The Medicalization of Sexuality in Twentieth-Century
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THE MEDICALIZATION OF SEXUALITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LESBIAN-IDENTIFIED LITERATURE by CAROL ANNE LITTLE Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (English) Acadia University Fall Graduation 2013 © by CAROL ANNE LITTLE, 2013 ii This thesis by CAROL ANNE LITTLE was defended successfully in an oral examination on September 6, 2013. The examining committee for the thesis was: ________________________ Dr. Diane Holmberg, Chair ________________________ Dr. Ann Braithwaite, External Reader ________________________ Dr. Lisa Narbeshuber, Internal Reader ________________________ Dr. Anne Quéma, Supervisor _________________________ Dr. John Eustace, Head of the Department __________________________ This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (English). iii I, CAROL ANNE LITTLE, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to reproduce, loan or distribute copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis. ______________________________ Author ______________________________ Supervisor ______________________________ Date iv Table of Contents INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE ............................................................................................................... 12 A HISTORY OF THE STUDY OF SEXUALITY CHAPTER TWO .............................................................................................................. 40 LESBIAN-IDENTIFIED LITERATURE A) 1930s / DJUNA BARNES NIGHTWOOD .......................................................... 45 B) 1950s / VIN PACKER SPRING FIRE ................................................................. 61 C) 1970s / RITA MAE BROWN RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE ........................................ 75 CHAPTER THREE .......................................................................................................... 86 CENSORSHIP – LITERATURE AND FILM CHAPTER FOUR ............................................................................................................. 95 CONCLUSIONS: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LITERATURE AND FILM, DSM CHANGES, AND TRANSEXUALITY WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED............................................................................101 v Abstract In this thesis, I explore the relationship between twentieth-century American lesbian- identified literature, medicine and psychology. My primary literary texts are Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1937), Vin Packer’s Spring Fire (1952), and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). I engage with theories relating to medicine, sexuality, and power by Michel Foucault, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and Judith Butler to demonstrate that the construction of homosexuality as a disease, as “other,” and as “deviant” throughout the twentieth century has had significant social and historical repercussions. I begin by examining the historical practice of medicalizing sexuality through the works of key philosophers, theorists, and medical practitioners, then move to explore the ways in which Barnes, Packer, and Brown incorporate and appropriate medical discourses of the time in order to highlight their inherent flaws and promote justice and equality for homosexuals. In addition to literature, I also briefly examine the ways in which other media, in particular films by director Alfred Hitchcock that feature queer protagonists, function within rigid censorship laws and amid pathologizing medical discourse. By studying both American literature and film from the twentieth century, I am able to take a broader view of the scope of authoritarian discipline and control over sexuality in the United States. 1 INTRODUCTION We have been the silent minority, the silenced minority—invisible women, invisible men. Early on, the alleged enormity of our “sin” justified the denial of our existence, even our physical destruction. Our “crime” was not merely against society, not only against humanity, but “against nature”—we were outlaws against the universe. Long did we remain literally and metaphorically unspeakable, “among Christians not to be named”—nameless. (Jonathan Katz Gay American History 1) The medicalization of women and homosexuality has influenced lesbian representation in twentieth-century American literature and film. The primary literary texts for my thesis exploring the connections between lesbian-identified literature and its relationship to medicine and psychology will be Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1937), Vin Packer’s Spring Fire (1952), and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). These novels represent a cross-section of publication periods with associated shifting medical theories and varying literary styles across the twentieth century. I will use these texts to demonstrate the ways in which “deviant” sexuality has traditionally been pathologized by the medical community, how this disease model is interpreted and appropriated in arts such as literature and film, and how it functions to negatively cast homosexuality as a burdensome illness. Leonore Tiefer identifies medicalization as a major social and intellectual trend whereby medicine, with its distinctive ways of thinking, its models, metaphors, values, agents, and institutions, 2 comes to exercise practical and theoretical authority over particular areas of life. Medicalization relocates activities or experiences (e.g., crimes, habits, or changes in physical or intellectual ability) from categories such as social deviance or ordinary aging to categories of medical expertise and dominion. (253) Through an examination of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American medical discourses and developing psychological theories relating to homosexuality in general and lesbianism in particular, we can trace trends that associate homosexuality with disease, criminality, and abnormality. As Michel Foucault argues in his lecture series from the 1970s, “for a long time, medicine, psychiatry, penal justice, and criminology remained, and to a large extent remain still today, on the borders of a manifestation of truth in accordance with the norms of knowledge and of a production of truth in the form of the test, the latter always tending to hide behind and get its justification from the former” (Psychiatric 335). So, if the medical, psychiatric, and legal communities deem homosexuality to be an expression of abnormality, illness, or of a mental defect, we can expect to see this category of frightening, possibly contagious, “disease” manifest in art and literature. The ways that we naturalize heterosexuality, and present it as the normal sexuality function to create a discourse that supports the disease model of homosexuality. Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between homosexuality and medicine relates to his theory of the panopticon by suggesting that medical discourse on sexuality can promote a form of internalized surveillance and discipline in which individuals police their own sexuality and the sexuality of others. This type of internalized surveillance is marked 3 within the normative American family structure wherein, especially in the twentieth century, a focus on the nuclear heterosexual family, its moral instruction, and “appropriate” division of gender roles is evident. In his lecture series on abnormality and psychiatric power, , Foucault refers to sexual psychopathology, and explores how psychological discourses can function to control sexuality. He writes that “psychiatric power is above all a certain way of managing, of administering, before being a cure or therapeutic intervention: it is a regime” (173). Viewed in this light, the psychiatric diagnosis of homosexuality as a disease is a way in which to discipline human behaviours whereby individuals are taught to desire to conform to the socially and medically accepted behaviours. Foucault furthers this idea of the psychiatric regime by explaining how, in a family, for example, we would see how the vigilant family eye, or, if you like, family sovereignty, gradually came to resemble the disciplinary form. The watchful family eye became a psychiatric gaze, or, at any rate, a psycho- pathological, a psychological gaze. Supervision of the child became supervision in the form of deciding on the normal and the abnormal; one began to keep an eye on the child’s behavior, character, and sexuality, and it is here that we see the emergence of precisely all that psychologization of the child within the family itself. (Psychiatric 124) Fear-motivated compliance functions as a deterrent from engaging in undesirable behaviours, especially when this type of binary view of the acceptable expression of sexuality is promoted within the family structure at home. It is more difficult for children, who live essentially helpless to the doctrine of their guardians, to accept their sexual 4 orientation if they are being taught at home that the way they feel is wrong or unnatural. Often, for example, if a young child’s family attends a religious ceremony, the child is also expected to attend and identify with the associated religious culture. So, when a homosexual child is raised in a family structure that outspokenly deems homosexuality to be undesirable, punishable, and diseased, the chances that the child will internalize these same opinions are high.