When boys will not be boys: American eugenics and the formation of gender nonconformity as psychopathology

ABSTRACT

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s theorization of disciplinary power and biopolitics, this paper advances and reconstructs earlier scholarly literature on American eugenics through an examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century penological and psychiatric techniques that contributed to the birth of a discourse on gender nonconformity as psychopathology. In this paper, I ask: how do certain forms of embodiment, dress and expression come to be interpreted as ‘effeminate’ and ‘sissy’? Furthermore, how did various moral and penological techniques around gender nonconforming embodiment and subjectivity contribute to the development of psychiatric treatment methods for homosexuality and transsexuality? Drawing from early sexological studies on prisoners as well as psychiatric studies on institutionalized children, the paper argues that in the context of ‘boyhood effeminacy’, normalizing power operates not merely on the disciplinary level of the individual body, but also through a biopolitical governing of health, reproduction, family and citizenship. The paper concludes by addressing the contemporary European Trans sterilization legislation as a biopolitical offshoot of eugenic rationality.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender nonconformity
• biopolitics
• eugenics
• femininity
• sterilization
• GIDC

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for detailed comments on previous versions of this paper. I also thank Sander Gilman, Peter Hegarty and Alexandra Minna Stern for valuable suggestions during the course of my research that led to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Julian Honkasalo is a Kone Foundation postdoc scholar in gender studies at the University of Helsinki as well as a Ph.D. candidate in politics at The New School for Social Research (NYC). Honkasalo’s research project ‘Unfit for citizenship: Eugenics and the pathologization of gender nonconformity’ (2015–2018) advances and reconstructs earlier scholarly literature on twentieth-century eugenic discourses by examining sex-reassignment related sterilization legislation in Scandinavian countries from a Foucauldian, genealogical perspective.

Notes

1. Although I analyze historical periods that precede the works of John Money (who coined the term ‘gender’), I use the umbrella term gender nonconforming as an adjective to denote various lives that violate the heteropatriarchal gender binary, as well as to describe persons who might have self-identified as transgender or genderqueer in today’s terminology. I use quotation marks (‘boy’, ‘girl’) and the neutral pronoun ‘they’ to denote persons assumed by courts or psychiatrists to be boys or girls without knowledge of their own self-identification. For a genealogical reading of John Money’s notion on gender, see Germon (2009).

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the Kone Foundation.