Black Novels and/as American Sexology

Abstract

Racial science and American sexology around the turn of the twentieth century capitalized on popular fears about Black sexuality to promote theories of Black sexual pathology. This chapter considers the ways in which Black American novelists deployed literary narrative to refute and subvert these scientific claims, thus participating in what I call Black vernacular sexology. Taking Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces (1900) as a case study, the chapter compares novelistic dramatizations of scientific debates over questions such as the racial origins of sexual violence to similar contemporaneous debates taking place within medical and scientific literatures. It shows that the literary intervention of an authoritative narratorial voice in this context allowed for a strategic amplification of Black expertise that questioned the conclusions of white scientists and posited alternative theories. Hopkins both adapts the form of the scientific case study and develops two narrative tools—which I term intradiegetic debate and narratorial prescription—to provide persuasive modes of sexological theorization and knowledge dissemination. Such uses of literary narrative allowed Hopkins to argue to a broader reading public that a pathological sexual violence endemic to Southern white men was the real problem in need of urgent treatment, contrary to the claims found in institutionally sanctioned scientific publications. This examination demonstrates how Black Americans successfully worked within the form of the literary novel to contribute dissenting voices to the white-dominated arena of American sexological thought.