Anaesthesia, Frigidity and Dispassionate Objectivity: On the Racial and Sexual Politics of Unfeeling in Medicine

In this online seminar, Dr Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism's paradigm of universal feeling. The fear of frigidity, a queer unwomanliness, haunts the women doctors (both historical figures and literary characters) who must negotiate heteronormative affective expectations in their shift from the private to the public sphere while pathologized by gynecology.

Yao first complicates feminist epistemologies of science to reframe this history of white women in medicine by tracking the homology between the invention of anaesthesia as a technology of controlled unfeeling and the pathology of queer female frigidity that the sexologist Havelock Ellis diagnosed as “sexual anaesthesia.” Yao investigates how white women physicians manipulated the unfeeling professionalism of medicine as a subversive tactic to anesthetize the coercive affective imperatives of marriage and family.

Yao then centres Black women, whose occlusions haunt the earlier discussions. Taking Black women seriously as medical practitioners alongside the coeval development of detached scientific objectivity pushes back against the well-documented history of Black women’s exploitation by medical science, particularly gynaecology. By reading Watkins Harper’s novel Iola Leroy in conjunction with medical texts by Rebecca Lee Crumpler and Rebecca J. Cole, the first Black women doctors to receive medical degrees in the United States, Yao revisits Ann duCille’s “passionlessness,” a tactic developed by Black women to assert their sexual and affective agency, in relation to the supposedly dispassionate objectivity of medical science—that ruse of professional and epistemic authority. These seemingly counterpoised phenomena of unfeeling that develop coevally during this century converge for Black women doctors who crafted an objective passionlessness for the sake of both concealing and tending to their passions.