articulated in this way was surprising to me. Race and sexuality (and gender) inform one another in everyday life, and that is by design. In the late nineteenth century, the pursuit of scientific knowledge to support presiding ideologies of race-inspired sexologists to use similar techniques to invent the homosexual body. The resulting understanding of homosexuality mirrored, and also influenced, the attitudes towards black people as they pertained to the black/white dichotomy of race that prevailed at the time. During this time, there was an effort to prove that black and homosexual bodies were obviously and drastically different than “normal,” white, heterosexual bodies. Both race as a concept and sexuality as an identity were invented to bolster hierarchies that were newly emerging or already deeply entrenched into society. These inventions did not reflect the true reality of the world but instead reflected the attitudes of the ruling class at the time. In the late nineteenth century, these conceptions of race and sexuality were used as an explanation for the eugenics movement. I enjoy this piece just because it demonstrates how race informed the American understanding of sexuality and gender. The fates of racially and sexually marginalized people are tied and have been since the creation of these categories.

Somerville, Siobhan. “Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1994, pp.243–266.