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Giordano Bruno (Nola 1548 – Rome 1600) published in 1582 Candelaio, a comedy that anticipates the core arguments he developed in the six dialogs written in volgare during the philosopher's stay in England (1583–1585). In the comedy, the term candelaio (candlebearer) is deployed not only as a trope for light and illumination, but also as a slang designation for sodomite. Thus, sexual dissident Bonifacio, the tragicomic personage to which the title refers, brings to light the mostly unavowed or denigrated, albeit ineradicable complexities of every sexual individuality. In this framework, the personality, lifestyle, and views of disruptive Bonifacio/Candelaio serve as narrative support for a critical stance aiming at undoing the validity claims of the man/woman dichotomy. At the antipodes of the finitization of sexuality fostered by Christian creationism, Bruno's sexual approach is framed within a conception of "natura naturante," the all-pervasive, inexhaustible and animating power, which enables the emergence of utterly diversified beings throughout the infinitude of the existing worlds. Having dismantled the epistemic pretentions of sexual binarity and its possible closed supplementations, Bruno effectively frees Bonifacio's sexual heteroclisis from the stigma of unnaturalness. Notwithstanding the trailblazing traits of Bruno's sexual thought and its ontological framework, Brunian scholarship to the present has ignored that the philosopher from Nola posed the arguably most profound and consistent challenge to binary sexuality and its finite suppletions in pre-Darwinian Modernity. In view of the critiques of patriarchy and anti-feminism that began to develop at the turn to the twentieth century, it is striking that no systematic effort has been undertaken to relate Bruno's principled reversion of the form/matter hierarchy to his advocacy for the axiological restauration of femaleness in the masculinist-centered culture of the West. In accordance with Bruno's explicit design to "turn upside down the reversed world," his philosophy seeks to reveal the endless profusion of sexual forms not as creations of an omnipotent paternal figure, but as emergences from an inexhaustible source, which he signally terms "the maternal womb of Nature." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two prominent representatives of the sexual emancipation movement in Germany, John Henry Mackay (1864-1933) and Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) launched significant attacks on sexual binarism and its combinatories. Although Mackay defended the 'nameless love' against seminal Christian and subsequent secularised misconstructions of its nature, he was unable to overcome the fundamental scheme of binomic sexuality. Hirschfeld, however, resolved the theoretical issue through his 'doctrine of sexual intermediaries' (Zwischenstufenlehre) which purports that-without exceptionall human beings are intersexual variants, i.e., unique composites of different proportions of masculinity and femininity. Since these proportions vary from one sexual layer of description to another in the same individual and can alter or be altered in time, it is sensu stricto not possible to postulate discrete sexual categories. Hirschfeld's 'doctrine' implies a radical deconstruction of not only binomic sexuality but its supplementation through a 'third sex.' It offers a meta-theoretical framework for rethinking sexual difference beyond the fictional schemes and categorial closures of Western traditions of sexual identity. His assumption of potentially infinite sexualities anticipates some of the basic tenets forwarded by the philosophical and political agendas of queer studies. KEYWORDS. Descriptive layers of sexuality, phallogocentrism, sexual binarism, sexual categories and narratives, sexual continuum, sexual difference, sexual emancipation movement, sexual identity, sexual intermediaries, third sex

US-American philosopher Norman O. Brown (1913–2002) was one of the very few twentieth-century intellectuals to situate hermaphroditism at the core of their work. Although Brown's publications became cult books of the then emerging protest subcultures and were eventually regarded as milestones in the history of Freudian revisionism, the reception of his views on hermaphroditism has been insubstantial. The present contribution focuses at first on Brown's attempt to supersede binary sexuality and its same-sex/other-sex combinatories by positing an ambit of hermaphroditic reconciliation that emerges from the depths of the unconscious, but is effectual only as an eschatological ideal. Against this backdrop, Brown's consequential neglect of Charles Darwin's universalization of corporeal hermaphroditism and of Magnus Hirschfeld's conception of human sexual intermediariness are analyzed and assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German-Jewish physician, sexologist and critical race theorist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) was arguably one of the most significant sexual thinkers of the twentieth century and a renowned sexual minority rights advocate. Hirschfeld's sexual-emancipatory engagement has been widely acknowledged. But his groundbreaking universalization of sexual intermediariness and the resulting dissolution of binary, triadic or otherwise finite schemes of sexuality have been mostly ignored or misrepresented in intellectual history. A relevant exception in this regard is the way sexuality historian Manfred Herzer has shortly approached the "doctrine of sexual intermediaries" as the "key concept" of his thought. While assessing and setting in historical perspective Herzer's interpretive contentions, the present study foregrounds Hirschfeld's Darwinian-inspired, non-essentialist naturalism as the ontic support for the new sexual and race regime he envisaged. By conceptualizing the potential in-finitization of sexualities and races, Hirschfeld was envisioning an unprecedented path toward the Messianic—albeit a-theological—goal of intra-historic liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) conjoined issues of sexuality and race in works that foreground the aesthetic worth of Black bodies. While exposing Western figuration practices that exclude Black people from artistic visibility, Barthé also targeted the African American distaste for the explicit treatment of nudity. Barthé's androgynous sculptures have by now become the trademark of his art, but Barthésian scholarship still neglects the significance of a small group of statues, which de-emphasize the aura of same-sex desire, in order to explore the intricacies of corporeal ambisexuality. In view of his homoerotic depictions and the presence of the hermaphrodite at the core of his disruption of the sexual dichotomy, the frequent assumption that Barthé remained "closeted all his life" does not stand critical scrutiny. Instead of taking refuge in the sexual closet, Barthé debunked the man/woman binary as the foremost epistemic construct that prompts the societal need for sexual self-misrepresentations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a Freudian revisionist and neo-Marxist, Erich Fromm (1900–1980) lessened the import of sexuality in the individual psyche but stressed the role played by the sex differential in the distribution of power throughout history and in the post-patriarchal form of matriarchy he envisioned. Seeking to reinforce the male/female divide and heteronormativity, Fromm outlined a “New Science of Man” that readily ignored not only the challenges posed to binary sexuality by post-Darwinian critical sexologies, but also the same-sex complexities evinced by key figures of his own cultural pantheon. Regardless of his declared pursuits, however, Fromm at times expressed insights suitable to undermine the cogency of his most cherished sexual convictions. As a tool for uncovering “indubitable commonsensical axioms” as sources of alienation, Fromm’s conception of “idology” challenges his own sanction of sexual binarity and heterosexuality, thus facilitating an understanding of the individual’s sexual difference as a unique modulation of male/female intermediariness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]