Articles for DWF
Articles for DWF
Analogous Obscenities. Tribades, Sapphians, Homosexuals: Sex-Gender Systems
and Categories in the Journal of Criminal Anthropology Founded by Cesare Lombroso
(1880-1949), 1994, n. 24, pp. 50-122
The author considers same-sex erotic attraction to be trans-historical and trans-cultural, whereas its manifestations, meanings and social implications differ in relation to the varying cultural settings.
In analysing the journal founded by Lombroso in 1880 ("Archivio di psichiatria, antropologia criminale e scienze penali per servire allo studio dell'uomo alienato e delinquente": Archives of psychiatry, criminal anthropology and penal sciences, to help the study of mentally alienated and delinquent man ), she looks at it both as a structure which exemplifies the cultural positivist scenario, and as a source of lesbian representations and self-representations.
As a structure, since the journal linked institutions (asylums, gaols, universities, tribunals etc.) and disciplines (anthropology, medicine, law, sociology, psychology, chemistry, zoology etc.) to culture, politics and the legislative action of the State. As a source, since in the journal one can retrace lesbian narratives and differences, albeit through the scientist's eye and prejudice.
It is only very seldom that lesbian historiography can avoid using male sources; this paper shows how fruitful such use can be, in order to focus on a dialectics thus defined by Milletti: "Having a sex, a gender, a sexual identity, requires a self-attribution on the part of the individual, who shapes behaviours which will be read, interpreted and judged as evidence of one's belonging to one or another category".
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Reviews for DWF
FAUSTO-STERLING Anne, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and
Men, New York, Basic Books, 1992
rev. by Nerina Milletti, 1993, n. 17, pp. 81-83