Sex and monstrosity. A genealogy of the sexual police

Abstract

This essay outlines different forms of Western sexual police from the Seventeen Century to the present. The genealogy will approach the problem from the point of view of hermaphroditism and transvestism. By “sexual police” I mean the determinations, forms, norms and ethos that defines sex through times, as well as the categories of which it is composed, and what is permitted and is possible to do, see and say through these sexual categories. This essay, pays special attention to the fears and its embodiment in some paradigmatic figures. In particular, it analyzes the historical meaning of sexual “monstrosity”, key to understand the different polices, including the own sexual police of gender feminism.