The Cunning of Desire: Queer Thinking in the History of Science

This article uses the story of a love triangle between neurologist Henry Head, psychologist William Rivers, and schoolteacher Ruth Mayhew to show how queer desire produced knowledge in the history of science. By tracing the sensuous, erotic, but nonsexual relations between these protagonists across experiments, letters, fiction, and scientific publications between 1903 and 1922, the article shows how queer desire was central to formulations of selfhood and the unconscious in the early twentieth century. In so doing, the article makes three key interventions. First, it develops an understanding of “queer” as detached from sexual subjectivity or acts, proposing that it also be understood as a historically specific form of thinking. Second, it pushes beyond histories of science that treat queerness as an object of knowledge, instead showing how it could also produce scientific knowledge. And, third, it argues that at the height of enthusiasm for Freudian ideas in Britain, queer thinking was important to the formulation of alternative models of the unconscious which, ironically, downplayed the significance of sex. The history of the unconscious was also that of queer thinking in the history of science.