Recent years have seen a proliferation of zoological studies and queer critiques of natural science that are transforming popular and scholarly understandings of sex differences, sexualities and sexual behaviours, moving beyond the lingering Victorianism of 20 th-century evolutionary biology, toward greater recognition and celebration of sex diversity in the natural world and in humans (e.g. The 150 th anniversary of Descent, and the opportunities that it presents for reflection on the development of sexological biology, is timely. While many of the sexological precepts that he promulgated in Descent were not original to him, and while he worked hard to subdue the queer potentialities of his evolutionism, Darwin’s authority as one of the most famous and influential naturalists of the 19 th century situate him and Descent as pivotal to the development of modern sexological science with profound, and highly equivocal, consequences for how sex has been conceptualized and debated ever since. Following a visit to London in 1913, the German homophile sexologist and sexual rights’ activist, Magnus Hirschfeld, praised Darwin above others for sowing the seeds of a new biological sexology that had borne fruit ‘even in the stony earth of England’ ( Hirschfeld, transl. The Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who, more than anyone else, fully extended Darwin’s evolutionary vision of sex into the realms of human psychology and behaviour, counted Descent among the ten most significant books that he knew ( Freud, 1960: 269). For good and for ill, it was a catalyst for the rapid development of scientific studies of sex differences, sexualities and sexual behaviours that flourished through the later decades of the 19 th century and early decades of the 20 th ( Sulloway, 1979 Bauer, 2012 Hamlin, 2014). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (courtesy of the Linnean Society Library).ĭescent was enormously popular in its time and became hugely influential. Despite working to subdue the queer potentialities of his evolutionism, Darwin nonetheless laid the foundations for a new, modernist sexology to emerge, a situation that was exploited by a cohort of Darwinist sexologists, Sigmund Freud chief among them, who followed in his path. Similarly, his construal of the ‘unnatural crimes’ of indigenous peoples was contained within a hierarchical narrative of the backwardness of ‘savages’ and civilizational supremacy but was readily subject to challenge and queer reinterpretations, not least with reference to the ‘extreme sensuality’ of the classical Greeks. Although he moved to cast sex-variant animals, human and non-human, as biological misfits and failures, Darwin’s commitment to the principle of primordial intersexuality (dual-sexed origins) nonetheless occasioned some of the queerest evolutionary narratives of the 19 th century.
Marking the 150 th anniversary of his major sexological work The descent of man, this historical review examines a range of strategies that Darwin deployed in order to accommodate such variations within his evolutionism, while simultaneously attempting to mitigate the potential for condoning sexual phenomena that were feared and reviled in Victorian bourgeois society.
Charles Darwin’s published and unpublished writings contain a plethora of references to sex variations, including intersexualities (‘hermaphroditism’), transformations of sex and non-heteronormative sexual behaviours.