Money’s Doodles

• In Event: Dissenting from Diagnosis: Embodiment and Visual Culture

Abstract

The eccentric sex researcher John Money (1921-2006), a maximalist, wrote forty some odd books and more than five hundred articles, and invented hundreds of words and ideas, some, like lovemap and mindbrain, in circulation, and others, like behavioron, normophilia, and aspirational pedophilia, forgotten. Money called the science-like discipline of sexology fuckology, a queer sounding science. Money’s archive, bequeathed to the Kinsey Institute, contains writings and correspondence and closed patient files, many about children and his research with and on pedophiles, and his artwork, hundreds of drawings and doodles: neon, groovy illustrations of forensic criminology, male and female anatomy, phrenology, and diagrams of diagnosis, pedophilia, and paraphilia. This paper considers the ornamental and auxiliary in Money’s archive, reading his sexological neologisms parallel to his artistic practice and output of photocollages, self-portraits, hair, and “distraction doodles.” Money’s self-identification as an artist and his artworks—made on university and hospital memos, invitations, and symposia schedules—animate a psychedelic boredom in the sexological, and a way to pause and meditate on the differences between boredom and distraction, the connections between diagnosis and the aesthetic, and the experimental and personal forms of scientific inquiry and method. His visual artifacts also illustrate evidence of the embattled forms of agency inherent to the formation of sexological archives and to the bodily encounter with diagnosis.

Author

• Jeanne Vaccaro, Indiana University Bloomington