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The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (courtesy of the Linnean Society Library).ĭescent was enormously popular in its time and became hugely influential. Despite working to subdue the queer potentialities of his evolutionism, Darwin nonetheless laid the foundations for a new, modernist sexology to emerge, a situation that was exploited by a cohort of Darwinist sexologists, Sigmund Freud chief among them, who followed in his path. Similarly, his construal of the ‘unnatural crimes’ of indigenous peoples was contained within a hierarchical narrative of the backwardness of ‘savages’ and civilizational supremacy but was readily subject to challenge and queer reinterpretations, not least with reference to the ‘extreme sensuality’ of the classical Greeks. Although he moved to cast sex-variant animals, human and non-human, as biological misfits and failures, Darwin’s commitment to the principle of primordial intersexuality (dual-sexed origins) nonetheless occasioned some of the queerest evolutionary narratives of the 19 th century. Marking the 150 th anniversary of his major sexological work The descent of man, this historical review examines a range of strategies that Darwin deployed in order to accommodate such variations within his evolutionism, while simultaneously attempting to mitigate the potential for condoning sexual phenomena that were feared and reviled in Victorian bourgeois society. Charles Darwin’s published and unpublished writings contain a plethora of references to sex variations, including intersexualities (‘hermaphroditism’), transformations of sex and non-heteronormative sexual behaviours.