Abstract

This article examines the ways in which female same-sex desires were represented across a range of nineteenth-century European medical writings. While recognizing the conceptual innovations of the late-nineteenth-century psychiatric idea of “sexual inversion,” it argues that the category of “sexual invert” was positioned alongside other medical representations of same-sex desires, such as gynecological descrip- tions of women with hypertrophy of the clitoris and socio-cultural analy- ses of the tribade-prostitute. These representations complicate current historical accounts of sexual inversion, which emphasize conceptual rup- tures within the history of medicine.