An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society - Hardcover

Terry, Jennifer

3.97

33 ratings by Goodreads

9780226793665: An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226793664 ISBN 13: 9780226793665

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1999

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Drawing on original research from medical texts, psychiatric case histories, pioneering statistical surveys, first-person accounts, legal cases, sensationalist journalism, and legislative debates, Jennifer Terry has written a nuanced and textured history of how the century-old obsession with homosexuality is deeply tied to changing American anxieties about social and sexual order in the modern age.

Terry's overarching argument is compelling: that homosexuality served as a marker of the "abnormal" against which malleable, tenuous, and often contradictory concepts of the "normal" were defined. One of the few histories to take into consideration homosexuality in both women and men, Terry's work also stands out in its refusal to erase the agency of people classified as abnormal. She documents the myriad ways that gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities have coauthored, resisted, and transformed the most powerful and authoritative modern truths about sex. Proposing this history as a "useable past," An American Obsession is an indispensable contribution to the study of American cultural history.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

paper 0-226-79367-2 An encyclopedic history of how the American medical and scientific communities' perceptions of homosexuality constructed it as ``abnormal'' rather than as part and parcel of ``the normal.'' Terry (comparative studies/Ohio State) confesses in her Introduction to an obsessive personality which stimulated her throughout the writing of this mammoth tome, and it may well take a similarly addled reader to wade through this text, its 80 pages of endnotes, and its 40-page bibliography. Obsessions, however, are not always without their rewards, and the reader who can match the author in zealous devotion to the topic will be amply recompensed. Through historical analysis breathtaking in its sweep and scope, Terry fractures scientific claims of objectivity in analyses of homosexuality to uncover the ideological and cultural agendas implicit in such work. Moving from such late 19th-century sexologists as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis to 20th-century figures like Alfred Kinsey, Terry deflates the cultural baggage which these scientists brought to their studies with her pinpricks of common sense and rational discourse. In her considerations of medical texts, psychiatric case histories, legal cases, personal narratives, and journalistic accounts, Terry exposes with patience (and, at times, with resigned humor) the ways cultural bias infects the supposedly objective arena of science. The anecdotes commonly underscore the demonization of the gay individual and community, making Terry's work itself a testimony to the importance of contesting cultural narratives. Terry is no dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants but a giant herself, towering over the misperceptions of past medical dwarfs with their insidious visions of homosexuality. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this persuasively argued social history, Terry, an associate professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University, contends that homosexuality "has acquired a symbolic centrality in American culture" as a dominant marker between the "normal" and the "abnormal" across a diverse range of disciplines and milieus. Drawing upon a wide range of materialsAfrom personal memoirs to legal cases, yellow journalism, pulp fiction, religious writings, psychology texts and "scientific" studies (which prove to be not all that scientific)ATerry demonstrates how, over the past 100 years, theories about the causes, nature and possible "cure" for homosexuality have focused far more on notions of sexuality, sin, gender and "social good" than on homosexuality itself. Analyzing the work of such 19th-century sexologists as Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis, she illustrates how their na?ve, often contradictory theories became so influential that they still inform contemporary thought, including "gay gene" studies and the religious beliefs and rhetoric of the Christian right. While her broad survey is vital to the book, Terry's real strength is her detailed explorations of individual groupsAsuch as the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, a multidisciplinary group of physicians and scientists who, in 1935, attempted to understand the "problem" of homosexuality on a scientific basisAand events, such as the harsh religious, psychoanalytic and cultural backlash against Kinsey's work in the early 1950s. Her exhaustively researched, astute synthesis is not only an original and important contribution to lesbian and gay studies, but sheds new light on the sociology of American life and the history of science.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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