“Lovesick Women”: A Historical Overview of Gendered Conceptualizations of Erotomania, and Their Influence on Responses to Stalking

ABSTRACT Stalking is a relatively new crime, with the U.S. state of California becoming the first jurisdiction in the world to develop specific laws about such behaviors in the early 1990s. In turn, the state (including law enforcement) turned to existing research on fixated and obsessed behaviors to develop typologies to better understand this kind of offending, as a means to inform response to stalking. This article focuses on one subtype featured in the literature and, later, adopted in the modern categorization of stalking behaviors—the person experiencing erotomania. We explore the conceptual development of erotomania and the gendered lens through which “lovesickness” was treated in the past. We consider how this perspective influenced contemporary constructions of the condition and, from there, influenced the reproduction of negative gender stereotypes in the stalking profiles used to guide institutional responses in the early criminalization period and, even, into contemporary practice.