• Corpus ID: 38213892

Scientific racism and the emergence of the homosexual body.

@article{Somerville1994ScientificRA,
  title={Scientific racism and the emergence of the homosexual body.},
  author={Siobhan B. Somerville},
  journal={Journal of the history of sexuality},
  year={1994},
  volume={5 2},
  pages={
          243-66
        }
}

• S. Somerville
• Published 1 October 1994
• History
• Journal of the history of sexuality

One of the most important insights developed in the fieldsof les? bian and gay history and the history of sexuality has been the notion that homosexuality and, by extension, heterosexuality are relatively recent in? ventions in Western culture, rather than transhistorical or "natural" cate? gories of human beings. As Michel Foucault and other historians of sexuality have argued, although sexual acts between two people of the same sex had been punishable through legal and religious sanctions well before the late nineteenth century, they did not necessarily define indi? viduals as homosexual per se.1 Only recently, in the late nineteenth cen? tury, did a new understanding of sexuality emerge, in which sexual acts