Conclusion: Alien Mirrors
Even the sharpest, the most piercing gaze will be incapable of calculating its angles of incidence, for the eye remains captive in the world of the visible and does not embrace the totality of viewpoints and their harmonious organization. 1
-- Luce Irigaray
By reading the state of medicine in the early twentieth century through the work of Robert L. Dickinson, we can see that medicine had a vested interest in the regulation of sexuality. Dickinson wanted to protect and promote the family through the management of sexuality. The marriage counselor, a physician, was to examine the young couple to make sure they were fit for marriage and parenthood. Dickinson wanted medicine to directly manage marriage and maternity. According to him, marriage counselors would decide if a potential marriage was valid on grounds of eugenics and sexual adjustment. If the couple did not live up to his standards of “marital health,” then the marriage counselor was left with two options by Dickinson. He or she would either try to correct the problem through sexual reeducation or by recommending that the wedding not proceed.
The family, in the logos of Dickinson’s science, assumed a transhistorical position. The family was constructed as biological destiny. It was seen to naturally flow from the female body. By maintaining a strong connection between the family, the natural, and the feminine, Dickinson believed that medicine had scientific grounds for the medical management of desire. The family, seen as the culmination of feminine sexual drive, was a problem that could be resolved by medical experts principally because it was rooted in the body. If medical experts did not intervene to preserve the family through the regulation of gender and sexuality, Dickinson believed the medical profession held the responsibility for the consequences of family instability, whatever those consequences could be.
The role of the marriage counselor was to facilitate the (re)discovery in women of their “natural” desire to get married and have children. What was crucial here was the performance of gender. Dickinson believed men and women had different roles in the family that stemmed from the different “natures” of men and women. Men needed to have authority the over domestic sphere. Women needed to make the home a sanctuary for her husband and children. The enforcement of strict gender roles became a medical technique in Dickinson’s work. Women were the main focus of his gender regulating discourse, but of course they had repercussions for the men as well. In the sexual sphere, Dickinson’s vision of health relied upon maintaining a patriarchical family structure.
Dickinson’s ideas about family were not new. Both Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing had similar assumptions about gender and family which permeated their respective works. Nonetheless, Dickinson was able to extend the scope of sexological investigations. He examined the female body to find signs of sexual deviance. Ellis and Krafft-Ebing did not explore the female body in nearly the same detail. They did not have the same clinical access to women’s bodies that Dickinson possessed. Instead, Ellis and Krafft-Ebing focused on interviewing patients to create a case study. Dickinson’s gynecological expertise set him apart from the two great fathers of sexology. Dickinson could extend the scope of the case study to include a gynecological examination as well as patient interviews. This form of investigation allowed him to come to a startling conclusion about the visibility of sexual pathology in women.
Dickinson’s difference from other sexological writers emerged in his discussion of female same-sex desire. He found a way to identify women who love other women by observing their genitals. Dickinson was also able to categorize the sexuality of women in general by observing their genitals. By simply viewing the genitals he believed he could see if and when women had engaged in autoeroticism, homosexuality, or heterosexuality. No other sexological writer was able to do this before Dickinson and so far no one has done it since his death. Dickinson’s “discovery” was a breakthrough in the practice of sexology; diagnosis of sexual pathology in women could simply come from a gynecological examination. Looking replaced listening in Dickinson’s sexology; this was the critical difference between himself and his sexological precursors.
Dickinson wanted his mode of sexual identification to be used for a variety of purposes. Dickinson wanted to be able to easily diagnose his patients as “pathologically perverse” through a brief gynecological examination instead of a lengthy dialogue. Furthermore, he used the criteria he invented as a tool for marriage counselors. Dickinson wanted the marriage counselor to be able to do a brief examination of the vulva to see if the woman was ready for marriage. If her genitals were deemed to be large, and therefore “homosexual” or “autoerotic”, she would be disqualified for marriage by the counselor. If she exhibited genitals of “normal” size and shape, then the marriage consultation most likely would lead to marriage.
Genital morphology took on a larger significance in Dickinson’s work than simply the policing of deviant desires. Measuring the genitals’ shape, size, and erectility was the way he could translate femininity into something he could make qualitative and quantitative judgments about. Dickinson read sexuality through the vulva. Women’s bodies were supposed to reflect his idealized vision of female sexuality. Female genitals were supposed to be open, but the width of this opening varied at different stages of “female life”. The young girl’s vulva apparently was only to admit a male finger or the “virgin” speculum. Only after the wedding night, were women sanctioned to have a full, open sexuality. Dickinson’s gynecology allowed for only the husband to open the hymen and initiate his wife in the erotic arts. Yet even after marital sexuality had begun, the shape of the vulva needed to be watched to ensure there was no homosexual or severe autoerotic behavior. Regardless of its specific form, women’s sexuality was something that Dickinson sought to manage because he deemed it uncontrollable.
Throughout Dickinson’s medical career, the regulation of gender was primary, sexual difference was secondary. The fundamental issue in his work is the management of desire in order to preserve the stability of the bourgeois family structure. For him, this primarily involved a regulation of gender behavior through medical intervention. Even in the case of his studies into same-sex eroticism, the issue at hand was whether these women would perform heterosexuality. It was that women who loved women were not making a family with a man that was problematic. Thus, the family was Dickinson’s primary concern. The fact they were sleeping with women was still important but not as important as their abdication of marriage and motherhood.
Dickinson’s work is symptomatic of medical writings on gender and sexuality. In his texts, women were exploited in order to further his hegemonic vision of heterosexuality. Whether the women in these texts loved other women or men they all fell under the surveillance of Dickinson’s medical gaze. His vision turned women into objects of discovery for the scientific mind. Women were uncovered to be disciplined; they were talked about, but there was no real dialogue between the woman and the doctor. Women were alienated and alien throughout Dickinson’s work.
By figuring female sexuality as undiscovered, Dickinson positioned women’s desire outside of medical knowledge. In this sense, female sexuality was unconscious and alien. It (id) was outside the realm of the known, the apparent. It was silent and Dickinson sought to give it a voice. However, the voice he gave female sexuality was only the echo of his own. Nevertheless, Dickinson maintained that female sexuality needed to be uncovered to maintain the imbalance in the gender system; this inequality was necessary for him to maintain marital harmony and “viable” offspring. Women therefore needed to be pulled back into discourse through scientific observation in order to be understood by Dickinson. By unveiling an always already alien feminine libido, Dickinson mistakenly thought he could reach some form of truth. In his work, female sexuality could be read as a phallogocentric fantasy.
Instead of locating women in a historical and social context, Dickinson saw women through their timeless bodies. Therefore in his studies, femininity, like the family, took upon a transhistorical quality. His vision of natural femininity was eternal. Dickinson wanted women to return to their primal desire for the man and his family. There was no sense that gender was constructed in the fabric of his time. For Dickinson, gender had no past and the body was always invested with the same meanings. Therefore, any change in female gender roles would deny the body. This denial was the source of pathology in Dickinson’s writings.
Yet, Dickinson failed to find his ideal of femininity in many of the women he examined. These other women, the women that were sexually awake before marriage, presented a problem for Dickinson. Their bodies did not mirror what Dickinson wanted to see. This discovery was shocking for the doctor especially when confronted by same-sex eroticism. The “homosexual” female body reflected difference. To manage the difference he saw in women who loved women, he focused on genital morphology. The genital morphology of “homosexual” women was understood to stand outside the norm. He used his discussion of female homosexuality as a mirror that reflected a distorted image of heterosexual satisfaction. This reflection was meant to warm the medical reader to prevent homosexuality at all costs. The distortion actually existed in his presentation of female genitalia.
Here, female sexuality existed underneath what was said about it, and was always alien to what could be said about it. The elusive quality of female sexuality as it was presented in Dickinson’s work was the precise reason it needed to be managed. By examining and instructing women, Dickinson thought he could resolve the “problem” of female sexuality. Nonetheless by Dickinson’s own construction of female sexuality as “undiscovered” and “alien”, there would be always something he could not grasp. By always seeing women’s sexuality as a question, the answer would always escape him.
Dickinson’s woman was an alien mirror. She could either reflect or distort his image of femininity. Yet, she should not speak and rarely did. Her body was a reflective canvas on which Dickinson focused the light of his gaze. When he did not see what he desired, the virgin hymen, the quiet wife, then the mirror that was woman became alien. It was no longer his mirror, his reflected gaze. The impact of this experience in looking at her changed his perspective. This other woman became something else, something pathological. He needed to put this woman in the category of what was not his, the displaced and distant. But from this outside space, in another time, this alien woman would reemerge. The mirror she holds would someday reflect all that had been done to her.
-- Luce Irigaray
By reading the state of medicine in the early twentieth century through the work of Robert L. Dickinson, we can see that medicine had a vested interest in the regulation of sexuality. Dickinson wanted to protect and promote the family through the management of sexuality. The marriage counselor, a physician, was to examine the young couple to make sure they were fit for marriage and parenthood. Dickinson wanted medicine to directly manage marriage and maternity. According to him, marriage counselors would decide if a potential marriage was valid on grounds of eugenics and sexual adjustment. If the couple did not live up to his standards of “marital health,” then the marriage counselor was left with two options by Dickinson. He or she would either try to correct the problem through sexual reeducation or by recommending that the wedding not proceed.
The family, in the logos of Dickinson’s science, assumed a transhistorical position. The family was constructed as biological destiny. It was seen to naturally flow from the female body. By maintaining a strong connection between the family, the natural, and the feminine, Dickinson believed that medicine had scientific grounds for the medical management of desire. The family, seen as the culmination of feminine sexual drive, was a problem that could be resolved by medical experts principally because it was rooted in the body. If medical experts did not intervene to preserve the family through the regulation of gender and sexuality, Dickinson believed the medical profession held the responsibility for the consequences of family instability, whatever those consequences could be.
The role of the marriage counselor was to facilitate the (re)discovery in women of their “natural” desire to get married and have children. What was crucial here was the performance of gender. Dickinson believed men and women had different roles in the family that stemmed from the different “natures” of men and women. Men needed to have authority the over domestic sphere. Women needed to make the home a sanctuary for her husband and children. The enforcement of strict gender roles became a medical technique in Dickinson’s work. Women were the main focus of his gender regulating discourse, but of course they had repercussions for the men as well. In the sexual sphere, Dickinson’s vision of health relied upon maintaining a patriarchical family structure.
Dickinson’s ideas about family were not new. Both Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing had similar assumptions about gender and family which permeated their respective works. Nonetheless, Dickinson was able to extend the scope of sexological investigations. He examined the female body to find signs of sexual deviance. Ellis and Krafft-Ebing did not explore the female body in nearly the same detail. They did not have the same clinical access to women’s bodies that Dickinson possessed. Instead, Ellis and Krafft-Ebing focused on interviewing patients to create a case study. Dickinson’s gynecological expertise set him apart from the two great fathers of sexology. Dickinson could extend the scope of the case study to include a gynecological examination as well as patient interviews. This form of investigation allowed him to come to a startling conclusion about the visibility of sexual pathology in women.
Dickinson’s difference from other sexological writers emerged in his discussion of female same-sex desire. He found a way to identify women who love other women by observing their genitals. Dickinson was also able to categorize the sexuality of women in general by observing their genitals. By simply viewing the genitals he believed he could see if and when women had engaged in autoeroticism, homosexuality, or heterosexuality. No other sexological writer was able to do this before Dickinson and so far no one has done it since his death. Dickinson’s “discovery” was a breakthrough in the practice of sexology; diagnosis of sexual pathology in women could simply come from a gynecological examination. Looking replaced listening in Dickinson’s sexology; this was the critical difference between himself and his sexological precursors.
Dickinson wanted his mode of sexual identification to be used for a variety of purposes. Dickinson wanted to be able to easily diagnose his patients as “pathologically perverse” through a brief gynecological examination instead of a lengthy dialogue. Furthermore, he used the criteria he invented as a tool for marriage counselors. Dickinson wanted the marriage counselor to be able to do a brief examination of the vulva to see if the woman was ready for marriage. If her genitals were deemed to be large, and therefore “homosexual” or “autoerotic”, she would be disqualified for marriage by the counselor. If she exhibited genitals of “normal” size and shape, then the marriage consultation most likely would lead to marriage.
Genital morphology took on a larger significance in Dickinson’s work than simply the policing of deviant desires. Measuring the genitals’ shape, size, and erectility was the way he could translate femininity into something he could make qualitative and quantitative judgments about. Dickinson read sexuality through the vulva. Women’s bodies were supposed to reflect his idealized vision of female sexuality. Female genitals were supposed to be open, but the width of this opening varied at different stages of “female life”. The young girl’s vulva apparently was only to admit a male finger or the “virgin” speculum. Only after the wedding night, were women sanctioned to have a full, open sexuality. Dickinson’s gynecology allowed for only the husband to open the hymen and initiate his wife in the erotic arts. Yet even after marital sexuality had begun, the shape of the vulva needed to be watched to ensure there was no homosexual or severe autoerotic behavior. Regardless of its specific form, women’s sexuality was something that Dickinson sought to manage because he deemed it uncontrollable.
Throughout Dickinson’s medical career, the regulation of gender was primary, sexual difference was secondary. The fundamental issue in his work is the management of desire in order to preserve the stability of the bourgeois family structure. For him, this primarily involved a regulation of gender behavior through medical intervention. Even in the case of his studies into same-sex eroticism, the issue at hand was whether these women would perform heterosexuality. It was that women who loved women were not making a family with a man that was problematic. Thus, the family was Dickinson’s primary concern. The fact they were sleeping with women was still important but not as important as their abdication of marriage and motherhood.
Dickinson’s work is symptomatic of medical writings on gender and sexuality. In his texts, women were exploited in order to further his hegemonic vision of heterosexuality. Whether the women in these texts loved other women or men they all fell under the surveillance of Dickinson’s medical gaze. His vision turned women into objects of discovery for the scientific mind. Women were uncovered to be disciplined; they were talked about, but there was no real dialogue between the woman and the doctor. Women were alienated and alien throughout Dickinson’s work.
By figuring female sexuality as undiscovered, Dickinson positioned women’s desire outside of medical knowledge. In this sense, female sexuality was unconscious and alien. It (id) was outside the realm of the known, the apparent. It was silent and Dickinson sought to give it a voice. However, the voice he gave female sexuality was only the echo of his own. Nevertheless, Dickinson maintained that female sexuality needed to be uncovered to maintain the imbalance in the gender system; this inequality was necessary for him to maintain marital harmony and “viable” offspring. Women therefore needed to be pulled back into discourse through scientific observation in order to be understood by Dickinson. By unveiling an always already alien feminine libido, Dickinson mistakenly thought he could reach some form of truth. In his work, female sexuality could be read as a phallogocentric fantasy.
Instead of locating women in a historical and social context, Dickinson saw women through their timeless bodies. Therefore in his studies, femininity, like the family, took upon a transhistorical quality. His vision of natural femininity was eternal. Dickinson wanted women to return to their primal desire for the man and his family. There was no sense that gender was constructed in the fabric of his time. For Dickinson, gender had no past and the body was always invested with the same meanings. Therefore, any change in female gender roles would deny the body. This denial was the source of pathology in Dickinson’s writings.
Yet, Dickinson failed to find his ideal of femininity in many of the women he examined. These other women, the women that were sexually awake before marriage, presented a problem for Dickinson. Their bodies did not mirror what Dickinson wanted to see. This discovery was shocking for the doctor especially when confronted by same-sex eroticism. The “homosexual” female body reflected difference. To manage the difference he saw in women who loved women, he focused on genital morphology. The genital morphology of “homosexual” women was understood to stand outside the norm. He used his discussion of female homosexuality as a mirror that reflected a distorted image of heterosexual satisfaction. This reflection was meant to warm the medical reader to prevent homosexuality at all costs. The distortion actually existed in his presentation of female genitalia.
Here, female sexuality existed underneath what was said about it, and was always alien to what could be said about it. The elusive quality of female sexuality as it was presented in Dickinson’s work was the precise reason it needed to be managed. By examining and instructing women, Dickinson thought he could resolve the “problem” of female sexuality. Nonetheless by Dickinson’s own construction of female sexuality as “undiscovered” and “alien”, there would be always something he could not grasp. By always seeing women’s sexuality as a question, the answer would always escape him.
Dickinson’s woman was an alien mirror. She could either reflect or distort his image of femininity. Yet, she should not speak and rarely did. Her body was a reflective canvas on which Dickinson focused the light of his gaze. When he did not see what he desired, the virgin hymen, the quiet wife, then the mirror that was woman became alien. It was no longer his mirror, his reflected gaze. The impact of this experience in looking at her changed his perspective. This other woman became something else, something pathological. He needed to put this woman in the category of what was not his, the displaced and distant. But from this outside space, in another time, this alien woman would reemerge. The mirror she holds would someday reflect all that had been done to her.
posted by Matthew at 5:57 PM
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