Table Of ContentFuckology
Fuckology
Critical Essays on John Money’s
Diagnostic Concepts
Lisa Downing,
Iain Morland, and
Nikki Sullivan
The University of Chicago Press chicago & london
lisa downing is professor of French discourses of sexuality at
the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. iain morland
works in music technology as an audio editor, sound designer, and
programmer. nikki sullivan is an honorary researcher in
the Department of Media, Music, Communication, and Cultural
Studies and teaches in the School of Communication, International
Studies, and Languages at the University of South Australia.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18658-0 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18661-0 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18675-7 (e-book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226186757.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fuckology : critical essays on John Money’s diagnostic concepts / Lisa
Downing, Iain Morland, and Nikki Sullivan. — 1 Edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-226-18658-0 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-18661-0
(paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-18675-7 (e-book) 1. Money,
John, 1921–2006. 2. Sexology. 3. Gender identity. I. Downing, Lisa,
author. II. Morland, Iain, 1978– author. III. Sullivan, Nikki, 1962– author.
HQ60.F83 2015
306.7—dc23
2014010241
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
c o n t e n t s
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: On the “Duke of Dysfunction” 1
Part 1 Mapping
1 The Matter of Gender 19
Nikki Sullivan
2 A Disavowed Inheritance: Nineteenth-Century Perversion Theory and
John Money’s “Paraphilia” 41
Lisa Downing
3 Gender, Genitals, and the Meaning of Being Human 69
Iain Morland
Part 2 Vandalizing
4 Cybernetic Sexology 101
Iain Morland
5 Reorienting Transsexualism: From Brain Organization
Theory to Phenomenology 133
Nikki Sullivan
6 “Citizen-Paraphiliac”: Normophilia and Biophilia in
John Money’s Sexology 158
Lisa Downing
Conclusion: Off the Map 182
Index 201
a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
Lisa thanks the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a 2009 Philip Leverhulme
Prize, which provided two years of research leave from the University of Ex-
eter, and the Wellcome Trust for a Research Expenses grant that funded a
trip to the Kinsey Institute, University of Indiana, in 2011 to carry out archival
research in the John Money Collection. Thanks are due to the staff of the
Kinsey Institute, especially Shawn C. Wilson and Liana Zhou, for their help
in the course of this visit. Lisa is individually indebted to the following col-
leagues for providing—variously—information, ideas, feedback, references,
and platforms for the dissemination of this research: Peter Cryle, Robby Da-
vidson, Tim Dean, Robbie Duschinsky, John Forrester, Gert Hekma, Jennifer
Burns Levin, Charles Moser, Dany Nobus, Eliza Steinbock, and Elizabeth
Stephens.
For invaluable discussions and information, Iain thanks Neil Badmington,
Diane Black, Jake Buckley, Helen D’Artillac-Brill, Milton Diamond, Alice
Dreger, Katie Gramich, Laura Gregory, Katrina Karkazis, Emma Ralph, Keith
Sigmundson, and Richard Symes. For feedback on earlier versions of chap-
ter 3, Iain thanks Robert Eaglestone, Mandy Merck, Margrit Shildrick, and
Joanna Zylinska. Chapter 3 originates in research that was supported by the
UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and includes material previously
published as “Plastic Man: Intersex, Humanism and the Reimer Case,” Sub-
ject Matters 3, no. 2/4, no. 1 (2007): 81–98, which is reproduced here with per-
mission of London Metropolitan University, and with thanks to Paul Cobley.
Nikki is grateful to all those who have helped her to think through the ma-
terial covered in chapters 1 and 5, in particular, Kellie Greene, Susan Stryker,
viii Acknowledgments
Samantha Murray, Jessica Cadwallader, Elizabeth Stephens, Dennis Bruining,
Rosalyn Diprose, Sara Ahmed, and, of course, Iain and Lisa. She would also
like to thank the Special Collections staff at the University of Otago Library,
Dunedin, for help navigating the collection of John Money’s manuscripts and
papers.
All three authors would like to thank the team at the University of Chicago
Press, especially Douglas Mitchell and Tim McGovern, and the expert read-
ers, Ivan Crozier and Susan Stryker, for their constructive feedback on this
manuscript.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
On the “Duke of Dysfunction”
Lisa Downing, Iain Morland, and Nikki Sullivan
Dr. John Money is the Duke of Dysfunction, a man who writes about “unspeakable”
human sexual problems with such dignity and care that his case histories make me feel
almost normal.
John Waters, jacket endorsement for John Money, Gendermaps:
Social Constructionism, Feminism, and Sexosophical History
The New Zealand-born, US-based psychologist John Money (1921–2006) has
had a singular infl uence on the diagnosis and treatment of (to use Money’s
terms) “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia.”1 The recep-
tion of his more than fi ve hundred articles and over forty books, as well as
hundreds of neologisms including “gender” itself, has been both exception-
ally signifi cant and strikingly uneven.2 Whereas “gender” is now a ubiquitous,
everyday term in the English-speaking world, and “lovemap” has entered
the lexicon of popular psychology, some of his more outlandish coinages,
concepts, and recommendations have entered neither popular nor medical
currency.
Money’s widespread yet disparate uptake is explained partly by the fact
that his stylistically bizarre texts were aimed at multiple audiences, most of-
ten physicians, psychiatrists, and sexologists, but sometimes anthropologists,
historians, psychoanalysts, and lay readers. Money’s career was also beset by
ethical controversy, exemplifi ed by the internationally publicized case of Da-
vid Reimer. Following sex reassignment in infancy under Money’s guidance,
in response to a circumcision accident, Reimer’s story was held variously to
show Money as humane and barbaric, naive and deceitful, a social construc-
tionist and an anatomical determinist. Just as Money’s ideas have been char-
acterized as either pathologizing or liberating, so too has Money’s fl amboyant
persona been beatifi ed or damned. These tendencies to polarize Money and
his work are both productive and symptomatic of a failure to interrogate the
