ABSTRACT
What kind of historical object is “decency”? As scholars of sexuality have argued, its definition is intimately tied to the delineation of social boundaries: public versus private, masculine versus feminine, white versus non-white, and heterosexual versus not. Historically, dominant groups have raised their banner against the implicit assault of its constitutive opposite – the realm of the “perverse” – in response to the perceived erosion of its borders. The work of shoring up the assumed alliance between social order and sexual morality has thus targeted those individuals, bodies, and behaviors that muddle, with the forces of law prosecuting some offenders while slotting others for the intervention of medical and psychiatric experts. Yet, exhibitionism has long represented an ontologically “queer” category: the object of uneven psychiatric theorizing on one hand and ambivalent persecution on the other. First theorized in 1877 by French physician Charles Las?gue as compulsive, reluctant, and “degenerate,” the exhibitionist would become a paradigmatic sign of the times, condensing contemporary concerns about bodily display and masculinity, yet sliding easily into homophobic policing and surveillance. Freud would help to shift attention to a psychodynamic evolution, while stressing the inherent “immaturity” of exhibitionism. Exhibitionism was simultaneously active and passive, practiced by men yet feminine in its insistence on display, compatible with heterosexuality but somehow “queer.” This essay traces the evolution of exhibitionism alongside homosexuality as a psychiatric, criminological, and popular category in twentieth-century Cuba in the twentieth century as a psychiatric, criminological, and popular notion. Only sporadically brought under the jurisdiction of the medical field, the practices thereby condensed under the term “exhibitionism” thus saw themselves claimed by competing forces and interpretive paradigms, from including the varied “ofensas contra a la moral” policed by the state (“rascabucheadores,” “indecency,” public masturbation, and “pederasty”) to the “excessive” behaviors decried by elites (Afro-descendent religions, homosexuality, consumerism, “extravagance”). This essay thus reverses the usual order of emphasis, taking psychiatrization as less an overdetermined outcome than a historical effect in itself. Overall, I argue, visibility itself was at issue in efforts to police the public display of sexuality. This unease with looking, moreover, reflected back on the scientific-bureaucratic gaze and the populace it sought to administer.
