Abstract
The most notorious episode of the prominent sexologist John Money’s career can be traced back to 22 August 1965 – the day that the twins Bruce and Brian Reimer were born. At birth, both children had the anatomical characteristics conventionally associated with maleness: a penis, testes, and an X and a Y chromosome. However, eight months later, one of the twins, Bruce, lost his penis during a botched circumcision procedure. Unsure of how to handle the situation, Bruce and Brian’s parents reached out to John Money and brought Bruce to his first medical consultation in 1967. Money, who was then deeply involved in pioneering the country’s first sex reassignment surgeries at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, made the controversial decision to reassign Bruce to the female sex and to raise him as a female, as Brenda. While Money hailed the Reimer case as a success for decades, it later came out that the child originally named Bruce never fully adopted a female identity, assumed the name David during his teenage years, and tragically ended his life in 2004.
As a result of sensational historical episodes like this one, existing accounts of Money’s life and career tend to be highly polarized. Indeed, Money has drawn ire and praise from both conservative and liberal commentators in equal parts: where conservative critics scolded Money for his insistence that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are not biologically rigid categories, more progressive critics condemned Money’s role in the Reimer case on different grounds – for his seemingly blatant neglect of medical ethics. In their piercing, sophisticated, and well-researched book Fuckology, co-authors Lisa Downing, Iain Morland and Nikki Sullivan bring nuance to these interpretations of Money’s work in sexology. This long-overdue critical reanalysis of John Money and his contributions embraces, rather than discounts, the tensions, complexities, and contradictions throughout Money’s scholarly corpus. It is at these points of tension that Downing, Morland and Sullivan locate and interrogate ‘the causes, consequences, and power dynamics of Money’s work’ (p. 9).
The book’s title, while surely designed to raise eyebrows, is also appropriate both historically and analytically – it serves the joint purpose of channelling Money’s peculiar brand of sexology and reflecting the analytical aims of the authors. Historically speaking, ‘fuckology’ was one of the many neologisms Money used to describe his academic project. As is pointed out, however, the authors also appropriate the word ‘fuckology’ in a way that pushes back against, rather than parrots, Money’s brand of sexology and its underlying assumptions. ‘Fuckology’, the authors explain, represents ‘extraordinarily appropriate shorthand to describe a method of queering – or fucking with – sexology, and with the logic of scientificity in which it is invested’ (p. 3).
The book is not a broad survey of Money’s diagnostic concepts. Instead, the authors seek to understand Money’s work through the prism of three main sexological and psychiatric diagnoses: ‘transsexualism’, ‘paraphilia’, and ‘hermaphroditism’, all concepts with which Money worked extensively. Each author tackles a separate diagnostic concept over two chapters, one of which provides historical context and the other of which provides critical analysis, and the authors bring different analytic frames to bear in examining these diagnoses. Writing from a feminist philosophy of science perspective, Sullivan shows how Money’s conception of transsexualism exemplifies ‘biological foundationalism’. As much as Money ostensibly disavowed a sharp dichotomy between biological and environmental explanations of human sexuality, his actual work casts the biological explanations as foundational. In her post-Foucauldian analysis of paraphilia, Downing similarly demonstrates how Money failed in his goal of synthesizing biological and social models of paraphilia and how, despite his personal commitment to sexual experimentation, he formed a concept of sexual perversion ‘predicated on hetero-reproductivity’ (p. 177). Finally, Morland uses expertise in the ethics and politics of intersex to explore the extent to which Money’s understanding of gender and genitals as highly plastic constructs gelled with a growing contemporaneous cultural interest in humanism. Morland’s second chapter unpacks Money’s attempt to create a ‘cybernetic’ sexology, analysing both his motivations for pursuing a conception of sexology based on communication and control and his ultimate failure in this pursuit. In short, all authors isolate moments of slippage between what Money claims to be doing in his work and what he actually does.
The book sits contentedly somewhere between a monograph and an edited volume. On one hand, each chapter can be read productively in isolation. But the chapters also amplify and sit in conversation with one another, and as a result, a number of thematic threads become apparent when the book is approached as a unified whole. Perhaps the most significant argument that emerges from a synthetic reading is the contention that Money’s contributions are disjointed and fragmentary and that these fundamental qualities of his work structured the enterprise of sexology through the 20th century. To suggest a cohesive theory of John Money is to misconstrue his life and his work.
One should approach Fuckology in the light of this recognition about Money. The book, in pulling together different scholarly perspectives, historical diagnoses, methodological orientations, and strands of critical theory, can at times leave a scattered impression. But an honest reading of Money, whose diffuse body of work is fraught with rifts and contradictions, demands a multi-faceted analysis. Downing, Morland and Sullivan’s success in producing such an analysis renders the book pertinent to categories of scholars as disparate and varied as Money’s own oeuvre: historians, scholars of gender and sexuality studies, sexologists, ethicists and others will all find relevant insights in this compelling new book.