Sexe, race et médecine

anatomie et sexualité des Africain·e·s sous l’œil des médecins français (1780-1950)

Abstract

From the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, the body of the African people becomes for French physicians an object of study in the context of the development of racial taxonomy and contacts between Africans and Europeans. Metropolitan doctors, assisted by colonial doctors, study the anatomy of the African Black peoples and the contours of their racial and sexual otherness. Black women in Africa, and especially the Hottentots and Bushmen of sou- thern Africa, seem to embody their race by their sexual characteristics, described as exuberant : steatopygia and apron. Beyond a racial marker, the analysis of sexual attributes also allows doctors to speculate on the African hypersexuality. In addition to these medical fantasies about sex and sexuality of the Africans, physicians also discuss the causes of genital mutilation until the middle of the twentieth century.