All too human: responses to same-sex copulation in the common cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha (L.)),1834-1900

摘要

Beginning in 1834, entomologists across Europe began reporting same-sex copulatory activity in a variety of insect species, sometimes between species or genera. Most communications concerned male-male couplings of the common cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha, syn. M. vulgaris).These reports offer a unique snapshot of how nineteenth-century naturalists responded when they were required to explain precisely what was natural in their observations. Initial communications of same-sex couplings were mainly accompanied by exclamations of surprise and the rhetoric of disapproval. Such activity was explained either by the assumption that one of the parties must in some way have a female anatomy or that blind or excessive lust compelled more virile individuals to force copulation upon weaker ones. As these explanations were questioned, more complex and controversial theories founded in fashionable evolutionary theories were forwarded as means of assimilating the phenomenon within hegemonic constructions of sexuality. These came from both within entomological circles and from outside observers whose primary interest was in theorizing human eroticism. This article follows a particularly intense dispute which erupted following the claim by one of France's leading naturalists, Henri Gadeau de Kerville, that the homoerotic activity demonstrated by male cockchafers evidenced the existence of a distinctly "homosexual" instinct. By 1900 no single taxonomy of non-human homoeroticism dominated intellectual discourse on the subject. Although zoological observations of same-sex eroticism continued to be made through the twentieth century, Melolontha were left in relative peace.