Electricity and Homosexuality: from 19th-century American Sexual Health Literature to D. H. Lawrence

Abstract

This paper surveys a range of scientific, popular scientific and literary texts from the late-19th-to the early 20th-centuries in order to demonstrate electricity's importance within theories of sexuality, in general, and homosexuality, in particular.Unless the sun were enveloped in the body of darkness, would a cast shadow run with me as I walk? Unless the night lay within the embrace of light, would the fish gleam phosphorescent in the sea, would the light break out of the black coals of the hearth, would the electricity gleam out of itself, declaring an opposite being? D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown ' (1915; Lawrence, 1988, p. 258) In the atraction [sic., passim] of material electricity, friction leads to a gradually acumulating atraction, which suddenly reaches the point of explozion or instant discharge; and then the two bodies becuming identical in polarity, repel each other. The analogy between this and the generativ function of [a person's] sexual batteries is too obvious to require elucidation.

Electricity and Imagination: Post-romantic Electrified Experience and the Gendered Body. An Introduction

“…As Halliday (2016) shows, medical, social and literary reformations merge in the radical reassessment of gender and electricity.…”

“…Most of the attention, however, goes to how the concept of electricity moves in different contexts and acquires new meanings, sometimes totally unrelated to the ‘epistemic things’ of the laboratory. As Gilmore and Halliday show, authors used the concept of electricity to explain divine inspiration, sexual attraction, genius, embodied emotions, the poetic imagination, love and immortality (Halliday, , ; Gilmore, , ), and Otto analyses the allegorical meanings of electricity (Otto, ). In my own terminology, the concept of electricity was like a ‘floating concept’, i.e.…”

“…Technical things may also spur the imagination on, especially in technological utopias. That electrical discourse had acquired a life of its own independent of the newest laboratory developments is maybe most visible in Halliday's paper in this issue (Halliday, ).…”