The origin of Italian sexological studies: Female sexual inversion, ca. 1870-1900

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 103-120

  Beccalossi, Chiara ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; EMPIRICAL RESEARCH; ETHNOLOGY; FEMALE; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY; HUMAN; ITALY; LEGAL ASPECT; LESBIAN; MENTAL HEALTH; MENTAL HOSPITAL; PHYSIOLOGY; PROSTITUTION; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; PSYCHOSEXUAL DISORDER; RESEARCH; SEXOLOGY; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SEXUAL MATURATION; SEXUALITY; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIAL STATUS; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

CULTURE; EMPIRICAL RESEARCH; FEMALE; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HOMOSEXUALITY, FEMALE; HOSPITALS, PSYCHIATRIC; HUMANS; ITALY; MENTAL HEALTH; PROSTITUTION; RESEARCH; SEXOLOGY; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SEXUAL DYSFUNCTIONS, PSYCHOLOGICAL; SEXUAL MATURATION; SEXUAL PARTNERS; SEXUALITY; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL CONDITIONS; SOCIAL VALUES; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

EID: 63249122935     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Arrigo Tamassia, "Sull'inversione dell'istinto sessuale," Rivista sperimentale di freniatria e di medicina legale in relazione con l'antropologia e le scienze giuridiche e sociali 4 (1878): 97-117.
2. Vincenzo Chiarugi, Della pazzia in genere, e in specie: Trattato medico-analitico con una centuria di osservazioni, 3 vols. (Florence: Luigi Carlieri, 1793-94), 2:144.
3. Ibid., 2:2-3.
4. Ibid., 3:28-29 (emphasis in original except in the last sentence). Vesani were persons deprived of reason, so, according to Chiarugi, people suffering from melanconia degli Sciti were suffering from madness.
5. For an overview of the Scythian disease see William A. Hammond, "The Disease of the Scythians (Morbus Feminarum) and Certain Analogous Conditions," American Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry 1 (1882): 339-55.
6. Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995);
7. Ivan Crozier, "British Psychiatric Writing on Homosexuality before Havelock Ellis: The Missing Story," Journal for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 63, no. 1 (2008): 65-102.
8. For an overview of Italian medicine see Franco Della Peruta, ed., Storia d'Italia: Annali: Malattia e medicina, vol. 7 (Turin: Einaudi, 1984);
9. for Italian psychiatry see Annamaria Tagliavini, "Aspects of the History of Psychiatry in Italy in the Second Half in the Nineteenth Century," in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, ed. William Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1985), 2:175-96.
10. Ugo Fornari, "Monomania e pazzia morale: Il contributo della psichiatria italiana nella seconda meta dell'ottocento," Criminologia 8 (1986): 5-7.
11. Ibid., 9-23.
12. Arrigo Tamassia, "La pazzia morale," Rivista sperimentale di freniatria e di medicina legale in relazione con l'antropologia e la scienze giuridiche e sociali 3 (1877): 158.
13. Ibid., 162.
14. Clomiro Bonfigli, "Sulla cosi detta pazzia morale," Archivio italiano delle malattie nervose 13 (1876): 163.
15. Valeria P. Babini, Fernanda Minuz, and Annamaria Tagliavini, La donna nelle scienze dell'uomo (Milan: F. Angeli, 1986).
16. Ferdinando Tonini, Igiene e fisiologia del matrimonio ossia storia naturale e medica dello stato coniugale e della igiene speciale dei coniugi nelle diverse loro fasi e del neonato, 2 vols. (Milan: Gaetano Brigola, 1862), 2:198-211.
17. Ibid., 2:190-91.
18. Ibid., 2:191.
19. Ibid., 2:194-95, 367, 371, 387.
20. Ibid., 2:194.
21. Marina Graziosi, "Infirmitas sexus: La donna nell'immaginario penalistico," Democrazia e Diritto 2 (1993): 99-143.
22. Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870 (London: Routledge, 2001).
23. Mary Gibson, rostitution and the State of Italy, 1860-1915 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986).
24. Paolo Zacchia, Quaestionum medico-legalium (1621-25), liber 4, titulus 2, quaestio 5. Although first published between 1621 and 1625, the most inclusive edition dates from 1661. On Zacchia and sodomy see George Rousseau, "Policing the Anus: Stuprum and Sodomy According to Paolo Zacchia's Forensic Medicine," in The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kenneth Borris and George Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2008), 75-91.
25. Querela di parte is the option for the legal guardian of a victim of a crime who is underage to bring legal action against an offender for which the legal system is not compelled to proceed. Before the unification of Italy sodomy was punished in the Papal States with a life sentence; in the region of Lombardy-Veneto under Austrian rule sodomy was punished with prison from six months to one year; and in the Kingdom of Sardinia (which included Savoy, Piedmont, and Liguria) sodomy was liable to a sentence of ten years in prison. The rest of Italy had adopted the Napoleonic Code, which was silent on the issue of same-sex acts. When Italy first became a unified nation in 1861, the criminal code of the Kingdom of Sardinia was extended to the rest of the country, but the law that punished male same-sex acts was not extended to southern Italy, creating a "double standard" between northern and southern Italy. In 1889 the Zanardelli penal code was promulgated, decriminalizing private male same-sex acts between any consenting adults. See Lorenzo Benadusi, Il nemico dell'uomo nuovo: L'omosessualità nell'esperimento totalitario fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005), 97-106.
26. Secondo Laura, Trattato di medicina legale (Turin: Camilla e Bertolero, 1874), 421-22.
27. See, for example, Angelo Filippi, Manuale di medicina legale conforme al nuovo codice penale (Palermo-Catania: Vallardi, n.d.), 736-37.
28. Laura, Trattato di medicina legale, 662-65.
29. Carl Westphal, "Die conträre Sexualempfindung: Symptom eines neuropathischen (psychopathischen) Zustandes," in Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 2 (1869): 73-108, trans. M. A. Lombardi-Nash, in Sodomites and Urnings: Homosexual Representations in Classic German Journals (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2006), 87-120.
30. See Tamassia, "Sull'inversione dell'istinto sessuale," 99.
31. Ibid., 101-2, 112-13.
32. Ibid., 97-98.
33. Ibid., 99.
34. Ibid., 97-117.
35. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1, Sexual Inversion (London: University of London Press, 1897), 27;
36. Vernon A. Rosario, The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 70.
37. Cesare Lombroso, "L'amore nei pazzi," Archivio di psichiatria, antropologia criminale e scienze penali 2 (1881): 1-32. This psychiatric and criminal anthropological journal was founded by Lombroso himself in 1880. For an overview of female homosexuality in Lombroso's journal see Nerina Miletti, "Tribadi, saffiste, invertite e omosessuali: Categorie e sistemi sesso/genere nella rivista di antropologia criminale fondata da Cesare Lombroso (1880-1949)," Nuova DWF Donnawomenfemme: Quaderni di studi internazionali sulla donna 4, no. 24 (1994): 50-122.
38. In the 1890s Cantarano became professor of clinical medicine and neuropathology at the University of Naples alongside his practice as psychiatrist in Neapolitan asylums.
39. Paolo Mantegazza, Gli amori degli uomini: saggio di un'etnologia dell'amore (Milan: Privately printed, 1886). This text, like many others he wrote, was harshly criticized by the Catholic Church and was promptly listed in the Index librorum proibitorum, although it did not stop Mantegazza's works being extremely successful, both among physicians and especially with a wider audience. In the first edition of his work Mantegazza did not use the term "sexual inversion" when discussing same-sex desires. However, early European sexologists referred to this work as a pioneer in the study of the subject. On Mantegazza and his engagement with sexual issues see Luisa Tasca, "Il 'senatore erotico': Sesso e matrimonio nell'antropologia di Paolo Mantegazza," in La mediazione matrimoniale in Europa fra Otto e Novecento, ed. Bruno P. F. Wanrooj (Fiesole-Rome: Georgetown University, 2004), 295-322.
40. Jean-Martin Charcot and Valentin Magnan, "Inversion du sens génital," Archives de neurologie 3 (1882): 53-60, 4 (1882): 296-322;
41. Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 27-28, 102-3;
42. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, L'Inversione sessuale nell'uomo e nella donna: Omosessualità, evirazione, effeminatezza, metamorfosi sessuale, ermafroditismo, uranismo, viraginità, androginia, ginandria, translator unknown (1894; Rome: Capaccini, 1897), 83-109.
43. On the importance of the case history in sexology see Ivan Crozier, "Philosophy in the English Boudoir: Havelock Ellis, Love and Pain, and Sexological Discourses on Algophilia," Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, no. 4 (2004): 294-95; for the importance in science of "reasoning in cases" see John Forrester, "If p, then What? Thinking in Cases," History of the Human Sciences 9 (1996): 1-25.
44. Guglielmo Cantarano, "Contribuzione alla casuistica della inversione dell'istinto sessuale," La psichiatria, la neurologia, e le scienze affini 1 (1883): 201.
45. Ibid., 201-2.
46. Ibid., 204-7.
47. Ibid., 209.
48. Ibid., 205, 210.
49. Ibid., 205.
50. Cesare Lombroso, "Del tribadismo nei manicomi," Archivio di psichiatria, scienze penali ed antropologia criminale per servire allo studio dell'uomo alienato e delinquente 6 (1885): 218-19.
51. Ibid., 218-21.
52. Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, La donna delinquente: La prostituta e la donna normale (Turin: Roux, 1893), 56-57. In La donna delinquente those parts regarding the evolution of the two sexes, women's psychology, and women's intelligence were written by Ferrero; those parts dealing with criminal anthropology were written by Lombroso. Broadly speaking, the first part of the book on the normal woman was Ferrero's, the rest Lombroso's, so the ideas described in this essay come almost entirely from Lombroso. See Fernanda Minuz, "Femmina o donna," in Babini, Minuz, and Tagliavini, La donna nelle scienze dell'uomo, 123n10. For an overview of female sexual inversion in Lombroso's La donna delinquente see Mary Gibson, "Labelling Women Deviant: Heterosexual Women, Prostitutes and Lesbians in Early Criminological Discourse," in Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy, 1860-1945, ed. Perry Wilson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 89-104.
53. Lombroso and Ferrero, La donna delinquente, 467.
54. Ibid., 161, 365, 369, 532, 594-95, 613-14.
55. Ibid., 186.
56. Ibid., 365, 369.
57. Ibid., 532-33.
58. Ibid., 414.
59. Gibson, "Labelling Women," 97.
60. Lombroso and Ferrero, La donna delinquente, 411.
61. Ibid., 411-12.
62. Judith Walkowitz, "Sessualità pericolose," in Storia delle donne in occidente: L'Ottocento, ed. Genevieve Fraisse and Micelle Perrot (Milan: Mondatori, 1994), 434.
63. Scipio Sighele, "La coppia criminale," Archivio di psichiatria, scienze penali ed antropologia criminale per servire allo studio dell'uomo alienato e delinquente 13 (1892): 519-41. Sighele is considered a pioneer of mass psychology. At the time Sighele was just twenty-four years old, at the beginning of his career, and already the author of a successful book, La folla delinquente (The Mass Offender), published in 1891. Later he became professor of mass psychology and sociology at the Institut des hautes études at the University of Brussels.
64. Michela De Giorgio, Le italiane dall'unità ad oggi: Modelli culturali e comportamenti sociali (Rome: Laterza, 1992), 118-30.
65. See, for example, the 1842 edition: Alfonso de' Liguori, La vera sposa di Gesú Cristo cioè la monaca santa per mezzo delle virtú proprie d'una religiosa (Bassano, Italy: Tipografia Remondini, 1842), 220.
66. Ibid., 221.
67. Giuseppe Frassinetti, La monaca in casa (Florence: Luigi Manuelli, 1862), 136 (emphasis added): "Come le legne accese le une colle altre maggiormente s'infiammano, come le monache ferventi di amor di Dio le une colle altre sempre piú s'infervorano di santo ardore."
68. Giovanni Marchesini and Giovanni Obici, Le "amicizie" di collegio: Ricerche sulle prime manifestazioni dell'amore sessuale (1898; Rome: Dante Alighieri di Albrighi Segati, 1903). Havelock Ellis added a section in the second edition of his Sexual Inversion based on Marchesini and Obici's work; see Appendix B, "The School-Friendships of Girls," in Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 2:243-75.
69. Marchesini and Obici, Le "amicizie" di collegio, 22-24.
70. Ibid., 115-16.
71. Ibid., 240-43.
72. Ibid., 8-9.
73. Ibid., 245-67.
74. Ibid., 298-307, 311-34.
75. Ibid., 195-98 (emphasis in the original).
76. Ibid., xvi-xviii.
77. See, for example, Rosario, The Erotic Imagination, 108-9.
78. For more on the Italian sources on sexual inversion see the pioneering work of Giovanni Dall'Orto, Leggere omosessuale (Turin: Gruppo Abele, 1984).
79. Gibson, "Labelling Women Deviant," 101-2. For an insightful view of the role of sexual differentiation and reproduction in Italian scientific discourses at the end of the nineteenth century see Valeria P. Babini, "Un altro genere: La costruzione scientifica della natura femminile," in Nel nome della razza: Il razzismo nella storia d'Italia, 1870-1945, ed. Alberto Bugio (Bologna: Il Mulino 1999), 475-89.
80. Simonetta Soldani, ed., L'educazione delle donne e modelli di vita femminile nell'Italia dell'Ottocento (Milan: F. Angeli 1989), 15, 16.