English 296: Master's Portfolio

Professors Haggerty and Roy

26 April 2000

One of the overriding themes of the work I've done in this portfolio is how scientific discourse has shaped, and continues to shape, Western views of sexuality. Coupled with that theme is how scientific discourses on disease and sexuality are informed, and in turn inform, discourses on nationality and colonialism. One of my primary interests has been the exploration of the intersection of queer theory and postcolonial theory.

My interest in this intersection began with "AIDS-In-Difference", the paper I wrote for Dr. Roy's Colonialism and Postcoloniality seminar in my first quarter at UCR. While doing research for this paper, I came to the realization that the West's understandings of sex, sexuality, and gender remain largely informed by Victorian sexology. I also ran across a puzzling dilemma: virtually all the writing on AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa assumes that Africans are universally heterosexual, and therefore AIDS in Africa, logically, is heterosexual in nature. This assumption is never questioned in the epidemiological writings or media reports. This led me to ask where this assumption came from. In my readings, I found that there were a few assumptions made by Europeans about African sexuality, beginning with the first contact between Europeans and Africans. The first assumption was that Africans were perverse and hypersexual. The second assumption was that homosexuality was an unknown vice to the Africans. This assumption has never been shaken, and in fact has been adopted, as the paper shows, by post-colonial Africans. These assumptions led me to ask yet another question, in the context of AIDS: if Africa is coded as a hotbed of perversion, wouldn't it have been easy to claim AIDS was due to some kind of homosexuality there as well as in the West? Why was it necessary for the West to code African sexuality, and therefore AIDS in Africa, as almost exclusively heterosexual?

This led me to a conclusion that runs as a thread through all three of the papers in this portfolio. The claims about African sexuality, and the sexuality of the Other in general, has a double function. The first function is the obvious one, to discipline the Other's behavior; in short, a missionary position. The second, but less obvious, function is to discipline Europeans into proper sexual behavior. The discourses on the sexuality of the racialized and sexualized Other, whether it's the African with AIDS, Frankenstein's creature, or Dracula, serves as a source of anxiety for the West, but also serves as a threat to subjects of Western sexual epistemologies: "Don't be like those perverse (Africans, Transylvanians, etc), you'll get sick and die. Be normal."

Anxieties about race, gender, and sexuality are firmly entrenched in medical discourses explored in all three of these papers. In "Body Parts that Matter: Frankenstein, or, A Modern Cyborg?", I explore Victor Frankenstein's anxieties over constructing gender, thereby decoupling gender from nature. Victor focuses on European humanity being overrun by his creatures' offspring, an anxiety similar to the anxieties of Western colonialist discourse about being overrun by the colonized, or, worse, mixing with them. I explore similar anxieties in "Exhuming the Body: 'Let's Open Up a Few Corpses' in Bram Stoker's Dracula". The vampire, Dracula, serves as the site of anxieties about the powerful and seductive sexuality of the foreigner--in Dracula's case, still European, but only barely. These anxieties are largely expressed through the character of Dr. Van Helsing who is, like Victor Frankenstein, a scientist and dabbler in the occult.

The role of science in the construction of discourses about gender, race, and sexuality is one of the primary foci of all three papers. Much of my research is indebted to Michel Foucault's work on the mingling of moral discourses with medical and scientific discourses, especially in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction: Volume I and The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Knowledge. His theories have given me a framework that I can use to analyze how what claims to be objective scientific or medical knowledge is actually working as a mechanism of power, and what effects these specifically Western medical discourses have upon persons, both in the West and outside it.

Further, one of my areas of interest has been how medical knowledge constructs sexually transmitted disease, the connection between venereal disease and homosexuality, and the connection between venereal disease and the foreign. The connection between disease, homosexuality (or at least sodomy), and the foreigner extends as far back as Renaissance England, when the presence of a sodomite was regarded as the cause of plagues and when sodomy was regarded as the Italian (i.e. foreign) vice. The focus on disease, homosexuality, and colonialism bridges "AIDS-In-Difference" to "Exhuming the Body"; one focuses on the anxieties of AIDS spreading to the heterosexual population through either the body of the foreigner or through the body of the bisexual, the other focuses on the anxieties of vampirism spreading to the English population from the body of the queer foreigner. After reading Dracula, I was struck with how similar the anxieties expressed in the novel about vampirism were to anxieties in North America and Europe over AIDS spreading to the "general population". The medical discourses about sexuality, race, and disease at the end of the Victorian period provided a framework upon which to re-inscribe similar discourses at the end of the twentieth century about AIDS, Africa, and homosexuality and heterosexuality.