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44 - Quantifying Sex

from How to Recognize the Queer Past before (and during) the Advent of Medicalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2024

Benjamin Kahan
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
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Summary

Quantification can be a double-edged sword. Converting lived experience into quantitative data can be reductive, coldly condensing complex thoughts, feelings, and actions into numbers. But it can also be a powerful tool to abstract from isolated instances into patterns and groups, providing empirical evidence of systemic injustice and grounds for collectivity. Queer lives and literatures have contended with both these qualities of quantification. Statistics have been used to pathologize queer desire as deviant from the norm, but they have also made it clear how prevalent queer people are, enabling collective action. Likewise for queer literature, which has sometimes regarded quantification as its antithesis, and other times as a prime representational resource. Across the history of queer American literature this dialectical tension between quantification as reductive and resource has played out in various ways, in conjunction with the histories of science, sexuality, and literary style. This chapter covers the history of queer quantification in literature from the singular sexological case study through the gay minority to contemporary queerness trying to transcend the countable.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Quantifying Sex
  • Edited by Benjamin Kahan, Louisiana State University
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
  • Online publication: 17 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108918725.048
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  • Quantifying Sex
  • Edited by Benjamin Kahan, Louisiana State University
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
  • Online publication: 17 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108918725.048
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Quantifying Sex
  • Edited by Benjamin Kahan, Louisiana State University
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
  • Online publication: 17 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108918725.048
Available formats
×