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

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Summary: Susan Squier, Professor, Penn State University
Review: "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

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Summary: Joanne Meyerowitz, editor of Not June Cleaver
Review: "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."

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Summary: an american obsession
Review: 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.

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Summary: Publishers Weekly review (October 11, 1999)
Review: 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.

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Summary: Couldn't put it down!
Review: 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.

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Summary: an american obsession
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: an american obsession
Review: 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.