Clitoral Corruption

In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, American doctors gradually eased their way into a debate full of sensationalist and moralistic passions: the analysis and classification of sexual perversion. These physicians were well aware that they were perceived as explorers in a new and possibly dangerous field, and the potential for heroic service permeated their rhetoric: “the ‘mightiest of human instincts,’ [the sex drive] is too intimately related to the physical basis of human weal and woe for any physician prudishly to ignore any of its phases. … Upon the perfection of the reproductive apparatus depends the position of the animal in the scale of evolution” ( Kiernan 1891, 188). For these doctors, the study of human sexual behaviors and perversions was vital to the species. The examination of perversion generally took the form of increasingly fine classifications and divisions. ¹ A condition that emerged from the larger category of “perversion” was sexual inversion, homosexuality, conträre Sexualempfindung, or a variety of other terms designed to connote a sexual attraction between two members of the same sex. ² Most medical accounts of homosexual activity or inversion were of male subjects, but in the century's final decades, a growing number of female “inverts” made their appearance in the medical literature. In many accounts of female homosexuality, doctors mentioned its link to an abnormal, enlarged clitoris. The inclusion of this apparently minor characteristic was not a random occurrence, or merely evidence of a thorough medical examination. Instead, by attributing an enlarged clitoris to these women, doctors had access to a shorthand system of cultural meanings. Assumptions and associations surrounding the clitoris highlighted and reinforced connections between female inverts and members of other stigmatized groups—drawing on images of race, class, gender, and insanity, and indicating an individual's position on an evolutionary scale. Through these connections, doctors were able to further marginalize and exoticize the female invert or homosexual, and minimize the threat that the existence of such individuals might pose to broader beliefs about sexuality, gender, and intimate relationships.