Month: April 2016

Book Review: ‘Curing Queers’ and ‘The Straight Line.’

Tommy Dickinson, Curing Queers: Mental Nurses and their Patients, 1935-74, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013, 272 pages, £70, ISBN 978-0-7190-9588-7 (hbk).

Tom Waidzunas, The Straight Line: How the Fringe Science of Ex-Gay Therapy Reoriented Sexuality, Minneapolis MN and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2015, 336 pages, £65.47 (hbk), £19.07 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-8166-9614-7 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-8166-9615-4 (pbk).

In late 2015, the international campaigning organisation ‘All Out’ launched a new website: Gay Cure Watch. The aim of this was to monitor and ultimately shut down individuals and groups offering so-called reorientation therapies, in which attempts to convert LGBT people to heterosexuality and gender conformity are offered under the guise of medical science. ‘We know you can’t catch “gay” and you can’t cure it either’, the site proclaims. The process through which homosexuality, and particularly male homosexuality in north America and Europe, came to be seen as a matter for medical science over and above legal, religious, or moral considerations has been well-documented; the standpoints of both Gay Cure Watch and the organisations against which it campaigns are legacies of this. They are not the whole story, though, and the story is not a simple one. We urgently need to understand the myriad ways in which theories, practices, and activism surrounding reorientation therapies have been used, by whom, and with what intended and unintended outcomes. Tommy Dickinson’s Curing Queers and Tom Waidzunas’s The Straight Line are both valuable contributions towards answering these complex questions.

Curing Queers delves into the history of aversion therapy in Britain. It is rooted in original oral history interviews, conducted not only with eight individuals who received such treatment to cure them of homosexuality, but also with 17 nurses who were involved in providing it. The goal is to examine their experiences, their impressions and their motivations as they attempted to cure or be cured, and the memories shared in these interviews are deployed effectively throughout. The first two chapters situate aversion therapies and the nurses who delivered them within their medical and cultural context. The first chapter provides an overview of clinical theories and treatments surrounding homosexuality, the impact of the Second World War on sexual attitudes and behaviour, post-war anxieties surrounding gender roles and loss of empire, and the impact of newspaper reporting of the homosexual ‘problem’ and key events such as the publication of the Wolfenden Report. The value of examining the experiences and views of both patients and nurses is brought out here: the mixed messages and confusion about what ‘caused’ homosexuality and what should be done about it affected patient and nurse alike. Men who were troubled by their same-sex attraction were encouraged to seek medical help, albeit often only as a desperate alternative to imprisonment, and nurses were encouraged to see homosexuality as a potentially damaging but curable condition. Widespread condemnation of homosexuality enabled nurses to participate in aversion therapy on the grounds that it could be beneficial for the individual patient who had sought out a cure, even though some nurses were homosexual themselves.

This is perhaps one of Dickinson’s most striking findings. The mental hospital itself could be a particularly welcoming environment for gay men on its staff: it was an enclosed community, slightly separated from the social mores of the wider world, and some nurses recalled a lively gay subculture. And yet, delivering aversion therapies to gay men rarely created the personal or professional tensions that we might expect. Patients were understood to be fully consenting and to be so very distressed and desperate to change that they were prepared to undergo almost anything. In this, they were perceived by nurses who were content with their homosexuality as entirely different from themselves, and perhaps able to benefit from treatment. This and other features of the professional context in which aversion therapy was practised are described in the second chapter. The nature of nursing education, hospital hierarchies, the rise of somatic explanations and treatments for all forms of mental illness, and the move towards treatment in the community in the post-war era, are all carefully outlined. Each contributed to creating an environment in which aversion therapy for homosexuality was widely and often unquestioningly accepted by nursing staff.

Chapters 3 and 4 then turn to the responses and reactions of nurses in more detail. They are divided into the submissive and subversive, with the former drawing on comparisons with nursing staff working for the Nazis and taking part in the infamous Tuskegee experiments, in which African American men participating in a decades-long medical study of syphilis were denied treatment and information that could have saved many lives. Nurses, Dickinson argues, have used a variety of methods to justify and cope with their participation in unethical and dangerous treatments. These have included a focus on their own specific role rather than the larger programme, faith in the overall benefits of their activities and the ready consent of their patients, failure to empathise with their patients, and an acknowledged need to fit in to the wider hospital community and to protect their job. However, not all nurses simply obeyed orders. Two of Dickinson’s interview subjects described acts of subversion, from simply chatting to patients to offer reassurances about their homosexuality, to throwing away medication and lying to superior staff about witnessing behaviour that suggested a successful ‘cure’. These nurses are quoted at length, bringing their personalities and experiences vividly to life. It is only a shame that more first-hand accounts could not be found to flesh out the analysis.

The final section of Curing Queers considers changes from the 1950s in the worlds of nursing and gay liberation campaigns alike. New nurse therapists brought a greater theoretical awareness of psychiatric diagnoses and treatments, Dickinson argues, while critiques of psychiatry in general and aversion therapy in particular challenged the status of homosexuality as an illness with a recognised cure. This final chapter perhaps does not connect these changes to the experiences of patients and nurses as much as it might. However, the most striking omission in Curing Queers is the lack of recognition of the very different scientific and ethical standards that were in place during the period under examination. It was not only this group of patients whose consent to treatment was neither adequately informed nor freely given, by today’s standards; coercion and questionable consent having a long history within mental health medicine. Nor was it unusual to find that evidence of efficacy in mental health medicine relied upon a handful of individual case studies, patient self-report, and no long-term follow up. It is around these matters of changing ethics and scientific practice that The Straight Line provides an ideal companion piece.

The Straight Line takes up the story on the other side of the Atlantic, examining reorientation therapies (as aversion therapies and their companion treatments within psychoanalysis and psychotherapy came to be known) from the late 1940s through to 2010. Its approach and objectives are rather different from those of Curing Queers. With a background in the sociology of scientific knowledge, Waidzunas seeks to trace the shifting meaning of sexual orientation and homosexuality, and the changing nature of credible scientific evidence. Through careful and intellectually rich analysis of the battles during these decades between psychiatrists, religious leaders, gay activists, and ex-gay campaigners, he plots transformations in what it meant to be homosexual or heterosexual, to be cured, and to prove such states with science. Beginning with the psychoanalytic understanding of orientation that dominated in post-war America, he emphasises that the case study, relying upon the patient’s own report of their sexuality, was initially accepted as persuasive evidence thanks to the pervasive influence of Freud’s case studies. This was challenged in the 1960s with the rise of experimental psychology. Behavioural treatments were imported from Britain to the USA, and this research sought to produce a different kind of evidence. It relied upon experimentation involving a greater number of participants, control groups, and physical measurements of arousal. Sexual orientation itself shifted from the mind to the body.

At the same time, however, all attempts at reorientation were coming under fire. Homosexuality was removed from the influential American reference work of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973. The next section of The Straight Line is centred around the work of Robert Spitzer, the psychiatrist who is credited with this removal and who then provoked enormous controversy three decades later by researching and reporting on the occasional efficacy of the same reorientation treatments he had helped to condemn. Spitzer is used to illustrate the extent to which the meaning and measures of orientation shifted over this period: Waidzunas argues that Spitzer’s own opinions and methods remained unchanged, while the meaning and measurement of orientation did not. In the 1970s, his view of homosexuality as ‘suboptimal’ but not an illness was both radical and essential to the rewriting of the DSM, as was his willingness to engage with the views of gay activists on the margins of the psychiatric profession. By 2010, those on the margins were the advocates of reorientation, and his readiness to rely upon self-reports from the ex-gay community was roundly criticised on evidentiary and ethical grounds. Although his findings were used as proof that orientation could be changed, pro-reorientation campaigners no longer spoke of illness but grounded their arguments instead in the language of human rights and religious freedoms. The question of how to define and measure orientation remained contested, though, as debate surrounding the measurement and alteration of sexuality continued.

Subsequent chapters provide an account of a new ‘middle way’ in the 2000s, including the APA’s influential position statement on conversion therapy for homosexuality. The APA came down firmly on the side of sexual orientation as immutable and located in the body, physiologically measurable, and unsuitable for treatment. Reflecting the compromises and adjustments made by the ex-gay movement and their opponents in search of their ‘middle way’, the APA also acknowledged that sexual identity, rather than orientation, could be changed by psychological treatment. This was only appropriate for individuals for whom a homosexual identity could not be reconciled with other aspects of their life, such as a religious identity, the APA report emphasised. This distinction between orientation and identity had emerged from debates between ‘ex-gay’ groups, grappling with the nature and meaning of a lifelong change in sexuality, and ‘ex-ex-gay’ activists, who were sympathetic towards deeply held religious beliefs and promoted respect for the decisions of those who sought treatment. Separating orientation and identity allowed for the possibility of same-sex attraction to remain while a heterosexual lifestyle was pursued, and made space for physiological testing to measure arousal, or orientation, alongside self-reporting to assess the individual’s sexual identity. Here, Waidzunas brings out the rich and complex interactions between different groups, as meanings and evidence were carefully negotiated.

The final chapter moves our attention to Uganda at the time of an Anti-Homosexuality Act, passed there in 2014. This offers an interesting contrast to the USA: social workers rather than psychiatrists and psychologists were key figures in the debate around homosexuality, and although reorientation therapies were accepted in theory, criminalisation and the extent of hostility towards gay people meant that it had not been put into practice. Importantly, homosexuality was frequently defined not simply as same-sex attraction, but as behaviour invariably involving child abuse and the spread of HIV. As a result, campaigners did not debate how sexual orientation might be measured or caused, but rather, focused on increasing and enforcing criminal penalties on the one hand, and offering covert grassroots support and education for and about LGBT issues and people on the other. Would it help campaigners against the Anti-Homosexuality Act to adopt an essentialist argument, to present sexual orientation as innate and immutable, Waidzunas asks? This closing chapter brings to the foreground one of the underlying issues that The Straight Line addresses: on what basis should LGBT rights arguments be founded? The opportunity to present any case about sexual orientation – acquired disorder, inborn state, natural variation – depends upon legal, political, professional and intellectual structures, and each one creates its own opportunities and limitations alike.

These books illustrate the potential for harm within any rigid model of acceptable gendered and sexual behaviour. They also highlight that scientific authority is far from neutral, that it can be used in unexpected ways, that such uses will themselves have unintended outcomes. Alternatives to criminal penalties aiming to cure rather than punish are not necessarily preferable; arguments in favour of greater tolerance on the basis of biology leave tolerance on other grounds out in the cold. As Waidzunas remarks in his closing pages, recognising the limits of science is not to condemn its achievements. Rather, such recognition might allow us to step away from rigid binaries and universals of all types, and towards reflection, dialogue, and thoughtful enquiry. Science, after all, is not the only way of knowing.

Janet Weston is a Research Fellow at the Centre for History in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where her research explores how the prison medical services in England and Ireland responded to HIV/AIDS from the 1980s onwards. This is part of a Wellcome Trust-funded project on the history of prisoner health: https://histprisonhealth.com/. Her PhD looked at medical approaches to sexual offenders in the early/mid-twentieth century.

“The human is not dead; it is going to be resurrected.”

This is the first in a four-part report from the workshop, ‘The Future of the History of the Human Sciences,’ which was held at the University of York, 7-8 April 2016 (see a storify form the workshop here). The workshop was jointly hosted by HHS and Chris Renwick (History, York), and was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the University of York. Here, David Saunders (postgraduate student at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Manchester) reports on one of the workshop’s core problematics: The Problem of The Human.

“We very much hope that this is an event where we can all be provocative and disagree with each other,” notes Felicity Callard (editor-in-chief of History of the Human Sciences) in her opening address to the attendees of the ‘Future of the History of the Human Sciences’ conference. The event’s first session, ‘The Problem of the Human’, sought to address the human sciences’ most central, and yet most frustratingly illusive, subject of inquiry – the human itself. The death of the human as a philosophical and scientific category has been endlessly prophesised and postponed over the years, from Michel Foucault’s oft-repeated prediction of man ‘erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault, 1966) to more recent concerns regarding the supposed overthrow of ‘selfhood’ by ‘brainhood’ facilitated by the emergent neurosciences (Vidal, 2009). Discussions among historians and human scientists about the uncertain ontological status of the human clearly continue to foster the kind of passionate and provocative disagreement that the event’s organisers had hoped for.

In the first paper, ‘Resisting Neurosciences and Sustaining History’, Roger Smith (Emiritus Reader in the History of Science, Lancaster) expresses his scepticism regarding the supposed novelty and radical impact of the neurosciences on conventional ideas of the human. Rather, Smith argues, materialist explanations for sentience have been present since the nineteenth-century and have had a very limited impact on the daily lives of ordinary people. Instead of neuroscientific colonisation, Smith sees the persistence of non-neuro understandings of the human, drawn from diverse sources such as folk knowledge, religious belief, and the social sciences. For Smith, any claim that these bodies of knowledge will all become subservient to the neurosciences is extremely questionable. Thus, rather than the replacement of one body of knowledge by another, Smith wishes to focus on the relationships between ways of knowing and being.

Such an approach structures Smith’s current research on the history of kinaesthesia. For Smith, movement provides a privileged entry point into engagements between the neurosciences, literary and cultural studies, and historical research, brought into contact via a shared interest in embodied knowledge and experience (e.g. Berthoz and Petit, 2008). This interest in touch and movement is not a recent development, Smith argues, but instead has formed a central preoccupation for philosophical inquiries since the time of Aristotle. Ultimately, Smith proposes, this recognition of the complex historical ontology underpinning modern concepts of the senses reminds us that all psychological categories of human experience are ‘up for grabs’ in future historical studies.

Steve Fuller’s (Sociology, Warwick University) following paper, ‘Kuhn’s Curse and the Crisis of the Human’, directly critiques Smith’s conceptualisation of the human. Fuller begins his paper with two pervasive influences in the history of the human sciences: Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault. Fuller argues that the one of the key tenets of Kuhn’s approach to history is frequently overlooked: his belief that historical studies can only be conducted on issues that have long since been resolved. Thus, writing histories of the human necessarily requires a Foucauldian perspective in which the human has ‘come and gone’ as a distinct category of being. However, Fuller argues that this perspective has been lost through the work of Ian Hacking, which he proposes has distorted Foucauldian thinking in a way that protects the special ontological status of the human and phenomena such as free will and autonomy (Hacking, 2002). The ensuing philosophical confusion, Fuller contends, has fuelled transhumanist debates.

Transhumanism, Fuller argues, is ‘not ashamed’ to talk about human issues of free will and autonomy, but rather questions whether the biological body, as bequeathed by evolutionary processes, is the only platform from which one can hold such discussions. Instead, Fuller suggests that a greater embrace of technology and cyborg forms of living is required. What emerges from this, he argues, is an ‘anti-Foucauldian’ view of the human in which ‘the human is not dead; it is going to be resurrected’. The role of history in this process, Fuller posits, is to recover alternative and long-forgotten paths in medicine and science that will legitimate and provide past precedents for the technological breakthroughs of future generations. Thus, historians’ attempts to reveal the contingent nature of current scientific orthodoxy, and to look again at paths not taken, has more than academic value; it provides a glimpse of the histories that future generations will use to make sense of their own understandings of human nature.

Jonna Brenninkmeijer’s (Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen) paper, ‘The Case of Neuromarketing’, provides an empirical perspective on these conceptual visions of the human. Utilising observations from fieldwork in a neuromarketing company, Brenninkmeijer outlines how neuro-practitioners in marketing have constructed a vision of the human as overly-complex, self-deceiving, and ultimately unreliable. These practitioners have thus turned to the brain to provide more straightforward, and thus commercially profitable, answers. For Brenninkmeijer, neuromarketing research ‘dehumanises’ consumers, removing the uncertainty and contradiction of human experience in order to gain reliable, quantitative results. Thus, the use of neuroscientific technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides opportunities to map out emotional and subjective responses and standardise and predict consumer reactions.

Ultimately, Brenninkmeijer contends that neuromarketing research fuels a conceptual dichotomy in which humans and brains are equated with deception and truth respectively. This also creates tension between experimenters and participants, with the former frequently frustrated by the difficulty and complexity of managing human subjects in a research environment. Brenninkmeijer concludes that this tension between human and brain cannot be resolved by these neuro-practitioners; even when brains give uniform and commercially useful ‘answers’, the free will, autonomy, and resistance of human subjects will continue to frustrate their agendas.

In many ways, it seems to me that the human that emerges from both Smith and Brenninkmeijer’s papers demonstrates notable similarities. In both accounts, the human is irreducible to a single conceptual category or body of knowledge, retaining its ability to confuse, surprise, and frustrate historian and human scientist alike. However, Fuller departs from this vision of the body, downplaying the current biological form of the human as merely one phase through which humanity will eventually pass. Divisions between these competing visions of the human continued to surface throughout the conference without any clear resolution. Yet to return to Callard’s initial call for disagreement, and indeed the new editors’ introduction for the History of the Human Sciences at this new juncture, these ongoing debates need not be a source of disciplinary anxiety, but might instead provide ground upon which innovative engagements with the problem of the human can grow and flourish in the years to come.

David Saunders is a postgraduate student at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (University of Manchester). His forthcoming doctoral research at the Centre for the History of the Emotions (Queen Mary University of London) focuses on the rise of the neurosciences in British post-war epilepsy research as part of the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Research Project ‘Living with Feeling‘

 

“The fact that we all assume that instantaneous photos of a smile are the only way to represent a smile tells us a lot about how pervasive the notion of the instant has been” – an interview with Beatriz Pichel

For the latest in our series of author interviews, we spoke to Beatriz Pichel, Wellcome Trust Fellow in Medical Humanities, at the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University. Dr Pichel works between the history of photography, the history of emotions, and the medical humanities; she is currently working on the relationship between psychological theories of the emotions and photography at then turn of the nineteenth century. Her new paper, ‘From Facial Expressions to Bodily Gestures: Passions, Photography and Movement in French 19th-Century Sciences‘ is available, open access, in the current issue of History of the Human Sciences. Dr Pichel spoke to HHS Web Editor, Des Fitzgerald. 

Des Fitzgerald: The fundamental claim of your paper, as I read it, and if you’ll forgive a radical simplification, is that the history of the emotions is also the history of photographic technology. Why was it that attention to the emotions, particularly, became so associated with photographic technology? Or should we understand what’s going on here as only one story within a broader history of visual technology in the history of psychology?

Beatriz Pichel: In the second half of the nineteenth century, psychologists and physiologists started to measure emotions in terms of bodily changes (breath, blood pressure, pulse, etc.). But some of them nonetheless still used photographs to see the external changes in the body. This is interesting because, at this time, the imaging of emotion is the only use of photography that I have found in the group of psychologists that I’m looking at. So yes, I would suggest that there is a special connection between photography and emotions in the history of psychology – although, of course, the uses of photography in psychology cannot be reduced to this. But there is a further question, which relates to what we understand by the ‘history of emotions’ more broadly. In my article, I refer to the history of emotions as a discipline, and I claim that part of this history should be written so as to take into account photographic history. I focus on one example: the history of how psychology has understood emotional expressions.

DF: Though your paper is very focused  on photographic technology, I also read it as a broader call for perhaps more attention to material cultures of experiment within the history of the emotions. Is this fair? Have these debates advanced as far as you would like?

BP: Yes, that is a fair reading. There are, of course, fantastic works that examine the practices and the material settings of the laboratory where emotions were ‘created’ – I’m thinking of Otniel Dror’s work (1999, 2011) for instance. This attention is fortunately common in both the history of medicine and the history of emotions nowadays. Perhaps my main claim here would be to turn to material and visual aspects of experiments at the same time. This is something that has been done in relation to the graphic method (an instrument which transcribed movement into linear traces on paper) but not so much in relation to photography. What I argue here is that we should consider images as objects embedded into material practices and cultures. This is actually the question that I would like to see not only in specialized debates in photography, but also in broader historical studies.

DF: We are used to accounts of photography eliciting emotion, and as having affective weight in that sense  – but one of the central claims of your paper (as I understand it) is that photographic technology is also constitutive of how we understand emotions in the first place. Can you expand on this claim a bit: how hard an argument are you making here, and where would you locate it within  studies of affect more generally?

BP: My strong claim in the article is that photographs – especially the ones produced in scientific studies – have participated in our understanding of what constitutes an emotional expression. First of all, because these studies used photography as a method of research. Photographs not only documented their theories but also provided essential information. Secondly, and most important for me, these photographs carried with them particular notions about emotional expressions: their location on the face, and their identification with the instant captured on the plate. It is the latter notion what is more relevant here. Charles Darwin, Duchenne de Boulogne and others described the process of producing an emotional expression, but they didn’t show this process: photographs displayed just one instant that summarized that process. This instant is not conceptualized as such in their books, but was nonetheless materialized in the photographs. These photographs were later appropriated by others such as the psychologist Georges Dumas and the physiologist Charles-Émile François-Franck, who also followed their photographic methods. By doing this, Dumas and François-Franck were implicitly assuming the principle of the instant: that the smile was that frozen moment that they were seeing in the photographs. This is especially important if we take into account that photography, as I discuss in the article, was able to introduce movement as an element in the analysis. However, this was a marginal practice, and most psychologists continued Duchenne’s and Darwin’s model (the focus on the face, and the use of instantaneous photography). The fact that we all assume that instantaneous photos of a smile are the only way to represent a smile tells us a lot about how pervasive the notion of the instant has been.

I think that the approach I develop here, based on research in the history of emotions, photographic history and the history of medicine, complements the work carried out in affect theory. My impression – as a non-specialist in the field-, is that affect theory is more helpful in the analysis of how photographs as visual objects can provoke emotions, or how we become attached to certain images. But it is difficult to apply it to epistemological questions such as why we understand emotions and emotional expressions in particular ways. Emotions are experienced but also categorised and understood, and therefore I think it is a good thing to have several theoretical approaches to examine each of these aspects.

DF: One of the really interesting stories, in this paper, is the story of the transition from an idea, first, that emotion is constituted by the fleeting expression in the face, versus, second, the idea that emotion is more of a bodily gesture, or a series of movements.  Your interest, in the article, is in how this becomes a story about the move from the photograph to the chronophotograph. But I also wondered what else was going on here – conceptually, empirical, even culturally? And how can we disentangle technological from cultural and conceptual developments I our interpretation of this scene – if at all?  

BP: I don’t think we can really disentangle the scientific and technological from other cultural developments and concerns, and that’s precisely the interesting point. The idea of the presence of the body in movement is something that permeates the French cultural scene at the end of the nineteenth century. As is widely known, hysterical patients became ‘muses’ or even role models for actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt. But there is also, as you said, something going on that is deeper than that. This is the moment when film was invented, but also when Loie Fuller started performing. Fuller is deemed one of the pioneers of modern dance. Her most famous dance, the Serpentine, was all about occupying the space with the movement of her body and clothing, using all sorts of technological props and theatrical lighting. She was an artist as well as an amateur scientist who was a close friend of Marie Curie and did research on lighting design. It’s a fascinating period to examine links between emerging technologies and emerging movements of the body.

DF: Was there any dialogue between the scientists who interest you, and more (for want of a better word) ‘creative’ or ‘fringe’ figures also exploring photography in this period?  For example, its maybe an obvious and/or stupid comparison, but to me the images by Albert Londe, in particular, are strikingly  redolent of the work of someone like Muybridge. It’s a crude dichotomy, but I guess my question is about two kinds of modernity that seem to getting mediated by photographic technologies in this period – scientific and artistic. What kind of dialogue is taking place across these twinned developments – if any?

BP: Definitely, there is a continuous dialogue between the sciences and arts, often mediated by photography. My Wellcome Trust funded project precisely tries to identify these links, particularly with theatre. Besides tracing shared ideas in the expression of emotions, we can also trace individuals who populated both worlds. Albert Londe is a very good example. He was a photographer, exactly like Muybridge. He had with no particular knowledge of medicine, but working at the Salpêtrière he learnt a great deal about nervous and physiological reactions. He later applied this knowledge, for instance, to his work photographing actors and his research on artificial lighting and the use of magnesium flash. He also presented his discoveries to the Société Française de la Photographie, so other photographers could learn from him. On the other hand, Charcot and Richer asked Londe to photograph artworks to demonstrate the history of hysteria, and psychologists like Alfred Binet wrote theatrical pieces. One of the things I like the most about this period are the blurred lines we find among disciplines, as well as between ‘science’ and ‘art’.

DF: Is there anything in this history that can help us to understand the visual technologies that seem to structure the science of emotion in the twenty-first century? I am thinking especially of the relationship between studies of emotion and the neurosciences in our own period.   

I would say that there is still the same desire to see emotions, locating them in particular places: the face, the body, the brain. It seems that we need images to fix emotions, turning them into a controllable thing –which I presume is exactly the opposite of what we experience! What is common in both periods, furthermore, is that the final image, the one reproduced in books and articles, is taken as the ‘data’ that we have to analyse. This means that the particular technological choices made in the production of that image usually stay out of question. These choices are never neutral, and they determine the kind of results we can get. I think we need to develop more critical approaches that take into account image-making processes, technologies and practices.

‘From Facial Expressions to Bodily Gestures: Passions, Photography and Movement in French 19th-Century Sciences’,  by Beatriz Pichel, is available open access in the February 2016 issue of History of the Human Sciences: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/29/1/27.abstract