Balance and appetite: a medical history of sexuality

Submission note: Thesis presented in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Victoria.

This thesis historicises the medicalisation of sexual appetite in Europe and in the United States across the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The interrelationship of quantity and quality, lack and excess are yet to be explored within intellectual histories of sexuality. Historiographies of sexuality in both the sciences and the humanities have been dominated by accounts of the emergence of object choice, desire and orientation. Through a genealogical approach that draws on the writings of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem, amongst others, I explore key “moments” in the pathologisation of sexuality and show how techniques of viewing, reading, writing, indexing and diagnosing the body were central to the medicalisation of sexual appetite. In each chapter, I analyse different techniques that were inherent in the diagnosis and management of sexual balance, which in turn have constituted and mediated norms of sexual subjectivity. The aim of the thesis is to examine how the question of amounts, that is how much one desires, was never far removed from studies of sexual orientation across the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Three key questions are central to this thesis: how has knowledge on sexual appetite developed? What techniques emerge from the problematisation of sexual appetite? And finally, how are subjectivities configured through the problematisation of sexual appetite and techniques of management? The thesis argues that the fluctuations of sexual appetite, lack and excess, quality and quantity, have always underpinned histories of sexual object choice. It also contends that the medical techniques that inform, produce and transform discourses and knowledges on the sexual appetites lead to the formation of subjectivities for the self-management of sexual balance.