Beginning in 1834, entomologists across Europe began reporting same-sex copulatory activity in a variety of insect species, sometimes between species or genera. Most communications concerned male-male couplings of the common cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha, syn. M. vulgaris). These reports offer a unique snapshot of how nineteenth-century naturalists responded when they were required to explain precisely what was natural in their observations. Initial communications of same-sex couplings were mainly accompanied by exclamations of surprise and the rhetoric of disapproval. Such activity was explained either by the assumption that one of the parties must in some way have a female anatomy or that blind or excessive lust compelled more virile individuals to force copulation upon weaker ones. As these explanations were questioned, more complex and controversial theories founded in fashionable evolutionary theories were forwarded as means of assimilating the phenomenon within hegemonic constructions of sexuality. These came from both within entomological circles and from outside observers whose primary interest was in theorizing human eroticism. This article follows a particularly intense dispute which erupted following the claim by one of France's leading naturalists, Henri Gadeau de Kerville, that the homoerotic activity demonstrated by male cockchafers evidenced the existence of a distinctly homosexual instinct. By 1900 no single taxonomy of non-human homoeroticism dominated intellectual discourse on the subject. Although zoological observations of same-sex eroticism continued to be made through the twentieth century, Melolontha were left in relative peace. Keywords. non-human homoeroticism, Melolontha vulgaris Fabricius, entomology, nineteenth century, evolutionary theory, sexology, theology
...MoreDescription Looks at the dispute over the claim by Henri Gadeau de Kerville that the male cockchafers displayed a “homosexual” instinct.
Article
Ina Linge;
(2021)
The Potency of the Butterfly: The Reception of Richard B. Goldschmidt’s Animal Experiments in German Sexology Around 1920
(/isis/citation/CBB132149292/)
Article
Kate Fisher;
Jana Funke;
(2019)
The Age of Attraction: Age, Gender and the History of Modern Male Homosexuality
(/isis/citation/CBB998120412/)
Book
Ellis, Havelock;
Symonds, John Addington;
Crozier, Ivan;
(2008)
Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition
(/isis/citation/CBB000931065/)
Article
Douglas Pretsell;
(2020)
The evolution of the questionnaire in German sexual science: A methodological narrative
(/isis/citation/CBB294665092/)
Book
Minton, Henry L.;
(2002)
Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America
(/isis/citation/CBB000201485/)
Article
Crozier, Ivan;
(2008)
Nineteenth-Century British Psychiatric Writing about Homosexuality before Havelock Ellis: The Missing Story
(/isis/citation/CBB000774473/)
Article
Bauer, Heike;
(2009)
Theorizing Female Inversion: Sexology, Discipline, and Gender at the Fin de Siècle
(/isis/citation/CBB001030578/)
Chapter
Bauer, Heike;
(2006)
Scholars, Scientists and Sexual Inverts: Authority and Sexology in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB001232441/)
Article
Beccalossi, Chiara;
(2009)
The Origin of Italian Sexological Studies: Female Sexual Inversion, ca. 1870--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001030579/)
Article
Bologna Soares de Andrade, Mariana A.;
de Alvarenga Julio, Carlos Eduardo;
(2013)
Investigações sobre o comportamento dos insetos durante o século XIX: uma contribuição de Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre
(/isis/citation/CBB001214030/)
Article
Deborah R. Coen;
(2021)
The Experimental Multispecies Household
(/isis/citation/CBB201138164/)
Article
Andrew C. Kitchener;
Franklin T. Simo;
Badru Mugerwa;
James G. Sanderson;
(2022)
Evidence that Temminck described Felis aurata in 1825, not 1827
(/isis/citation/CBB054549875/)
Article
Hoare, Philip;
(2013)
Cetology: How Science Inspired Moby-Dick
(/isis/citation/CBB001320419/)
Article
Clapperton Mavhunga;
(2006)
Big Game Hunters, Bacteriolgists, and Tsetse Fly Entomology in Colonial Southeast Africa: The Selous-Austen Debate Revisited, 1905—1940s
(/isis/citation/CBB753729681/)
Article
Sealy, Spencer G.;
(2009)
Cuckoos and Their Fosterers: Uncovering Details of Edward Blyth's Field Experiments
(/isis/citation/CBB000931235/)
Article
Clark, J. F. M.;
(2014)
John Lubbock, Science, and the Liberal Intellectual
(/isis/citation/CBB001213902/)
Article
Varma, Charissa S.;
(2009)
Threads that Guide or Ties that Bind: William Kirby and the Essentialism Story
(/isis/citation/CBB000932210/)
Article
Ackery, Phillip. R.;
(2002)
Emin Pasha's Butterflies---A Case for Casati?
(/isis/citation/CBB000740303/)
Article
Gay, Hannah;
(2010)
Chemist, Entomologist, Darwinian, and Man of Affairs: Raphael Meldola and the Making of a Scientific Career
(/isis/citation/CBB000953439/)
Article
Cervantes, Emilio;
(2012)
El viaje al sol de Manuel Martínez de la Escalera
(/isis/citation/CBB001253025/)
Be the first to comment!