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In this latest, closely reasoned book Chodorow casts a cool eye on two assumptions that continue to inform—and deform—psychoanalytic theories of sex and gender. The first of these assumptions gives rise to ‘universalizing gender theories’. As Chodorow points out, feminist, gay and lesbian theorists have raised objections to the essentialist assumption that there are but ‘two normative modes of development—that of the girl and that of the boy’—and the biological determinism that underlies this assumption. These same critics have also challenged the second assumption, which has to do with the ‘normative status of heterosexuality’. This heterosexual bias gives rise, they say, to the ‘devaluation of women, homophobia, and heterosexism found in much psychoanalytic writing … ’
Chodorow’s book is best understood in the context of the history of our field and of sexology. While no branch of science is value-free, nowhere is this more the case than in fields like sexology, which are invariably saturated with the prevailing prejudices of the cultural milieu. The scientific study of sex first surged only in the 1870s, when masturbation, homosexuality and deviance were discussed from a medical point of view (Sulloway, 1979). The putative evils of masturbation (depletion and insanity) were culturally deplored and clinically documented to the satisfaction of most of the medical profession (Marcus, 1964). Yet little attention was paid to ‘normal’ sexuality, other than to the biology of reproduction.
Around the turn of the century, however, the narrow interest in pathological sexuality and sexual physiology gradually gave way to a broader interest in ‘normal’ sexuality. Originating in part from the general psychiatric interest in concepts of normality, the study of normal sexuality also had its roots, ironically enough, in the contemporary fascination with deviance. The study of such perversions as pain-dependence and sexual sadism, for example, necessarily opened scientists’ eyes to