Norviel's Scientific Racism Review

1. The author states at the end of the chapter that "This chapter has focused on the various ways in which late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century scientific discourses on race provided a logic through which sexologists and other medical 'experts' articulated emerging models of homosexuality in the United States." In other words, it is about the different reasons and theories as to how homosexuality came about, and also the impact race may have on it according to past writers.

2. This piece starts out with explaining how sexology even came about. Since there were people who were acting out of their gender norms, and having relations with same sex partners, people were interested in why this was happening and started conducting studies and tests to try and find the reason being homosexuality. Throughout this reading the author explains many different views that different sexologists have on the development of homosexuals in our society. One reason given was based on race. He discussed the terms monogeny and polygeny. Monogeny is the theory that all races originated from the same species and descended from common ancestors, while polygeny means that different races came from different species and are biologically different from one another. There were said to be visible differences in black and white people's genitalia. African American males were found to have larger genitals that white males. Males were not the main focus of study though, women were. The sexologist said that white women's genitalia was "normal" and that black, and homosexual womens were not because they were much larger and had different shape. They described the abnormal genitalia as being a smaller version of a males, and that could be the reason for homosexuals, having somewhat bisexual body parts. The author describes a piece of writing from "Cult of True Womanhood" saying that "racial ideologies of the nineteenth century explicitly privileged white women's sexual purity while implicitly suggesting African American women's sexual accessibility; basically saying that black women were "loose" (for lack of a better term), or more willing to have sexual relations. Somerville also explains the idea of "butch-femme" which he describes to be "as a particular construction of lesbian desire", talking about a lesbians desire for another woman, rather than for a man.

3. Are there more black homosexuals or white homosexuals in the U.S. today? Could homosexuals be classified as being "another species" or from another species, like they say that people of different race are?

4. I thought the topic was an interesting one; however I did not fully understand this reading and was lost at times. Some of the terms and language I am not familiar with so it was hard to follow sometimes. It had convincing evidence for it's points, and many references. All of the references made it somewhat hard to tell if that is the author's belief or someone else's. In many lesbian couples there is still a "man" and a "woman" role in the relationship, where one may act like a guy while the other acts much like any other girl; this confuses me. If this were going to be the case in a relationship, then why does the lesbian that plays the 'female' part not just date a man?