Pathologizing female sexual frigidity in fin-de-siecle France, or how absence was made into a thing

Visions of female coldness or lack of sexual desire were not new to the nineteenth century. But the fin-de-siecle saw a new development in such visions with the growing usage of the terms frigide and la frigidite in French medical and pseudo-medical writing - a process that began sometime after 1860, intensifying in the final years of the nineteenth and the first few years of the twentieth centuries. While the possibility of a humoral lack of sexual desire was conceivable in previous visions of feminine bodies, late nineteenth-century models increasingly rejected such a possibility in favor of a vision that viewed the absence of desire (specifically for appropriate heterosexual coitus) as the sign of some less appropriate perverse desire.