Between Science and Self-Perception. The Stigmatisation of Sexual Deviance from Positivist Europe to Italy

Throughout the nineteenth century, the international scientific community embarked on a true process of pathologisation and criminalisation of all those individuals who, living their sexuality beyond the boundaries of potentially fertile heterosexuality, were designated as “deviants”. In this perspective, doctors, psychiatrists, and anthropologists constructed stigmatising diagnostic categories, within which they placed all those individuals whose sexual behavior was deemed perverse. This article, based on literary, scientific, and archival sources has two primary aims. First, to illustrate some of the assumptions underlying nineteenth-century scientific treatises on the concept of sexual perversion. Second, to show how some of these individuals who recognised themselves in the categories elaborated by the scientific community ended up perceiving themselves as unfit: true mistakes of nature, unworthy of living.