Customer Reviews

An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From Publishers Weekly (October 11, 1999) In this persuasively argued social history, Terry, an associate professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University, contends that homosexuality "has acquired a symbolic centrality in American culture" as a dominant marker between the "normal" and the "abnormal" across a diverse range of disciplines and milieus. Drawing upon a wide range of materials - from personal memoirs to legal cases, yellow journalism, pulp fiction, religious writings, psychology texts and "scientific" studies (which prove to be not all that scientific) - Terry demonstrates how, over the past 100 years, theories about the causes, nature and possible "cure" for homosexuality have focused far more on notions of sexuality, sin, gender and "social good" than on homosexuality itself. Analyzing the work of such 19th-century sexologists as Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis, she illustrates how their naïve, often contradictory theories became so influential that they still inform contemporary thought, including "gay gene" studies and the religious beliefs and rhetoric of the Christian right. While her broad survey is vital to the book, Terry's real strength is her detailed explorations of individual groups - such as the Committee for the study of Sex Variants, a multidisciplinary group of physicians and scientists who, in 1935, attempted to understand the "problem" of homosexuality on a scientific basis - and events, such as the harsh religious, psychoanalytic and cultural backlash against Kinsey's work in the early 1950s. Her exhaustively researched, astute synthesis is not only an original and important contribution to lesbian and gay studies, but sheds new light on the sociology of American life and the history of science. Copyright Publishers Weekly. All rights reserved.

"Jennifer Terry's engaging book provides a sweeping overview of American scientific thought on homosexuality. No one else has provided the depth of analysis or the breadth of coverage offered here. Terry makes a compelling argument: Homosexuality served as a marker of the `abnormal' by which the `normal' was defined."

This is a review of the Kindle version of this book. I've not completed reading it yet, so this review will be limited to my concerns about the book's appearance and usability on the Kindle. A later addition to this review will cover the content of the book.

I am disappointed with the Kindle version of this book. The fonts look very poor. One of the reasons that many of us purchase Kindle versions of books is to provide us with good typeface presentation to make it easier to read as well as control over the presentation, ie., choice of typeface, line spacing, etc., in order to ensure consistency of presentation that is required by those of us with reading difficulties. So, in this case i've lost both the controls and the font face provided really looks like a poor photo copy. My second concern is that the footnotes are not actually active. With Kindle, or any ebook for that matter, you expect to be able to click on footnote numbers so that you can be taken to the actual footnote which is located elsewhere in the book. With a book like this easy access to the footnotes is very important in that it allows for an easy reading flow. For this book the footnotes are merely text so that if you want to read the footnote you have to search through the book, there is no index to the footnotes, to find the footnote.

Given that the price difference between the Kindle and print versions is very little, and that the price of the book is expensive when compared to other Kindle books of a technical nature, i am very disappointed. I appreciate the rave reviews others have given this book, but their reviews are about the content rather than the presentation. I feel that my 3-star rating is actually rather high given the poor quality of the Kindle version.

My review of the content will follow once i've completed reading the entire book, which will be a while given the quality of the Kindle edition presentation.

This book explores the truly fascinating 20th century story of origin and development of the so-called unbiased medical/scientific investigation of homosexuality and how it often functioned to condemn homosexuality, working people, and people of color while advocating heterosexuality (defined as not homosexual). The author records how this binary view of sexuality rose to national preeminence as aided by experts, monopolist foundations and national politicians, like McCarthy, as well as a very human recounting of the struggles of those subjected to it. In the end, the author asks whether the medical/scientific investigation should continue? However, even Freud considered heterosexuality a learned behavior. Isn't the question, who is teaching and why? While there have been some tantalizing starts into these questions, such as John D'Emilio's Making Trouble, there is still much to be learned about how capitalism has destroyed the family; what monopolist, university, and government regulators have done about it; and, how lesbian and gay organizations have succumbed to the ideas of these regulators in the current campaign for gay marriage, see for example Michael Warner's The Trouble with Normal.

With insight and humor, Jennifer Terry chronicles the past two centuries' efforts by science and society to classify and adjudicate our myriad ways to experience love, desire, and pleasure. An important book that raises many new questions and casts new light on the old ones.

"An American Obsession is wide-ranging, theoretically powerful, and rich with new material. Terry's volume provides a remarkable integration of archival history, discourse analysis, and the cultural/social studies of medicine and science." -- Susan Squier, coeditor of Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction

An excellent piece of scholarship, Jennifer Terry's outstanding book on the evolution of scientific thinking about homosexuality is the first to provide a synoptic view of this large and important subject.