Melissa N. Stein

In Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934, Melissa N. Stein argues, “Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, [scientists’] conclusions about human difference helped naturalize and institutionalize sociopolitical difference – and hierarchy – in America. For these scientists, the physical body both reflected and determined the character of the social body” (pg. 4). She continues, “race provided the raison d’être for whole fields of scientific inquiry and a space for scientists to lay claim to social and political relevance” (pg. 5). Incorporating gender, Stein writes, “Gender – a metalanguage in its own right and one already in use as a biological means through which the populace could be parsed and understood – functioned as a rhetorical tool for scientists to employ in constructing race” (pg. 5). Indeed, just as other scholars such as Gail Bederman have concluded, race and gender were inextricably intertwined. These scientists and ethnographers used their studies to work toward an ideal society through legislation and social programs (pg. 12). In this way, Stein writes, “Scientific theories about race reached a wide audience through…lecture circuits and print media; ethnology was a science for the people as much as it was about people” (pg. 16).
Of the long nineteenth century, Stein writes, “Especially in its discussion of gender, nineteenth-century scientific thought about race changed over time, revising itself to meet the ideological needs of a nation divided first over slavery and later over the status that blacks would occupy as free people” (pg. 29). During this long period, “As the nation stood on the brink of war, what was at stake in ethnological defenses of slavery such as [John] Van Evrie’s had intensified and changed; it now included the question of who could fully exercise ‘manhood rights’ if slavery were to disappear” (pg. 91). This led physicians to obsess over the proper roles of manhood and womanhood, both inextricably tied to the hierarchy of race. Recalling Gerald Linderman’s thesis in Embattled Courage, Stein argues, “Manhood was central to social and political concerns that preoccupied Americans during the Civil War” (pg. 104). Following the Civil War, “the emergence of the ‘black beast’ and racial scientists’ growing interest in sexuality more generally in the late nineteenth century was precipitated by several factors in American politics, culture, and science” (pg. 148). New theories of sexuality, particularly a focus on homosexuality, inversion, and hermaphrodites dominated the discourse surrounding gender in America. Stein writes, “In the context of evolutionary theory’s growing popularity in the United States, sexuality and sexual instincts joined sex and gender as markers of racial difference in late nineteenth-century racial science” (pg. 167). This led white scientists to claim, “The ‘lower races’ deviated from white norms of gender roles, reproductive anatomy, and sexual behavior. Predictably, when these same medical scientists turned their attention to gender or sexual variance, they often read these differences through the lens of race,” further demonstrating the intertwined nature of the two (pg. 170). In order to control what people perceived as sexual deviancy, some white scientists advocated castration as an alternative to lynching. This desire to modify genitalia in order to facilitate proper sexuality also helped popularize circumcision. Stein writes, “From the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, emasculation was central to scientific and popular discussions of lynching, the brutal practice itself, and racial scientists’ proposed medio-legal alternatives to mob violence” (pg. 219). In all cases, sex and gender co-existed on an axis in the American mind. Stein concludes, “In a society where social and political institutions were structured around binaries, it was the spaces in between that fascinated and loomed most dangerous to scientists” (pg. 172).… (más)