Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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sexuality [Normalsexualis], homosexualism [Homosexualismus] is and was present always and everywhere among all races and climates and could never be suppressed even by the most bestial persecutions.”59 Kertbeny does acknowledge some level of cultural specificity in the forms that homosexuality takes, arguing, for instance, that homosexuals among more southerly peoples like the Greeks tend to prefer younger men, while homosexuals among more northerly peoples like the Germans are fixed on mature men.60
Kertbeny believes that the “homosexual,” with his (or her) natural, fixed sexual identity deserves the protection of the modern legal state—the kind of state, that is, that was emerging in Germany and Austria-Hungary. He praises the Napoleonic penal code for decriminalizing many sexual acts. Similarly, he extols Feuerbach’s 1813 penal code in Bavaria. For Kertbeny, the modern legal state had “no other goal than to protect rights.”61 He views homosexuality as a matter of human rights: “Human rights [Menschenrechte] begin with the human being, and the most immediate aspect of a human being is his body.”62 Like Ulrichs, Kertbeny insists upon the natural and innate nature of sexual desire in order to make a liberal claim for political rights.
As part of his liberal appeal for a modern state of law, Kertbeny takes on the religious forces that motivate the legal codes that persecute the people he describes as homosexuals. He puts religious prohibitions against homosexuality in the same category as “original sin, the devil and witchcraft,” all of which he consigns to superstition. For him, all these beliefs are merely the product of “the historical development of Judaism and Christianity.”63
Kertbeny’s vocabulary of the homosexual spread slowly at first. Herzer has uncovered some writings in Dutch that use the terms homo sexualisme, homosexualiteit, and homosexuelle verkeering in 1872. The words appear in a ten-volume German book, Scandal-Geschichten europäischer Höfe (Scandalous Stories of European Courts), translated into German by Daniel von Kaszony, one of Kertbeny’s acquaintances. Also a supporter of the Hungarian revolution, Kaszony mentions Kertbeny’s work on same-sex desire in three letters written in 1868.64 This suggests that Kertbeny’s vocabulary on sexuality enjoyed a certain currency among Hungarian nationalists.
Jonathan Ned Katz has usefully summarized the further history of the word “homosexual.” The term really took off when Gustav Jäger, a professor of zoology at the University of Stuttgart, published some of Kertbeny’s work on homosexuality in the second edition of his book Entdeckung der Seele (Discovery of the Soul) in 1880. Jäger, also known incidentally for his promotion of rational dress reform and the usage of natural animal fibers (in particular wool), appropriated Kertbeny’s vocabulary of “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” From there the term spread to other medical and sexological authors, including Krafft-Ebing. In the second edition of Psychopathia sexualis (1887) it shows up in some of the patients’ self-descriptions; Krafft-Ebing himself adopts the term in the fourth edition of 1889.65 The general public came to know the term through sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing. According to Hirschfeld, the word was in general circulation by the last decade of the nineteenth century.66
Although Kertbeny claimed medical standing and used that standing to legitimize his arguments, it is worth lingering on the political origins of the word “homosexual.” It clearly emerges out of a political demand for rights that has nothing to do with pathology or medicalization. Moreover, this demand for rights takes place at the creation of the modern nation state of Germany and the reorganization of the Habsburg Empire into the Dual Monarchy. Kertbeny’s concept of a natural, innate, fixed homosexuality that is deserving of equal rights protection in a secular liberal modern nation-state is intrinsically involved with the political developments taking place in Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Carl Westphal and the Invert
The final of the three authors who published in German on same-sex desire in 1869 is Carl Westphal, whom Foucault cites as one of the begetters of the modern homosexual in a frequently quoted passage from Histoire de la sexualité: “One must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted on the day that it was characterized—Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on ‘contrary sexual sensations’ can serve as its date of birth.”67 Foucault not only gets the year wrong, but he also cites the journal incorrectly. The article did not appear in the Archiv für Neurologie (Archives of Neurology), but actually the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten (Archives for Psychiatry and Neurology), which Westphal himself cofounded and coedited.68 Foucault’s point, however, remains valid—this depiction of “contrary sexual sensations” (or “sexual inversion,” as the term was often translated) became central in the depiction of same-sex desire.
Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833–1890) was a leading figure in the medical institutions of the time. Unlike the outsiders Ulrichs and Kertbeny, Westphal was firmly entrenched in the establishment. The son of a prominent physician, he began working in 1857 for the Charité, the famous hospital that Frederick I had established in Berlin in 1710. By 1869, he was director of the Clinic for Neurology there, a post he retained for twenty years. In 1868, he founded the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, which ran until 1983, when it became the European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, under which title it still appears. Although he didn’t name sexual inversion after himself, numerous other human medical features are named after him, including the Erdinger-Westphal nucleus (in the oculomotor nerve), Erb-Westphal symptom (an anomolous reflex caused by nervous system syphilis), and Westphal’s Syndrome (an inherited form of intermittent paralysis). Even from these phenomena, one can see that Westphal was primarily interested in locating the bodily origin of mental and nervous ailments. Westphal’s position at the well-established clinic in Berlin was unassailable and his work with somatic explanations of mental illness gave him the prestige of the hard sciences in which so many advances were taking place.
While the construction of Germany and Austria-Hungary is the political backdrop that stands out most significantly behind the interventions of Ulrichs and Kertbeny, Westphal’s influence should also be seen in the context of the developments in central European research. At the same time as Prussian military might became increasingly manifest and German cities both within and outside of Prussia became more and more prosperous, German universities began to reap the benefits of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s post-Napoleonic reforms of the educational system. German universities attained a preeminent status, especially in the sciences, that they would maintain until well into the twentieth century. The positive developments in the German university system affected Austria too, where the universities enjoyed enormous prestige in the second half of the nineteenth century. Within German psychiatry, the so-called Somatiker, who—as their name suggests—favored somatic interpretations of mental illness, had become dominant in the middle of the nineteenth century.69 The more philosophical legacy of Romantic psychiatry was set aside, at least until Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis could bring back a psychology less based on the body. In 1869, the world was prepared to listen to a leading German psychiatrist’s somatic interpretation of same-sex desire.
The full title of Westphal’s article makes clear its medicalizing and pathologizing agenda: “Sexual Inversion, Symptom of a neuropathic (psychopathic) Condition” (Die conträre Sexualempfindung, Symptom eines neuropathischen [psychopathischen] Zustandes). Unlike Ulrichs and Kertbeny, who allude to medical evidence while not completely accepting a pathological diagnosis, Westphal is convinced that certain forms of same-sex desire are a sickness. Admittedly, he denies that every single case of same-sex desire is pathological: “in order to prevent from the beginning all misunderstandings, I want to state expressly that it is not my idea to identify all individuals who commit unnatural sexual offences as pathological! I know very well that this is not the case.”70 He goes on to explain that, just as there are some pathological thieves and murderers among the many normal thieves and murderers, so there are some pathological sexual inverts among the many people who commit sexual crimes with members of their own sex. Clearly, he has no room for a nonpathological expression of same-sex desire that is also noncriminal.
As a somaticist, Westphal locates the roots of same-sex desire in the body. Sexual