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This book looks at the highly publicised, sensational trials of several young female protagonists in the period 1918-1924. These cases, all presented by the press as morality tales involving drugs, murder, adultery, miscegenation and sexual perversion, are used as a prism through which to identify concerns about modern femininity. The book first examines a libel case, brought by a well-known female dancer against a maverick right-wing MP for the accusation of lesbianism. One aspect of this libel trial involved the drawing up of battle-lines in relation to the construction of a new, post-war womanhood. The book then looks at two inquests and three magistrate-court trials that involved women and drugs; young women in relationships with Chinese men were also effectively in the dock. One way of accessing court proceedings has been via the account of the trial published as part of the Notable British Trial Series. There are no extant trial transcripts. But there are prosecution depositions lodged at the National Archives, much press reportage, and a number of relevant memoirs, all giving a keen sense of the key issues raised by the trial. The book also focuses on an extraordinary divorce case, that of Christabel Russell, involving cross-dressing, claims of a virgin birth, extreme sexual ignorance, and a particular brand of eccentric modern femininity.
human physiology. In addition, some of these publications featured passages on homosexuality, labelling it a ‘sexual perversion’. The emergence of these sex education manuals represented the Foucauldian ‘pedagogisation of children’s sex’ and a genuine attempt by the Soviet state to impose a ‘medical-sexual regime’ on Soviet families in the 1950s and 1960s. Doctors and educators, who wrote these manuals, urged parents and teachers to put children’s sexuality under close surveillance, looking out for any sort of suspicious behaviour and signs of sexual deviance. 1 As
the developments in Soviet sexology – homosexual men and women. He knew that many homosexuals were desperately trying to make sense of their feelings and desires, searching for information about their desire in medical encyclopaedias only to find a brief statement that homosexuality was a sexual perversion and a criminal act. They also suffered harassment at the hands of the police and lived in fear of prosecution. Ivanov believed that criminal prosecution of such individuals was pointless as homosexuality was a mental disorder, which should be treated by
perversions, there exists a perverse condition that expresses itself from childhood in aggressive conduct and with a deplorable malignance. These weaknesses reveal themselves as inherent, independent of any external influence, before any sort of learning. In substance, it would be a matter of a tendency of preferring bad behavior over good behavior. Sexual perversions are just one aspect among others comprising the perverse condition. For Dupré, this is indistinguishable from the born- criminal proposed by the anthropologist Lombroso. According to Dupré, “the moral
‘family’ papers, and assumed that their (upper- and middle-class male) readers had no need of ‘protection’ from explicit sexual terms. The only two popular papers to reproduce any of these concepts were the News of the World, who like The Times referred to ‘homosexualists’ (this was, after all, a paper renowned for sensationalism), and the Daily Sketch, who like the Manchester Guardian, referred to ‘sadism’ (the term might have been thought fairly unobjectionable). Most of the papers most of the time in their reporting of this trial wrote of ‘sexual perversions’, ‘a
(muzhelozhstva), lesbian love and other types of sexual perversion, including rape and syphilis infections resulting from this. Considering that this state of affairs is abnormal and that it is likely to have serious consequences, I request that you study this phenomenon on the ground and in detail and then submit an elaborate report (dokladnaya) to the Central Administration of prison camps and colonies of the MVD USSR by 15 March 1956. 2 Yegorov went on to specify a list of the issues which he expected the chiefs of the GULAG colonies across the Soviet Union to
In his manual for law-enforcement agencies titled Sexual Perversions and Criminal Liability (1972), scholar Boris Daniel’bek made a striking statement: ‘As is well known, in the Soviet Union, if a person suffering from homosexuality goes to a medical institution (meditsinskoe uchrezhdenie), doctors are obliged to provide medical aid, and this cannot be considered a reason for starting a criminal prosecution’. 1 Indeed, throughout his text Daniel’bek argued that homosexuality should be dealt with not only by punitive measures, but with the help of ‘medical
likely unpublished so never made it into the archival holdings. Stalin’s heirs, concerned about the spiking rates of crime in society due to the mass release of prisoners, attempted to put the GULAG system in order, to minimise the negative effects of the mass prisoners’ exodus. They attempted to improve prisoners’ health, re-educate them before release and, most significantly, discourage them from engaging in same-sex activity which, as Soviet officials feared, could spill over into society and spawn sexual perversions there. To prevent this from happening, the GULAG
European sexology and endocrinology, as well as the absence of criminal penalties for same-sex relations in the new Soviet penal code. 9 However, medical discussions of homosexuality were discontinued after 1930, when Stalin outlawed homosexuality and introduced rigid ideological controls. Despite homosexuality being deemed an ‘unmentionable vice’ under Stalin, Soviet psychiatrists did not lose interest in the topic completely. 10 For example, in 1935 Soviet psychiatrist Yevgenii Popov produced an article, ‘On the Classification of Sexual Perversions’, which
GULAG, signed a decree, which was circulated among all labour camps and colonies across the country: The Central Administration of prison camps and colonies … has information about increased instances (among both male and female prisoners) of sodomy, lesbian love and other types of sexual perversion, including rape and syphilis resulting from this. Considering that this state of affairs is abnormal and that it is likely to have serious consequences, I request that you study this phenomenon on the