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The Evolution of Darwinian Sexualities BJHS Themes (2021), 1–23 doi:10.1017/bjt.2021.7 RESEARCH ARTICLE The evolution of Darwinian sexualities Erika Lorraine Milam* History Department, Princeton University *Corresponding author: Erika Milam, Email: [email protected] Abstract Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man was suffused with questions of courtship, mating and sex. Following in his footsteps, biologists throughout the twentieth century interrogated the sexual behaviour of humans and animals. This paper charts the fate of evolutionary theories of sexuality to argue that – despite legal and social gains of the past century – when biologists used sexual selection as a tool for theorizing the evolution of homosexual behaviour (which happened only rarely), the effect of their theories was to continuously reinscribe normative heterosexuality. If, at the end of the nineteenth century, certain sex theorists viewed homosexuality as a marker of intermediate sex, by the late twentieth a new generation of evolutionary theorists idealized gay men as hyper- masculine biological males whose sexual behaviours were uncompromised by the necessity of accommodating women’s sexual preferences. In both cases, normative assumptions about gender were interwoven with those about sexuality. By the twenty-first century, animal exemplars were again mobilized alongside data gathered about human sexual practices in defence of gay rights, but this time by creating the opportunity for naturalization without recourse to biological determinism. Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex was suffused with questions of courtship, mating and sex.1 Darwin’s reconstruction of animal history positioned ani- mals as vital sources of information on the development of the sexes and the mechanisms of courtship. Sexologists easily combined Darwinian with Freudian perspectives whereby homosexual desire was often rendered a sign of sex intermediacy.2 By interpreting 1 Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd edn, London: John Murray, 1874; Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. See also Ross Brooks, ‘Darwin’s closet: the queer sides of The Descent of Man (1871)’, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society (2021) 191, pp. 323–46. 2 Sigmund Freud, ‘III. The general theoryof the neuroses’,inFreud,A General Introductionto Psychoanalysis,NewYork: Boni and Liveright, 1920, pp. 309–402. On sexologists who would position homosexuality within gender variance (e.g. Karl Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld) see Alice Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998; Vernon Rosario, Homosexuality and Science: A Guide to the Debates, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002; Ralph Leck, Vita Sexualis: Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. More on sexologists like Adolf Brand, who resisted this association, can be found in Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, New York: Knopf, 2014. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosexual Desire, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985; John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of Science. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 23 Sep 2021 at 15:40:47, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2021.7 2 Erika Lorraine Milam phylogeny as analogous to ontogeny, scientific theories of sexual development reinforced the moral authority of nature as a guide to normative sexual identity and desire.3 As sexuality came under scientific and medical scrutiny, homoerotics subtended het- erosexuality, rendering desire directed towards a member of the same sex a precursor to the capacity for normative gendered identity later in life. In the words of historian Jennifer Terry, ‘homosexual men were imagined as embodying the worst of both savages and women; while they were insatiable in their sexual pursuits and frivolously emotional, they lacked the modesty of bourgeois women and the primal strength of savage men’.4 Evolutionary theory served rarely as a hopeful intellectual resource for sex radicals at the turn of the last century and was more often invoked in concerns over civilizational degeneration.5 Psychically, homoeroticism was supposed to disappear as it matured into heterosexuality; evolutionarily, homosexuals were fated for extinction.6 Over a century after Descent of Man, Joan Roughgarden and colleagues sparked a flash of angry letters to the editors of Science by claiming that Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection could not provide an explanation for the origin of sexual differences because it assumed binary, competing sexualities in animals.7 Sexual selection, they contended, was fatally flawed; their critics demurred. Roughgarden’s hope of constructing a more inclu- sive evolutionary account of sexuality, without relying on the sexual stereotypes found in Darwin’s ‘second’ theory, caught the attention of science studies scholars, especially those attentive to questions of sex and gender norms.8 This paper charts the fate of evolutionary theories of homosexuality from Darwin to Roughgarden, and their entanglement with gendered sexual norms as theorized through animal models of human sexuality. I argue that when evolutionary biologists in the twen- tieth century used sexual selection as a tool for theorizing the evolution of homosexual behaviour – which happened only rarely – the effect of their theories was to continuously reinscribe normative heterosexuality.9 As literary scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1988; Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (eds.), Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995; Vernon A. Rosario (ed.), Science and Homosexualities, New York: Routledge, 1997; Edward Stein, The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999; Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002; Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 3 E.g. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (eds.), The Moral Authority of Nature, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004; Jeannette Eileen Jones and Patrick Sharp (eds.), Darwin in Atlantic Cultures: Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, New York: Routledge, 2010. 4 Terry, op. cit. (2), p. 35. 5 I borrow the term ‘sex radicals’ from Anna Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality, London: Routledge, 2008. On the appropriation of sexual selection by feminists see Kimberly Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. 6 Jeff Nunokawa, ‘In memoriam and the extinction of the homosexual’, ELH (1991) 58, pp. 427–38. 7 Joan Roughgarden, Meeko Oishi and Erol Akčay, ‘Reproductive social behaviour: cooperative genetics to replace sexual selection’, Science (2006) 311, pp. 965–9. 8 Erika Lorraine Milam, Roberta Millstein, Angela Potochinik and Joan Roughgarden, ‘Sex and sensibility: the role of social selection’, Metascience (2011) 20, pp. 253–77. See also Anne-Fausto Sterling, ‘The five sexes: why male and female are not enough’, The Sciences (1993) 33, pp. 20–5; and Sterling, ‘The five sexes, revisited’, The Sciences (2000) 40, pp. 18–25. 9 Here I analogize homosexuality to race, following Barbara Jeanne Fields, ‘Slavery, race and ideology in the United States of America’, New Left Review (1990) 181, pp. 95–118, in which she argues that societies reuse con- cepts like ‘race’ only as long as they continue to have social power. Rather than seeing ideas about sexuality past as constraining the present, this framework urges us to see the present as a moment in which we can shape the future by refusing the politics of the past. See e.g. Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, New York: Dutton, 1995. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 23 Sep 2021 at 15:40:47, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2021.7 BJHS Themes 3 elegantly articulated, of the four sexual preoccupations identified by Michel Foucault as critical to understanding Victorian sensibilities (the masturbating child, the hysterical woman, sex in marriage and the medicalization of perversions), the one with real staying power turned out to be the medicalization
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