Lisa Downing, Iain Morland, and Nikki Sullivan
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186580
- eISBN:
- 9780226186757
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186757.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
One of the twentieth century’s most controversial sexologists—or “fuckologists,” to use his own term—John Money was considered a trailblazing scientist and sexual libertarian by some, but damned by ...
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One of the twentieth century’s most controversial sexologists—or “fuckologists,” to use his own term—John Money was considered a trailblazing scientist and sexual libertarian by some, but damned by others as a fraud and a pervert. This is the first book to contextualize and interrogate Money’s writings and practices across his three key diagnostic concepts, “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia.” The book offers a multidisciplinary critique of the tensions and controversies that engendered and followed from Money’s work. He invented the concept of gender in the 1950s, yet fought its uptake by feminists. He backed surgical treatments for transsexuality, but argued that gender roles were set by reproductive capacity. He shaped the treatment of intersex, advocating experimental sex changes for children with ambiguous genitalia. He pioneered drug therapy for sex offenders, yet took an ambivalent stance towards pedophilia. In his most publicized case study, Money oversaw the reassignment of David Reimer as female following a circumcision accident in infancy. Heralded by many as proof that gender is pliable, the case was later discredited when Reimer revealed that he had lived as a male since his early teens. Bringing Money’s ideas into dialogue with both the theoretical humanities and the history of medicine, the book also addresses Money’s lesser-known work on topics such as animal behavior, cybernetics, brain development, and the philosophy of science.Less
One of the twentieth century’s most controversial sexologists—or “fuckologists,” to use his own term—John Money was considered a trailblazing scientist and sexual libertarian by some, but damned by others as a fraud and a pervert. This is the first book to contextualize and interrogate Money’s writings and practices across his three key diagnostic concepts, “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia.” The book offers a multidisciplinary critique of the tensions and controversies that engendered and followed from Money’s work. He invented the concept of gender in the 1950s, yet fought its uptake by feminists. He backed surgical treatments for transsexuality, but argued that gender roles were set by reproductive capacity. He shaped the treatment of intersex, advocating experimental sex changes for children with ambiguous genitalia. He pioneered drug therapy for sex offenders, yet took an ambivalent stance towards pedophilia. In his most publicized case study, Money oversaw the reassignment of David Reimer as female following a circumcision accident in infancy. Heralded by many as proof that gender is pliable, the case was later discredited when Reimer revealed that he had lived as a male since his early teens. Bringing Money’s ideas into dialogue with both the theoretical humanities and the history of medicine, the book also addresses Money’s lesser-known work on topics such as animal behavior, cybernetics, brain development, and the philosophy of science.
Lisa Downing
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186580
- eISBN:
- 9780226186757
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186757.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Authored by Lisa Downing, this chapter traces a genealogy from foundational nineteenth-century sexological “perversion” theory, wherein sexual deviance is posited as a dangerous symptom of a ...
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Authored by Lisa Downing, this chapter traces a genealogy from foundational nineteenth-century sexological “perversion” theory, wherein sexual deviance is posited as a dangerous symptom of a degenerate society, through twentieth-century psychoanalytic writing on “perversion,” to John Money’s authoritative writings on “paraphilia” in the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter argues that although Money’s texts explicitly reject the values and systems of their historical forebears, the logic and rhetoric of nineteenth-century sexology haunt Money’s thinking. Given the influence of Money’s involvement in the definition of the paraphilia diagnosis (such as his naming of scores of paraphiliac conditions; his contribution to the DSM-III-R in 1987; his pioneering and controversial treatment program for paraphiliac sex offenders), the chapter contends that the disavowed inheritance of nineteenth-century sexological values in twentieth-century psychiatry continues to play into formulations of “paraphilia” today.Less
Authored by Lisa Downing, this chapter traces a genealogy from foundational nineteenth-century sexological “perversion” theory, wherein sexual deviance is posited as a dangerous symptom of a degenerate society, through twentieth-century psychoanalytic writing on “perversion,” to John Money’s authoritative writings on “paraphilia” in the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter argues that although Money’s texts explicitly reject the values and systems of their historical forebears, the logic and rhetoric of nineteenth-century sexology haunt Money’s thinking. Given the influence of Money’s involvement in the definition of the paraphilia diagnosis (such as his naming of scores of paraphiliac conditions; his contribution to the DSM-III-R in 1987; his pioneering and controversial treatment program for paraphiliac sex offenders), the chapter contends that the disavowed inheritance of nineteenth-century sexological values in twentieth-century psychiatry continues to play into formulations of “paraphilia” today.
Lisa Downing
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186580
- eISBN:
- 9780226186757
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186757.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Authored by Lisa Downing, this chapter focuses in detail on one key aspect of John Money’s work on paraphilia, namely the idea that paraphilia is the dangerous and deadly form of eroticism that ...
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Authored by Lisa Downing, this chapter focuses in detail on one key aspect of John Money’s work on paraphilia, namely the idea that paraphilia is the dangerous and deadly form of eroticism that compromises the proper, life-giving “nature” of reproductive sexuality and thereby threatens the social order. It argues that, at the fantasy level of Money’s system, paraphilia is understood as leading to individual and social death, in the intellectual historical context of a biological and psychological worldview in which the theory of “biophilia” was proliferating. The chapter explores Money’s wish to attain a “paraphilia-free” society, alongside his paradoxical call for “a pluralistic democracy of sexualism,” showing that his writing on paraphilia reveals one of the tensions at the heart of his “sex-positive” liberalism and libertarianism. For Money, and many who influenced and follow him, the possibility of the figure of the “paraphiliac citizen” is not admitted. Using insights from queer citizenship studies, the anti-social turn in queer theory, and what Judith Jack Halberstam has termed “shadow feminism,” the chapter undertakes a critique of the bio-normativity of this premise and the conservative paradigm of health and harm on which it rests.Less
Authored by Lisa Downing, this chapter focuses in detail on one key aspect of John Money’s work on paraphilia, namely the idea that paraphilia is the dangerous and deadly form of eroticism that compromises the proper, life-giving “nature” of reproductive sexuality and thereby threatens the social order. It argues that, at the fantasy level of Money’s system, paraphilia is understood as leading to individual and social death, in the intellectual historical context of a biological and psychological worldview in which the theory of “biophilia” was proliferating. The chapter explores Money’s wish to attain a “paraphilia-free” society, alongside his paradoxical call for “a pluralistic democracy of sexualism,” showing that his writing on paraphilia reveals one of the tensions at the heart of his “sex-positive” liberalism and libertarianism. For Money, and many who influenced and follow him, the possibility of the figure of the “paraphiliac citizen” is not admitted. Using insights from queer citizenship studies, the anti-social turn in queer theory, and what Judith Jack Halberstam has termed “shadow feminism,” the chapter undertakes a critique of the bio-normativity of this premise and the conservative paradigm of health and harm on which it rests.
Lisa Downing, Iain Morland, and Nikki Sullivan
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186580
- eISBN:
- 9780226186757
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186757.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This co-authored introduction provides a biographical sketch of John Money; outlines the key characteristics of his work on “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia”; identifies the major ...
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This co-authored introduction provides a biographical sketch of John Money; outlines the key characteristics of his work on “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia”; identifies the major controversies over his theoretical claims and clinical practice; and explains the trajectory and methodology of the book.Less
This co-authored introduction provides a biographical sketch of John Money; outlines the key characteristics of his work on “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia”; identifies the major controversies over his theoretical claims and clinical practice; and explains the trajectory and methodology of the book.
Lisa Downing, Iain Morland, and Nikki Sullivan
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186580
- eISBN:
- 9780226186757
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186757.003.0008
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This co-authored conclusion identifies and examines some of the key features of Money’s textuality and practice that interconnect his interventions into the three diagnostic concepts, ...
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This co-authored conclusion identifies and examines some of the key features of Money’s textuality and practice that interconnect his interventions into the three diagnostic concepts, “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia.” These features include Money’s metaphor and methodology of “mapping,” his insistence on the power of language acquisition, and his concomitant obsession with neologistic labeling, especially of gender. The conclusion critiques Money’s fears that without unanimity in language, sexology could collapse into “wasteful word games,” just as gender development might become “ambiguous” in the manner of “native bilingualism.” Yet, the conclusion shows too that Money’s unremitting invention of terms stoked these very fears, demarcating a private linguistic world in which he and his colleagues were the only native speakers.Less
This co-authored conclusion identifies and examines some of the key features of Money’s textuality and practice that interconnect his interventions into the three diagnostic concepts, “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia.” These features include Money’s metaphor and methodology of “mapping,” his insistence on the power of language acquisition, and his concomitant obsession with neologistic labeling, especially of gender. The conclusion critiques Money’s fears that without unanimity in language, sexology could collapse into “wasteful word games,” just as gender development might become “ambiguous” in the manner of “native bilingualism.” Yet, the conclusion shows too that Money’s unremitting invention of terms stoked these very fears, demarcating a private linguistic world in which he and his colleagues were the only native speakers.
John Borneman
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226233888
- eISBN:
- 9780226234076
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226234076.003.0002
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter analyzes child sex abuse as both a real and phantasmatic phenomenon in the West that has become prominent in the last 40 years. It theorizes the secular ritual of rehabilitation of child ...
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This chapter analyzes child sex abuse as both a real and phantasmatic phenomenon in the West that has become prominent in the last 40 years. It theorizes the secular ritual of rehabilitation of child molesters in its relation to the changing legal and social regulation of adult child relations. Arising from this relatively new phenomenon are a set of significant issues: defining and diagnosing paraphilia, transforming taboos into illegalities, including sex in anthropological concepts of incest, understanding anew the significance of parricide in the Oedipal complex, redefining intimacy and perversion in the changing lifecourse of men, recognizing disgust in the transference with the phenomenon of child sex abuse, overcoming obstacles to knowledgeability about child sex abuse and child sex molesters, creating untouchability in definitions of transgressive sex, acknowledging evidence of the efficacy of treatment of child sex offenders.Less
This chapter analyzes child sex abuse as both a real and phantasmatic phenomenon in the West that has become prominent in the last 40 years. It theorizes the secular ritual of rehabilitation of child molesters in its relation to the changing legal and social regulation of adult child relations. Arising from this relatively new phenomenon are a set of significant issues: defining and diagnosing paraphilia, transforming taboos into illegalities, including sex in anthropological concepts of incest, understanding anew the significance of parricide in the Oedipal complex, redefining intimacy and perversion in the changing lifecourse of men, recognizing disgust in the transference with the phenomenon of child sex abuse, overcoming obstacles to knowledgeability about child sex abuse and child sex molesters, creating untouchability in definitions of transgressive sex, acknowledging evidence of the efficacy of treatment of child sex offenders.
