ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Substances of Sex/ology in Egypt and Algeria

• In Event: Beyond Binaries in LGBTQI+ Histories of Sexology: Bi, Trans, Intersex

English Abstract

This paper positions Northern Africa and Afro-Arab racial difference as constitutive to sexological knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before focusing on the itineraries of two scientists, Serge Voronoff and Magnus Hirschfeld. Voronoff arrived in Egypt in 1896 and remained as a physician in the Khedival court until 1910. His observations of eunuchs informed his later experiments with inter-species testicular transplants and other rejuvenation techniques. He subsequently opened a clinic in Algiers and performed experiments on sheep so that they may produce more wool. I read his oeuvre in relation to what Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein have theorized as Tranimalities (2015) and what Kadji Amin has analyzed as the eugenic genealogies of trans medicine (2018). Voronoff’s experiments point to the racial histories of endocrinology. Hirschfeld visited Egypt as a part of his world tour in 1931. I examine his lectures at the American University in Cairo, his conversations with prominent local doctors and the work of his student and interlocutor the Egyptian sexologist Faraj Fakhri. I argue that although sexology remained a derivative discourse in Arabic, one that was highly inflected by statist family-planning, it was in Egypt and Algeria that sexology found its primary sources, those substantive differences that ultimately informed how sex was distilled into a supplement both pharmaceutically and analytically. I conclude with some notes on the medicalization of testosterone and estrogen and how this contours subsequent trans subjectivities.

Author

• Beshouy Botros, Yale University