"The history of one happy marriage". Cultural grammar of rehabilitation in Autobiography of Havelock Ellis
Abstract
The article raises questions concerning the discursive fabrications of genealogy of sexual deviance and abnormality that rely on metaphors of bodily as well as mental difference. Arguing beyond such prosthetic reading of relationship between gender, sexual and bodily/mental difference, I am instead proposing an intersectional reading accentuating interdependencies of categories of gender, sexuality and disability.
I revisit the autobiography of Havelock Ellis, the founder of British sexology, and discuss the role of bodily difference and tis figurations in the ways in which his autobiography performs an outing of his wife as a Lesbian, while it at the same time strives to construe a performance of happy marriage. It is discourses of dis/ability that harmonize the conflicts between homo/heterosexuality.