Sexual inversion (sexology)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Central polemical texts contributing to this [sexual inversion] discourse include Symonds's A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883); and his A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891); Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion, originally written with Symonds, published and suppressed in England in 1897, and later to be included as volume 2 of Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1901); and Edward Carpenter's Homogenic Love (1894) and his The Intermediate Sex (1908)." --Speaking of Gender (1989) by Elaine Showalter |
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Sexual inversion is a term used by sexologists, primarily in the late 19th and early 20th century, to refer to homosexuality. Sexual inversion was believed to be an inborn reversal of gender traits: male inverts were, to a greater or lesser degree, inclined to traditionally female pursuits and dress and vice versa. The sexologist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing described female sexual inversion as "the masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom".
Initially confined to medical texts, the concept of sexual inversion was given wide currency by Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, which was written in part to popularize the sexologists' views. Published with a foreword by the sexologist Havelock Ellis, it consistently used the term "invert" to refer to its protagonist, who bore a strong resemblance to one of Krafft-Ebing's case studies.
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