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ANTI-ESSENTIALIST FEMINISM VERSUS MISOGYNIST SEXOLOGY IN FIN DE SIECLE VIENNA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2012
Abstract
As the foundational contributions of the fin de siècle sexual science movement to research on sexuality continue to be fleshed out, new avenues of understanding this important movement will continue to emerge. This essay uncovers the explosive intersection of early sexual science and strains of first-wave feminism in Vienna and charts the emergence of anti-essentialist feminism from this intersection. The first section offers an interpretation of how the discipline of sexual science emerged from medical criminology and how these origins contributed to the misogynist inflection of early sexology. The essay then chronicles the intersection of first-wave feminism and this misogynist sexual science. The central argument is that feminists’ encounters with sexual science dialectically produced an anti-essentialist variant of feminism. This microscopic interpretation of historical context, it will be argued, provides a new vista from which to view the larger tableau of modern European, especially Austrian, intellectual history.
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References
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17 “The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify, to punish.” Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1995; first published 1975), 184Google Scholar. Despite references to humiliating techniques of examination, Foucault's Discipline and Punish made no reference to Lombroso's criminology. This is remarkable, because the latter's science literally depended upon an examination of a captive audience, and the conservation and normalization of existing power relations via social science was explicit. Nonetheless, Foucault radically transformed the historical analysis of criminology in three ways. First, he shifted radically the focus of penology from the study of presumably abnormal criminals to an examination of how the law constituted individuals as correlatives of ideology, institutions, and classificatory social science. Second, he revealed that systems of social control are not merely external institutions but tropic mental frameworks that might be understood as internal penal codes. These codes are not autarkic. Their functioning depends upon our willing participation, a type of self-subjectification. Third, although Foucault would not have put it this way, his history of bio-power and revelation that social control is participatory created a vista of second-order observation facilitating both a degree of individual sovereignty and Promethean resistance.
18 Criminal Woman expanded greatly upon a section of Lombroso's more famous Criminal Man, trans. Mary Gibson and Nichole Rafter (Durham, 2006; first published 1876), 54–7.
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37 Möbius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, 42. Similar anti-feminist defenses of the “male-state” appear in Fuchs, Eduard and Kind, Alfred, Die Weiberherrschaft in der Geschichte der Menschheit, Bd. 2 (Munich, 1923), 383Google Scholar.
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61 Anderson, Utopian Feminism, chaps. 7–11 devoted to a taxonomy of “feminist philosophers.”
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68 Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, 101–2.
69 Mayreder, Zur Kritik, 41.
70 Ibid., 63–4.
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