Narrating ‘Sexual Inversion’: The Case of Patient N* in Ippolit Tarnovskii’s 'Sexual Inversion among Women'

• In Event: Queer(ing) Archives: Alternative Intimacies, Histories, and Subjectivities

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, medical doctors published case histories of patients with various forms of sexual “deviance” including “sexual inversion,” a term that closely related same-sex desires to cross-gendered behaviors. Despite the substantial scholarship on gender and sexuality in the imperial Russia, medical texts on sexual inversion remain underexplored. This paper focuses on the question: How should we treat nineteenth-century accounts of sexual inversion, which blur the lines between our contemporary understandings of homosexuality, queerness, and transness? To explore this question, I perform a close analysis of the gynecologist Ippolit Tarnovskii’s case history of patient N*, included in his 1895 volume Sexual Inversion among Women. In this case history, the doctor-narrator relates the life story of patient N*, as told by both patient N* and their female partner. The doctor-narrator emphasized aspects of patient N*’s biography that conformed to contemporaneous studies of female sexual inversion where the patient reported preferring “masculine” attire and behavior from a young age. However, patient N* also described “feeling like [they] were born a man” and living as a man among their small circle of friends. These comments relate to patient N*’s gender identity, which the doctor-narrator interpreted as pronounced symptoms of sexual inversion. I analyze this text from a narratological perspective using scholarship on the ethics of trans care that problematizes physicians’ narration and patients’ self-expression in case histories. In so doing, my paper studies the erasure of trans voices from the nineteenth-century Russian medical archive and contributes to their recovery.

Author

• LeiAnna X Hamel, Smith College