La «chiave dell’enigma»? Variabilità sessuale e narrazioni depatologizzanti nell’antropologia di Paolo Mantegazza

Abstract

This article deals with the contribution of Paolo Mantegazza’s anthropology to the emergence of sexual science during the nineteenth century. First, it shows the continuities and discontinuities between the medical-psychiatric strand in the study of human sexuality and Mantegazza’s anthropological method. Second, it argues that by combining a blurred view of the boundaries between healthy and pathological with the study of the variability of global sexual behaviours, Mantegazza spread narratives that embodied depathologising discourses towards homosexual desires. Finally, it demonstrates that some of the protagonists of the so-called anthropological turn of the early-twentieth-century sexual science took up his arguments and used them to advocate for a depathologisation of homosexuality.

Keywords

• anthropology
• homosexuality
• paolo mantegazza
• psychiatry
• sexual science