title: Female same-sex desires: conceptualizing a disease in competing medical fields in nineteenth-century Europe.
abstract: This article examines the ways in which female same-sex desires were represented across a range of nineteenth-century European medical writings. While recognizing the conceptual innovations of the late-nineteenth-century psychiatric idea of "sexual inversion," it argues that the category of "sexual invert" was positioned alongside other medical representations of same-sex desires, such as gynecological descriptions of women with hypertrophy of the clitoris and socio-cultural analyses of the tribade-prostitute. These representations complicate current historical accounts of sexual inversion, which emphasize conceptual ruptures within the history of medicine.
authors.affiliation: Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland, Forgan-Smith Building, Level 5, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia. c.beccalossi@uq.edu.au
authors.forename: Chiara
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Beccalossi
mesh_terms: D005060:Europe; D005260:Female; D006176:Gynecology / Q000266:history; D006663:Historiography; D049672:History, 19th Century; D018452:Homosexuality, Female / Q000266:history* / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000266:history; D060386:Sex Workers / Q000266:history; D044347:Sexology / Q000266:history*