Article ID: CBB001260562

The Queer Life of a Lab Rat (2012)

unapi

Pettit, Michael John (Author)


History of Psychology
Volume: 15, no. 3
Issue: 3
Pages: 217-227


Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Special Section: Beyond Kinsey, Sex and American Psychology
Language: English

The laboratory rat is an important, if neglected, actor in the history of sexuality. From the 1920s and 1940s, a series of reports emerged from American psychology laboratories detailing instances of spontaneous reversals in sexual behavior within their rat colonies. Frank Beach, then at the American Museum of Natural History, developed a model for the nature of sexuality that stressed that all organisms had the neurological capacity to perform behavior of either sex. Beach enrolled his emerging specialty, behavioral endocrinology, in support of Alfred Kinsey's controversial findings. Both scientists highlighted the multitude of potential sexual outlets pursued by organisms and the prevalence of nonprocreative sexual behaviors. This article draws on elements of queer theory to elucidate how the landscape of the comparative psychologist's rat colony with its organisms, apparatus, practices, and rituals served an integral function in the redefinition of sex in the 20th century. Queer theory calls into question easy proclamations about what counts as natural or normal by drawing attention to the presumed binaries that frequently govern the classification of sex. The maintenance of the colony required the careful management of sex with its obstruction devices, hypersexualized indicator animals, segregation cages, and castrated rats injected with hormones. Moreover, Beach's own writings indicate how his own domestic life became entangled with the sex lives of the rats. An irony animates this Rockefeller-funded sexology: Research funded to elucidate the mechanisms underlying heterosexuality came to question its innateness and universality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

...More

Description Looks at the studies by Frank Beach at the American Museum of Natural History.


Included in

Article Hegarty, Peter (2012) Beyond Kinsey: The Committee for Research on Problems of Sex and American Psychology. History of Psychology (pp. 197-200). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001260562/

Similar Citations

Article Serlin, David; (2012)
Carney Landis and the Psychosexual Landscape of Touch in Mid-20th-Century America (/isis/citation/CBB001251152/)

Book McLaren, Angus; (2012)
Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain (/isis/citation/CBB001212414/)

Chapter Sylvie Chaperon; Camille Noûs; Alain Giami; Sharman Levinson; (2021)
Marie Bonaparte and Female Frigidity: From Physiology to Psychology (/isis/citation/CBB970490543/)

Book Ellis, Havelock; Symonds, John Addington; Crozier, Ivan; (2008)
Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition (/isis/citation/CBB000931065/)

Article Bauer, Heike; (2009)
Theorizing Female Inversion: Sexology, Discipline, and Gender at the Fin de Siècle (/isis/citation/CBB001030578/)

Article Beccalossi, Chiara; (2009)
The Origin of Italian Sexological Studies: Female Sexual Inversion, ca. 1870--1900 (/isis/citation/CBB001030579/)

Article Miller, Allison; (2013)
Am I Normal? American Vernacular Psychology and the Tomboy Body, 1900--1940 (/isis/citation/CBB001320022/)

Article Kate Fisher; Jana Funke; (2019)
The Age of Attraction: Age, Gender and the History of Modern Male Homosexuality (/isis/citation/CBB998120412/)

Article Brennan, Toni; Hegarty, Peter; (2009)
Magnus Hirschfeld, His Biographies and the Possibilities and Boundaries of “Biography” as “Doing History” (/isis/citation/CBB000953778/)

Article Dewsbury, Donald A.; (2002)
The Chicago Five: A Family Group of Integrative Psychobiologists (/isis/citation/CBB000201132/)

Book Tom Waidzunas; (2015)
The Straight Line: How the Fringe Science of Ex-Gay Therapy Reoriented Sexuality (/isis/citation/CBB226278085/)

Article Aaron Lahl; Patrick Henze; (2020)
Developing Homosexuality: Fritz Morgenthaler, Junction Points and Psychoanalytic Theory (/isis/citation/CBB304045330/)

Article Ramsden, Edmund; (2011)
From Rodent Utopia to Urban Hell: Population, Pathology, and the Crowded Rats of NIMH (/isis/citation/CBB001220017/)

Book Downing, Lisa; Morland, Iain; Sullivan, Nikki; (2014)
Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money's Diagnostic Concepts (/isis/citation/CBB001422044/)

Authors & Contributors
Hegarty, Peter
Jana Funke
Sharman Levinson
Sylvie Chaperon
Linge, Ina
Camille Noûs
Concepts
Sexology
Psychology
Homosexuality
Sexual behavior
Science and gender
Sexuality
Time Periods
20th century, early
20th century
19th century
21st century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Italy
Germany
France
Chicago (Illinois, U.S.)
Institutions
Committee for Research on the Problems of Sex (CRPS) (1920-1965)
Columbia University
National Institute of Mental Health (U.S.)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment