Displacing the physiological model that had held sway in 19th-century medical thinking, early 20th-century medical scientists working on hormones promoted a new understanding of the body, psychological reactions, and the sexual instinct, arguing that each were fundamentally malleable. Hormones came to be understood as the chemical messengers that regulated an individual's growth and sexual development, and sexologists interested in this area focused primarily on children and adolescents. Hormone research also promoted a view of the body in which ‘hermaphroditism’, homosexuality, and (...) ‘sexual perversions’ such as masochism and sadism were attributed to anomalies in the internal secretions produced by the testes or the ovaries. This article focuses on Spanish, Italian, Argentinian, and Brazilian sexology shaped by endocrinological research in the interwar period. First, it shows the key role hormone treatments played in the historical development of sexology in Southern Europe and Latin America. Second, it looks at how sexologists employed hormone research to study human sexual development in the early stages of life, and how they set about ‘correcting’ what they viewed as ‘sexual anomalies’. (shrink)

We present this work with pardonable pride, believing it will be the means of saving many lives and a vast amount of suffering and needless unhappiness. The importance and demand for a work of this character cannot be doubted. Its need has been announced upon the floor of the Senate Chamber; in resolutions adopted by Church Assemblies; in the Pulpit; in our Religious and Medical Journals; and the need of the knowledge it contains is evidenced by the newspapers, in their (...) daily records of disagreements, separations, desertions, seductions, adultery, insanity, suicide, murder and death, the cause of which in almost every case is admitted by all authorities and shown by the Records of our Courts to be ignorance of the Laws of Nature, of self and of sex. It is to the unfortunate victims of these dreadful conditions that this book directly appeals. It is written to enlighten and benefit those who have recklessly plunged into marriage, who have assumed that relationship at once so holy and so intricate, where knowledge is essential, yet substituted by ignorance; marriage, whose only incentive is to get "a home" or secure a "partner." It is this "home" and this "partner" that we desire to reach, as well as to enlighten those who mentally and physically are capable of the functions of wedlock, but who for lack of knowledge suffer in silence. In attempting to map out the rights and wrongs of the relations that exist between human beings, and which govern their life, health, intellect, love, power, happiness, usefulness and honor, we cannot avoid a feeling of responsibility, a desire and absolute determination to record nothing without careful investigation and due consideration-and yet an equal desire to hold back nothing that can give them a proper understanding of themselves. (shrink)

Sexology, or the formal study of sexuality, positions itself as an authoritative voice wearing a cloak of neutrality. Sexology offers the seal of “scientific truth” to pronoucements that have been arrived at through processes that are ostensibly objective, but covertly value-laden; thus sex research has been effective in perpetuating innocent claims about the human condition and human sexual behavior. Closer examination reveals these claims to be controversial. In the texts and literature of sexology, we find that there (...) is a coherent and significant cluster of assumptions about what is so-called natural sexuality. These assumptions express major paradigms that not only inform the theoretical basis of contemporary sexological thought, but which also happen to be constituent elements in contemporary patriarchal ideology. In this paper I will look at these major paradigms. (shrink)

This study situates Henry Havelock Ellis’s sexological research within the nineteenth-century evolutionary debates, especially the discussion over sexual selection’s applicability to humanity. For example, Ellis’s monograph on sexual behavior, _Sexual Inversion_ (1897), treated inborn homosexuality as a natural variation of evolutionary mechanisms. This book was situated within a longer study of human sexuality in relation to evolutionary selection. His later works dealt even more directly with Charles Darwin’s concept of selection, such as _Sexual Selection in Man_ (1905). Through _Sexual Selection (...) in Man_, Ellis asserted that sexual attraction stemmed from a physical cause rather than an innate aesthetic sense. I argue that Ellis’s best-known historical publications, including his work on sexual inversion, were intended to intervene in the contemporary evolutionary debates. This analysis also identifies a specific point where evolutionary theory informed the foundation of sexology as a scientific discipline. (shrink)

The historiography of sexology is young. It is also expanding at a remarkable pace, both in terms of the volume of publications and, more notably, in terms of its geographical, disciplinary, and intersectional reach. This special issue takes stock of these new directions, while offering new research contributions that expand our understanding of the interdisciplinary and transnational formation of this field from the late 19th through to the mid 20th century. The five articles that make up this special issue (...) stage historiographical interventions by challenging the tendency within sexological history to focus on the medical, the homosexual, the human, and the Western European at the expense of other disciplines, diagnoses, non-human subjects, and geographical locations. A particular strength of these contributions is their focus on mapping conversations among and between sexologists on both sides of the Atlantic in the early to mid 20th century – particularly in Germany, Britain, and the US – and between East and West in the early Cold War era. (shrink)

This article discusses the term erotology, which was applied to medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah (the science of coitus), as well as other world traditions of sexual knowledge, by European sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who contrasted it with their own forms of inquiry into sexual matters in the modern field of sexual science. It argues that the homogenisation and minimisation of all ancient and non-European forms of medical knowledge about sex, even one as substantial as the (...) ‘ilm al-bah tradition, supported a particular story about the origins of sexology's own emergence as a new and unprecedented biomedical and scientific way of knowing, characterised by an opposition assumed between sexuality and religion, by a view of sexual variations as perversions or pathologies, and by a view of Arabs and Muslims as sexually excessive. The article focusses on French, English, German, Austrian, and Italian sources of the 19th century that discussed the history of sexual medicine, relating these accounts to recent attempts to historicise sexology. It considers how forms of colonial hierarchy and exoticist views of non-European cultures impacted the dismissal of ‘ilm al-bah among European sexual scientists and how they may continue to exert an influence on forms of modern historical inquiry that are not attentive to scholarship on medieval Islamicate sexual medicine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 259 Chloë Taylor Female Sexual Dysfunction, Feminist Sexology, and the Psychiatry of the Normal It is really weird that doctors should be the reigning experts on sex. —Leonore Tiefer1 The first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality provides a compelling and influential critique of the “sciences of sex.” In this work, Foucault suggests that there (...) is little that is scientific about the disciplines of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and sexology that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 In each case, Foucault argues that the authority of science is exploited to facilitate the regulation of sexuality in a biopolitical era in which the sex life of the population has become a crucial political stake.3 Sex, according to Foucault, is managed by doctors not so much to cure health problems as to enforce social norms, and sexual science does not provide the truth of sex or make people healthy, but naturalizes the monogamous, heterosexual, nuclear family.4 1. Leonore Tiefer, Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2004), 180. 2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978). 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: 133–160. See also Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974 (New York: Palgrave -MacMillan, 2006) and Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975 (New York: Picador, 2003). 4. This is not to say that for Foucault doctors do not ever cure health problems or that their intentions are not to cure health problems. However, Foucault 260 Chloë Taylor Feminism has also posed powerful critiques of the sexual sciences. As Janice Irvine notes, feminist epistemology has rejected the purported neutrality of science, especially of the sciences that claim knowledge about sex and gender.5 Feminist and queer political theorists and activists have, moreover, “underscored the hollowness of solutions based on techniques” that are favored by sexologists; teaching men skills to resist premature ejaculation or to better stimulate their wives’ clitorises are not adequate resolutions to widespread and profound dissatisfactions with sex, gender, and marriage in a heterosexist and patriarchal society.6 As Irvine writes, Feminism and lesbian/gay liberation…challenged power inequalities between men and women and questioned the very concepts of maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity.…They presented alternatives to tradition and to expert power and authority. Therein lay their threat to American sexology.7 Given this antagonistic relationship, combining feminism and sexology has proved controversial. The work of feminist sexologist Shere Hite in the 1970s and 1980s was critiqued by sexologists and feminists alike: sexologists complained that the 1976 Hite Report was political and thus undermined the scientific prestige of sexology, while feminists criticized Hite for aspiring to a masculine scientific authority.8 Describing the relationship between feminism and sexology, Irvine notes that “the incompatibility of their concerns—science and market, on the one hand, versus shows that what we consider “healthy” is thoroughly political and that the effect of doctors’ practices is normalizing whatever their intentions may be. For two recent Foucauldian studies of the ways that medical and sexual science function to sexually normalize individuals and populations, see Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); and Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 5. Janice Irvine, Disorders of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sexology, rev. ed. (1990; repr., Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005), 101. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 117. Chloë Taylor 261 progressive political change, on the other—led…to a contentious and emotionally charged history.”9 Drawing on both Foucauldian and feminist perspectives, this article explores a new chapter in this history, examining self-described feminist sexologists’ responses to the psychiatric diagnoses of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD). While psychologists had pathologized female sexuality under the label of frigidity since the nineteenth century, sexual dysfunctions were relatively marginal in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1952. In the DSM-1, frigidity (like impotence) was... (shrink)

One of sexologist Wilhelm Reich's most ambitious and enduring theories claims that sexuality and sexual repression play a central role in the production and reproduction of class structures and hierarchies. From 1927–1933, Reich combined his sexological work with his communist political convictions in a movement that became known as sex-pol. Reich developed some of his most provocative and potentially emancipatory theories through this empirical work with members of working-class communities. Though they often remain anonymous in his writings, the traces of (...) their voices remain audible throughout. In this paper, I employ a Gramscian method, developed by post-colonial scholars, to read for the trace of proletarian voices in Reich's archive. I argue that these subjects helped to theorize the role of sex in producing and reproducing class oppression. Reading for the trace of proletarian voices in the archive expands our understanding of how working-class subjects in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria helped to produce concrete sexological knowledge from below. (shrink)

Sexology emerged as a discipline during a period of keen concern about the social effects of sexually explicit media. In this context, sex researchers and their allies took pains to establish the respectability of their work, a process that often involved positioning sexual science in opposition to erotic literature and images. This article argues that this presentation of sexual science obfuscated sex researchers’ complex relationship with erotic print culture, which during the late 19th and early 20th centuries provided sexual (...) scientists with access to explicit material that served as evidence for theories about human sexuality, facilitated transnational exchanges of sexual-scientific thought by bringing sex research across borders, and introduced sex research to wider audiences. Erotic print culture can thus be seen as one of several fields that contributed to the interdisciplinary development of sexology and facilitated the diffusion of sexual-scientific theories. Sex researchers’ shifting, often ambivalent relationship with erotic print and its producers emphasizes that while the boundaries of sexology were extremely porous, they were also heavily policed: Working to establish a modern, respectable new branch of science, sexual scientists reframed the output of other fields of enquiry as products of their own, blotted their reliance on these sources from the historical record, and denigrated them in public writing. (shrink)

The ArgumentI argue here that in its historical development, sexology developed differently in France than elsewhere in Europe. Though I concur that the modern notion of “sexuality” arose some time in the last half of the nineteenth century, the older notion of ”sex” persisted in French science and medicine for a far longer time than elsewhere because of a fear that nonreproductive sexual behavior would deepen the country's population crisis. I argue that the scientific and medical concepts of the (...) sexual perversions, particularly homosexuality, were considered by French sexologists to be abnormal deviations from heterosexuality, whereas some English, German, and Austrian sexologists — including Freud — viewed the perversions more tolerantly as natural variations of the norm. I also address here the inadequacies of historical accounts of these developments that favor discursive ruptures in the Foucauldian manner, and stress the advantages of social history and causal historical explanation. (shrink)

Title: The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters & Virginia JohnsonPublisher: Cornell University PressISBN: 0801495393Author: Paul RobinsonTitle: The History of Sexuality: An IntroductionPublisher: VintageISBN: 0679724699Author: Michel FoucaultTitle: The Construction of HomosexualityPublisher: University Of Chicago PressISBN: 0226306283Author: David Greenberg.

Despite its historical focus on aberrant behavior, sexology barely dealt with sexual deviants in 1950s Czechoslovakia. Rather, sexologists treated only isolated instances of deviance. The rare cases that went to court appeared mostly because they hindered work or harmed the national economy. Two decades later, however, the situation was markedly different. Hundreds of men were labeled as sexual delinquents and sentenced for treatment in special sexological wards at psychiatric hospitals. They endangered society, so it was claimed, by being unwilling (...) or unable to conform to the family norm. The mode of subjection shifted from work to family. I analyse this change by using the tools of Gil Eyal’s sociology of expertise, which focuses on shifts in institutional matrices that bring forth new groups of agents creating new expert networks. I argue that sexology became profoundly institutionalized in the early 1970s, which brought the discipline closer to psychiatry and forensic science. New inpatient facilities were opened that could admit sentenced sexual deviants. Also, demographic changes accelerated in the 1960s, especially skyrocketing divorce rates and plummeting birth rates, which made it imperative for the government to focus on cementing the family. After the failed attempts of the Prague Spring in 1968, the new pro-Soviet government of communist Czechoslovakia did just that. During the time dubbed as ‘normalization’ by the new elites, anyone who strayed from the family norm was suspected of deviance. (shrink)

The paper investigates how formal/informal networks of scientists, while facilitating the scientific West-East transfer in the Cold War context, shaped the scientific field of sexology by imposing personal scientific credos, in a particular national context. The paper shows that in the Cold War context, sexual science was present in Communist Romania, but neither as imitation of the regional scholarship, nor as a simple reproduction of western advancements in the field. The post-war Romanian scholarship in the field of sexology (...) was the result of scientific interests of Stefan Milcu – long time party protégée and respected member of the international scientific community – and of its personal circle that included remarkable personalities such as Victor Săhleanu or Tudor Stoica. Presenting the public with information about sexual and re­productive functions, and sometimes even elaborated descriptions of sexual techniques, certainly was never meant to enhance the individual gratification or provoke any form of sexual revolution. The Romanian production of sex/educational manuals and of sexology works was part of a state policy towards a better, stable, family life, aiming for collective and social happiness. (shrink)

Introduction to Sexology [Vvedenie v seksologiiu] by I. S. Kon has finally been published after having made the rounds of publishing houses for many years. This is the first Soviet publication devoted to a description and an analysis of the genesis, development, and state of a new branch of scientific knowledge about man-sexology-which affects every one of us. To be sure, General Sexual Pathology [Obshchaia seksopatologiia], a textbook for physicians edited by G. S. Vasil'chenko, which came out in (...) 1977, has an extensive introductory chapter on sexology, but it is limited to medical problems. Kon's book is an example of an interdisciplinary approach that provides an idea of the most essential components of sexology; it is thus addressed not only to the medical profession, but also to sociologists, philosophers of culture, psychologists, pedagogues, etc. The book takes into account the latest publications in this area of science. (shrink)

This article considers the sexual politics of animal evidence in the context of German sexology around 1920. In the 1910s, the German-Jewish geneticist Richard B. Goldschmidt conducted experiments on the moth Lymantria dispar, and discovered individuals that were no longer clearly identifiable as male or female. When he published an article tentatively arguing that his research on ‘intersex butterflies’ could be used to inform concurrent debates about human homosexuality, he triggered a flurry of responses from Berlin-based sexologists. In this (...) article, I examine how a number of well-known sexologists affiliated with Magnus Hirschfeld, his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, and later his Institute of Sexology attempted to incorporate Goldschmidt’s experiments into their sexological work between 1917 and 1923. Intersex butterflies were used to discuss issues at the heart of German sexology: the legal debate about the criminalisation of homosexuality under paragraph 175; the scientific methodology of sexology, caught between psychiatric, biological, and sociological approaches to the study of sexual and gender diversity; and the status of sexology as natural science, able to contribute knowledge about the sexual Konstitution of the organism. This article thus shows that butterfly experiments function as important and politically charged evidence for a discussion at the heart of the sexological project of those involved in the founding of the Institute of Sexology: the question of the nature and naturalness of homosexuality and its political consequences. In doing so, this article makes a case for paying attention to non-human actors in the history of sexology. (shrink)

In spite of the fact that the term ‘sexology’ was popularized in the United States by Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard and that the term ‘sexual science’—which is usually attributed to Iwan Bloch as ‘Sexualwissenschaft’—was actually coined by the American phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler in 1852, the archives of American sexology have received scant attention in the period prior to Alfred Kinsey. In my article, I explore the role of Transcendentalism and phrenology in the production and development of American (...) sexology and sexual science. In particular, I argue that shifting the origins of sexology and sexual science away from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kertbeny and the more familiar narratives of the German invention of sexuality furnishes a radically different account of early sexology and sexual science. Rather than the unevenly homophilic sympathies of early German activists, their American counterparts promote marital, reproductive, loving sex and vilify prostitution, polygamy, masturbation, contraception, sex for pleasure, and, if they think to mention it, sodomy. In addition to this less progressive story, however, I argue that early American sexologists provide the first theories of gender and help to provide a fuller description of the politics of sexology and sexual science. (shrink)

The diverse historical, cultural, and physiological influences that determine sexual orientation are the focus of this fascinating work by one of the foremost investigators of human sexuality. Drawing on case studies from his sexology clinic, the author explores such topics as prenatal and postnatal history, gender differentiation in childhood, and postpubertal hormonal theories. In so doing, he addresses the many enigmas of sexual orientation: What makes some children grow up to be homosexual, while others become heterosexual or bisexual? To (...) what degree is gender identity determined before birth? How do the concepts of masculine and feminine become differentiated during childhood? What do we know about the relationship between hormones and homosexuality in adulthood? A unique feature of this book is the follow-up reporting on Money's long-term studies that began over three decades ago. The studies are brought together here for comparison with one another--and with the work of others--and their full significance is systematically evaluated. Also explored here is his pioneering concepts of lovemaps, the pathways of individual sexual and erotic development, and the factors that may shape overall healthy or pathological orientation, paraphilia, and gender transposition in childhood, adolescence, and maturity. Written in accessible language for researchers and clinicians, this authoritative work is both thought-provoking and informative as it explores timely questions of sexual orientation. (shrink)

As the foundational contributions of the fin de si encounters with sexual science dialectically produced an anti-essentialist variant of feminism. This microscopic interpretation of historical context, it will be argued, provides a new vista from which to view the larger tableau of modern European, especially Austrian, intellectual history.

This article explores the relationship between sexual science and evolutionary models of human development and progress. It examines the ways in which late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexual scientists constructed the sexual instinct as an evolutionary force that not only served a reproductive purpose, but was also pivotal to the social, moral, and cultural development of human societies. Sexual scientists challenged the idea that non-reproductive sexualities were necessarily perverse, pathological, or degenerative by linking sexual desire to the evolution (...) of sociality, often focusing on forms of relationality and care that exceeded biological kinship. As a result, non-reproductive sexual expressions, including homosexual and non-reproductive heterosexual behaviours, were interpreted as manifestations of a sexual instinct operating in the service of human development. These claims were reliant on cross-cultural and historical comparisons of sexual values, behaviours, and customs that rehearsed and reinforced imperial narratives of development premised on racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies. Sexual scientists mapped diverse sexual behaviours in terms of their perceived evolutionary benefits, contributing to colonial narratives that distinguished between different cultures according to imagined trajectories of development. These contestations around the sexual instinct and its developmental functions played a vital role in allowing sexual science to authorize itself as a field of knowledge that promised to provide expertise required to manage sexual life and secure the global development of human civilization. (shrink)

Reviews the diverse historical, cultural, and physiological influences that determine sexual orientation.

This article situates Mexican sexology, and how it engaged homosexuality and gender nonconformity, within more familiar nation-building projects in Mexico following the Revolution (1910–20). It argues that much like with understandings of race, Mexican sexologists, influenced by neo-Lamarckism and ‘Latin' eugenics, viewed sexuality as caused largely by social and environmental factors, rather than simply as a congenital characteristic. Such experts advocated for social solutions for what they saw as the ‘state of danger’ that homosexuality represented, targeting their interventions at (...) youths, who were seen as pliable, future citizens, rather than adults, who were largely seen as irredeemable and best isolated from the national body. The article explores discursive, ideological, and methodological threads in Mexican sexology from the 19th to the mid-20th century, the field’s professionalization and transnational connections, case studies of youths in which the preferred solutions involved promoting family stability and coherence, and adult cases ranging from prison studies to the case of Marta Olmos, recipient of Mexico’s first widely known sex reassignment. Overall, it demonstrates important intersections between sexology and nation-building projects related to criminology, anthropology, and eugenics, and how the attempted management of homosexuality and gender nonconformity sheds light on Mexican development more broadly. (shrink)

This study considers the role of epistemic turning points in the historiography of sexuality. Disentangling the historical complexity of scientia sexualis, I argue that the late 19th century and the mid-20th century constitute two critical epistemic junctures in the genealogy of sexual liberation, as the notion of free love slowly gave way to the idea of sexual freedom in modern western society. I also explore the value of the Foucauldian approach for the study of the history of sexuality in non-western (...) contexts. Drawing on examples from Republican China (1912—49), I propose that the Foucauldian insight concerning the emergence of a ‘homosexual identity’ in the West can serve as a useful guide for thinking about similar issues in the history of sexuality and the historical epistemology of sexology in modern East Asia. (shrink)

Homosexual aversion therapy enjoyed two brief but intense periods of clinical experimentation: between 1950 and 1962 in Czechoslovakia, and between 1962 and 1975 in the British Commonwealth. The specific context of its emergence was the geopolitical polarization of the Cold War and a parallel polarization within psychological medicine between Pavlovian and Freudian paradigms. In 1949, the Pavlovian paradigm became the guiding doctrine in the Communist bloc, characterized by a psychophysiological or materialist understanding of mental illness. It was taken up by (...) therapists in Western countries who were critical of psychoanalysis and sought more ‘scientific’ diagnostic and therapeutic methods that focused on empirical evidence and treating actual symptoms. However, their attitude towards homosexuality often played a decisive role in how they used aversion therapy. Whereas Czechoslovakian researchers cautioned readers about low success rates and agitated for homosexual law reform in 1961, most of their anglophone counterparts selectively ignored or misrepresented the results of ‘the Prague experiment’, instead celebrating single-case ‘success’ stories in their effort to correct ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation. In histories of queer sexuality and its pathologization, the behaviourist paradigm remains almost entirely unmapped. This article provides the most detailed study to date of aversion therapy literature from both sides of the East/West border. In doing so, it contributes to the project not only of ‘decentring Western sexualities’, but of decentring Western sexological knowledge. Given its Pavlovian origins, the history of homosexual aversion therapy can be fully understood only in the context of Cold War transnational sexological knowledge exchange. (shrink)

This article raises the question of ‘normality’ today and the fracturing of health ideals along new lines of enablement and function. In particular the study asks if ‘functional’ and ‘dysfunctional’ are displacing ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ as master biopolitical binarisms, and if so, what distinctions can be drawn between them. The discourse of ‘function’ and ‘dysfunction’ is certainly ubiquitous in two areas of research and practice: gerontology and sexology. In the former case ‘functional health’ is linked to successful aging represented (...) by technical tests around activities of daily living (ADLs) and risk-assessment profiles. In the latter case, sexual function and dysfunction have become all-encompassing markers of heterosexual competence, now largely detached from reproductive imperatives, but refashioned as integral to responsible and successful self-management. Presenting examples from both cases, the article concludes that functionality, circulating under the signs of ‘normal’, ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’, furnishes economic, technological, educational, professional, pharmacological and policy fields with a rich intellectual, practical and regulatory resource. (shrink)

This article studies the eugenic theories of Marathi sexological writer and novelist Narayan Sitaram Phadke, and his attempts to domesticate the modern ideal of the adult romantic couple as a yardstick of ‘emotional democracy’ in late colonial India. Locating Phadke's work against the backdrop of the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) and its eugenicist concerns, I argue that he conceptualized romantic love as an emotion and a form of sociability central to the state's biopolitical schemes of ensuring modern coupledom but (...) as exceeding the state's capacity to rationally order Indian sex life. Consequently, he crafted literary supplements like the bildungsroman to circulate ‘English’ idioms of emotional and corporeal intimacy in Marathi; his novels domesticated eugenic sexology for its ‘vernacular’ audiences by advocating caste-bound romantic love as the blueprint for Indian marital coupling. As exemplified by Phadke's work, an emerging Marathi discourse of love demarcated a space for the young couple to operate as a vehicle of interpersonal openness within the constraints of the upper-caste joint family. By outlining the parameters of this Brahmanical aesthetic discourse, I show that the couple became the locus of a self-styled ‘democratic’ form of emotional attachment aimed at developing a necessary dynamism within endogamous caste-based marital arrangements without radically transforming them. The science performed through the Marathi novel in the 1920s and 1930s consequently explains the increasing prominence of romantic love as a form of developmental ‘democratic’ discourse at a time when both romantic love and democracy-in-practice were widely experienced as absent from Indian society. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Dickemann’s review ofPedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions. Her main criticism of the book is its inappropriate application of ethology to human sexology and its natural variations. She proposes instead the superiority of the “social constructionist” perspective. The “Phylogenetic Fallacy” of which her review speaks results from her erroneously having attributed ethological arguments about the phylogeny of coordinated motor patterns and sensory releasing stimuli to higher levels of behavioral-ecological strategies to which such arguments were never applied. (...) Because no convincingly adaptive function of human pedophilia could be found at this higher level, as a working hypothesis, variant erotic age and gender orientations were both tentatively conceptualized as by-products of Darwinian natural selection for heterosexual “adultophilia.” The social and political implications of this perspective, when compared to social constructionism, are discussed. (shrink)

The sexological research questionnaire, which became a central research tool in twentieth-century sexology, has a methodological-developmental history stretching back into mid-nineteenth century Germany. It was the product of a prolonged, disruptive encounter between sexual scientists constructing sexual case studies along with newly assertive homosexual men supplying self-penned sexual autobiographies. Homosexual autobiographies were intensely interesting to these men of science but lacked the brevity, structure, and discipline of a formal clinical case study. In the closing decades of the century, efforts (...) to harness and regularize this self-penned material resulted in a series of methodological adaptations. By the turn of the century this process had resulted in the first use of a formal sexual research questionnaire. (shrink)

Trans studies constitute part of the coming-to-voice of transpeople, long the theorized and researched objects of sexology, psychiatry, and feminist theory. Sandy Stone’s pioneering, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” sought the end of monolithic medical and feminist accounts of transsexuality to reveal a multiplicity of trans-authored narratives. My goal is a better understanding of what it is for transpeople to come to this polyvocality. I argue that trans politics ought to proceed with the principle that transpeople have (...) first-person authority (FPA) over their own gender, and I clarify what this means. (shrink)

Historically, male sexual fitness was framed by a patriarchal politics of life centred on regeneration, population and nation. In the later 20th century, as successful ageing became promoted by the lifestyle practices of an idealized healthy and active senior citizenry, traditional gerontocratic power over the sexual risks of youth gave way to a medical sexology concerned with sexual functionality across the lifecourse; in particular, erectility. Recently, erectile dysfunction has expanded to become a population-wide health problem with increasingly refined diagnoses (...) based on `phases', `early warning signs' and preventative regimes, especially as Viagra has become so widely available. This article explores a new bodily configuration in the making; arising, on the one hand, from the pharmacological and scientific technologization of male sexuality, and, on the other, from a contemporary politics of life that both contests the late-life ageism of the past and fosters a mid-life ageism in the present. (shrink)

Many areas of genetic research, genetic forensics and genetic essentialism are treated in public sphere debate as suspicious and problematic or are subject to waves of moral panic. In cultural theory, likewise, strong critiques of the genetic essentialism emerge as part of a broader critical assessment of the discourses of the biological sciences and the assertion of a connection between genes and human behavior. However, the scientific and popular claim to the existence of a “gay gene” is not treated in (...) the same way, and has been widely celebrated both within lesbian/gay culture and more broadly in liberal-humanist speech. This essay suggests that it is not enough to presume that this is a result of the extension of essentialism into new popular understandings of human biology. Rather, this essay examines five reasons which have made the popular acceptance of a “gay gene” tenable: the dominance of “gay personage” arguments, the continued influence of early sexology, the suspicion of psychological and constructionist approaches to lesbian/gay sexualities, the effectiveness of genetic essentialism in“ethnic rights” political approaches and the continued centrality of “fixed subjecthood” in contemporary western culture. (shrink)

This article offers a case study in how historians of science can use musical theater productions to understand the cultural reception of scientific ideas. In 1970, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's musical Company opened on Broadway. The show engaged with and reflected contemporary theories and ideas from the human sciences; Company's portrayal of its 35-year-old bachelor protagonist, his married friends, and his girlfriends reflected present-day theories from psychoanalysis, sexology, and sociology. In 2018, when director Marianne Elliott revived the show (...) with a female protagonist, Company once again amplified contemporary dilemmas around human sciences expertise—this time, the biological fertility clock. Through Company, Sondheim and Furth—and later Elliott—constructed arguments about modern society that paralleled those put forth by contemporary human scientists, including psychoanalytic models of the mind, the lonely crowd phenomenon, and shifting conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Because of their wide popularity and potential for readaptation, musicals such as Company offer a promising source base for analyzing the relationship between contemporary society and scientific expertise in specific historical contexts. (shrink)

Historically, male sexual fitness was framed by a patriarchal politics of life centred on regeneration, population and nation. In the later 20th century, as successful ageing became promoted by the lifestyle practices of an idealized healthy and active senior citizenry, traditional gerontocratic power over the sexual risks of youth gave way to a medical sexology concerned with sexual functionality across the lifecourse; in particular, erectility. Recently, erectile dysfunction has expanded to become a population-wide health problem with increasingly refined diagnoses (...) based on `phases', `early warning signs' and preventative regimes, especially as Viagra has become so widely available. This article explores a new bodily configuration in the making; arising, on the one hand, from the pharmacological and scientific technologization of male sexuality, and, on the other, from a contemporary politics of life that both contests the late-life ageism of the past and fosters a mid-life ageism in the present. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century by Alyson K. SpurgasTheodora K. Hurley (bio)Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century by Alyson K. Spurgas Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020What are the stakes of research on women's sexuality? Alyson K. Spurgas takes on this deceptively straightforward question with an impressive examination of scientific research on women's sexuality and subsequent treatments for women with (...) low sexual desire. The result, Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, merges analysis of clinical sex research and therapeutic discourses, data from interviews with women who consider themselves to have low sexual desire, and a wealth of critical theoretical perspectives on embodiment, sexuality, and disability. This investigation of scientific approaches to women's sexuality hinges on Spurgas's concept of the "feminized responsive desire framework," which integrates several components of "expert" information on women's sexuality: the prominence of research into the "discordance" between women's externally monitored and self-reported arousal; a receptive model of feminine sexuality in which arousal precedes sexual desire; the recent inclusion of female sexual interest/arousal disorder (FSIAD) in the DSM-5; and a suite of therapeutic interventions aimed at rehabilitating women's deficient or discordant sexuality, including mindfulness-based sex therapy. Spurgas's analysis of this multipronged framework for understanding women's sexuality innovatively considers how laypeople internalize and contend with scientific ideas, how sexological and sex therapeutic discourses contribute to neoliberal mandates of bodily improvement, and how scientific discussions of women's sexuality neglect questions of power and trauma.Spurgas opens the book with an incisive examination of how early ideas in sexology, behaviorism, evolutionary psychology, and the sex therapies they inspired framed women's sexuality as inherently responsive, fluid, and restrained. Following sexological discourses into the twenty-first century, chapter 2 examines how contemporary sex researchers and therapists argue that women's desire responds to or follows arousal. With an eye toward governmentality and selfoptimization, Spurgas considers how contemporary sex research paradigms and [End Page 232] therapeutic interventions deliver a new normative model of women's sexuality "based on receptivity, responsiveness, and a willingness to be seduced or coaxed into sex by an initiating male partner" (91). Spurgas's close reading of sexological texts provides a detailed view of the feminization of responsive desire. These texts, however, speak less clearly about why some researchers and practitioners consider the model of feminine sexual receptivity to be "feminist," as the book argues. Despite locating the responsive desire framework within regimes of gender difference and neoliberalism, the book leaves unanswered questions about how the framework fits into larger trends in neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg 2018). Despite this specific underdeveloped claim, these chapters shine in their close readings of texts produced by sex researchers and therapists, and indeed provide a template for how social science scholars might analyze scientific research articles and paradigms.The second half of the book considers how women who report low sexual desire interact with these expert ideas about their sexuality. Tracking how women come to understand their sexual desires and experiences through the prism of scientific and therapeutic discourses (what Spurgas calls "sexual difference socialization"), Diagnosing Desire argues that these discourses construct a population of "women-with-low-desire" and encourage low-desiring women's sexual rehabilitation—and compulsory sexual performance—in service of their partners, who are typically straight cisgender men. Turning the biomedical model of receptive feminine sexuality on its head, chapter 5 considers the pleasures and possibilities of agentic feminine receptivity through sexual submission. In a stirring conclusion, Spurgas insists that models of receptive feminine sexuality paint over the violence, trauma, and power relations that permeate women's experiences of sexuality, calling instead for community-based forms of care that supersede the individualistic foci of current sex research and treatment programs.Throughout the monograph, Spurgas maintains theoretical dialogues with critical lineages including feminist science studies, queer studies, and disability and madness studies; the breadth and richness of theoretical conversation allow Spurgas to robustly contribute to several areas of scholarship. Perhaps most centrally, the book offers a rare view of how patients and would-be patients internalize, modify... (shrink)

Surgical castration of sex offenders has been used in several countries to prevent sexual recidivism and is still practiced in several states in the United States. In Europe, it has remained in limited use in Germany and in the Czech Republic (Douglas et al. 2013). Since the 1960s, most jurisdictions have replaced irreversible surgical castration of sex offenders with reversible chemical castration with anti-androgen drugs. In Denmark, use of surgical castration was stopped in 1970, and since the late 1980s, serious (...) sex offenders have on a trial basis been treated with anti-androgen drugs (Hansen and Lykke-Olesen 1997). In 1997, an official treatment program for sex offenders was introduced on a trial basis, and in 2011 this scheme was made permanent (Nielsen 2001).The first part of the scheme covers persons with a suspended sentence with conditions of sexological treatment. This program serves as an alternative to suspended sentences of up to one and a half years of prison for crimina. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This issue invites us to consider examples of feminist cultural production that use music, graphic art, and film to resist sexual conventions. Andrea Wood turns our attention to lesbian sex and romance in comics, a genre that has long captivated lay readers and is gaining popularity in academic circles. Rachel Lumsden analyzes Ethel Smyth’s 1913 musical composition “Possession,” an ode to same-sex intimacy displaying a “sonic meld” of (...) passion, desire, and political commitment. Sharmila Lodhia’s account of Nina Paley’s film Sita Sings the Blues considers how a sexually charged anitmated representation of a traditional epic can spur battles over cultural authenticity. Ariane Cruz examines how sexual pleasure presses against racist histories in a study on black women and BDSM. Whether sexuality is policed, as Chloë Taylor explores in her article, or the policing of sexuality is shunned, as Lynn Comella addresses in her review essay, it is clear that the grip of sexual politics on women ’s sexual lives is strong. Wang Zheng’s News and Views piece recounts recent global feminist tactics used to release five young feminists jailed in China, an urgent reminder about how women’s bodies are policed in violent ways. We begin this issue with Chloë Taylor’s essay reflecting on how sexology and psychiatry function to represent female desire in narrow ways. Taylor explores how female sexual dysfunction is constructed in sexology and psychiatric practice and locates this as part of a longer history of rendering selected bodies and sexual practices as deviant. Her analysis is a valuable rejoinder to the ever-expanding grip of psychiatry on the ordering—and disordering—of women’s bodies and sexuality. The line between normal and abnormal is always shifting, but its constant is how it maneuvers and is maneuvered to control female sexual desire. Taylor’s argument moves toward a non-normalizing feminist sexology that can interrogate sexual practice and function without rendering any as “right” or “wrong.” 256Preface Andrea Wood also turns to female sexuality, specifically lesbian sex, love, and romance, in her article on comics as a literary genre. Lesbian romance comics, Wood argues, offer a different discursive lens for “making the invisible visible.” Using queer theory to interrogate romantic depictions of lesbian sex and sexuality, she explores how the visual narrative form of comics allows for a different and politically compelling depiction of lesbian identity and sexual activity. Although lesbian romance and same-sex desire has been an interest of many feminist scholars, few have examined the visual field of lesbian comics—a genre, Wood insists, that demonstrates resistance to what Adrienne Rich identified as “compulsory heterosexuality.” Rachel Lumsden draws our attention to composer Ethel Smyth’s understudied song “Possession.” The song is a rumination on what it means to possess something or someone, and what it means to be possessed ; it is also a song that Smyth dedicated to Emmeline Pankhurst, her political comrade as well as her close friend and muse. Lumsden reads the song as a creative, strategically ambiguous “ode to an intimate female relationship,” a tribute to the respect, affection, and tenderness that Pankhurst and Smyth shared. Rather than reveal the “truth” of Smyth’s relationship with Pankhurst, Lumsden instead invites readers to consider the “sonic meld” of “Possession” as a space through which “themes of desire, activism, eroticism, solidarity, and sacrifice coalesce and congeal ” and as a site through which Smyth narrated her experiences, passions, desires, and political commitments. Sharmila Lodhia engages the controversy surrounding Nina Paley’s re-telling of the Ramayana in her film Sita Sings the Blues, which some critics have deemed “offensive,” “insulting,” and a “desecration of the Ramayana and the Hindu faith.” Lodhia treats Paley’s film—which positions Sita rather than Ram as the story’s protagonist, deploys animation and myriad narrator perspectives, fuses Paley’s own story with Sita’s story, and sets the story to a 1920s blues soundtrack—as a productive “body of critique about the epic’s central teachings on virtue, righteousness, and idealized gender roles.” By situating Paley’s retelling of the Ramayana in the context of numerous and varied Ramayana retellings, Lodhia reveals that Sita Sings the Blues is a “creative... (shrink)

Charlotte Wolff was born in Riesenburg, West Prussia into a middle-class Jewish family. She studied philosophy and then medicine at several German universities, completing her doctorate in Berlin in 1926. Working in various institutions over the next few years, she was also interested in psychotherapy and had a small private medical and psychotherapeutic practice. In 1933 she was forced to leave Germany because of the Nazi regime, and settled for a few years in Paris. As a German refugee she was (...) unable to practice medicine, so she began her research into the correlation between hand traits and personality. In 1936 she went to London to continue her research work and lived there until her death. An active lesbian from an early age, her later research turned to sexology and her writing on lesbianism and bisexuality were influential early works in the field. This is a great opportunity to rediscover her early work, including her first autobiography. (shrink)

This article interrogates the scientific conference as a means by which the organizers of the World League for Sexual Reform's 1929 conference attempted to marshal the ‘scientific spirit’ in order to present progressive sexual reform as a rational and scientifically informed undertaking. The conference was carefully curated to make the sex reform movement (and the assorted characters that gathered under its banner) look serious, legitimate and, most importantly, scientific. The conference was also an attempt by organizer Norman Haire to exert (...) control over the strategy of sexology, an enterprise that put him at odds with other prominent sexologists of the time. Crucially, Haire understood sexology as inherently intellectually interdisciplinary, but was strategically convinced that the only sound rubric through which to promote and gain acceptance for the movement was through medical science. This central debate, about how best to define the contested concept of sexology, continues among historians today. By examining how the 1929 conference organizers wrestled to define their sex-reforming remit and how they curated the conference to that end, this paper will offer a window onto the mechanisms via which adherents of intellectual communities contend with heterogeneity, how we judge forms of knowledge and, ultimately, what constitutes science. (shrink)

Scholars are increasingly concerned about social biases in facial analysis systems, particularly with regard to the tangible consequences of misidentification of marginalized groups. However, few have examined how automated facial analysis technologies intersect with the historical genealogy of racialized gender—the gender binary and its classification as a highly racialized tool of colonial power and control. In this paper, we introduce the concept of auto-essentialization: the use of automated technologies to re-inscribe the essential notions of difference that were established under colonial (...) rule. We consider how the face has emerged as a legitimate site of gender classification, despite being historically tied to projects of racial domination. We examine the history of gendering the face and body, from colonial projects aimed at disciplining bodies which do not fit within the European gender binary, to sexology's role in normalizing that binary, to physiognomic practices that ascribed notions of inferiority to non-European groups and women. We argue that the contemporary auto-essentialization of gender via the face is both racialized and trans-exclusive: it asserts a fixed gender binary and it elevates the white face as the ultimate model of gender difference. We demonstrate that imperialist ideologies are reflected in modern automated facial analysis tools in computer vision through two case studies: commercial gender classification and the security of both small-scale and large-scale spaces. Thus, we posit a rethinking of ethical attention to these systems: not as immature and novel, but as mature instantiations of much older technologies. (shrink)

IntroductionAs we near the semicentennial of the 1976 publication of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, for all its influence in the interim, this work remains today extraordinarily challenging in relation to our sexual mores. In this article, I will attempt to reapply its insights to analyze contemporary trends in sexuality and gender. Questions that I will consider include the continuing applicability of Foucault’s analyses, to what extent and how they may need to be revised in light of (...) historical developments, and what reading Foucault can tell us about our contemporary conjuncture. I will argue that volume 1 of The History of Sexuality remains highly relevant in this regard, although I will also indicate some ways in which things have moved on since Foucault’s time, and thus in which his thesis might be modified. Despite Foucault having apparently been extremely influential on academic thinking about sex, we seem nonetheless to have become or remained “other Victorians,” perversely mimicking the nineteenth-century sexology that Foucault pilloried. I will argue that we have continued to believe exactly the great myths about sex that Foucault sought to dispense with: namely, that sexuality has primarily been shaped by historic “repression,” that sexuality needs to be “liberated” from this repression, and that there is a “truth of sex” that is on the side of freedom. These beliefs have all mutated, however, to the extent that questions of sex (like many other social questions) are increasingly oriented around individual identities and the supposed sovereignty of the individual to determine their own truth. (shrink)

Based on therapeutic meetings with individuals who have experienced sexual violence and abuse, the challenge is how do we help these couples to establish sexual relationships on their own terms, without interference of defence or coping strategies they have used to protect themselves against the overwhelming experiences of violence or abuse in the past? This article will focus on therapeutic work with such couples and how to interact with them and support their efforts to establish satisfying sexual relationships, based on (...) sexological experience as well as experience from work with traumatisation. The basis for our treatment is a modified version of William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s approach. The technique of sensate focus is central, modified by trauma theory, including the understanding of dissociation, and the need to integrate memories from different levels: somatic, emotional, and cognitive. The traumatised client needs special attention to the experiences of predictability and safety and respect due to their history of being transgressed against. The therapists must be aware of the issue of dissociation; different dissociated inner parts can play different roles in the interaction between client and therapist. While couples therapy is a necessary frame for this therapy, the therapist often needs to work with issues unique to each individual. Each partner must be able to identify their own responses and their own sexual needs and preferences. It may therefore be valuable to have a co-therapist. The central goal is for the clients to identify responses to stimulation as a here and now experience in a setting that feels safe and welcome. (shrink)

The relationship between opera and gay subcultures (especially male), lifestyle practices and consumerism has been noted by cultural critics and musicologists - the former in affirmative terms, the latter largely hostile. This article explores this relationship initially through a review of the existing literature before concentrating on the striking affinities in the discursive construction of both cultural forms. In the modern era, both opera and homosexuality have been stigmatized and marginalized in their respective rationalizing ‘scientific’ domains: musicology and sexology. (...) Both have been authoritatively declared unhealthy, both reconstructed out of the distinctive repressions of Victorianism, both subsequently searching for inclusion and legitimacy. (shrink)

The historical forces of war and migration impacted heavily on the disciplinary locations, practitioners, and structures of sexology and psychoanalysis that had developed in the first decades of the 20th century. By the late 1940s, the US was fast becoming the world centre of each of these prominent fields within the modern human sciences. During these years, the work of Alfred C. Kinsey and his team became synonymous with a distinctly North American brand of empirical sex research. This article (...) offers the most nuanced account to date of the shifting relationship between these two fields in the late 1940s to mid 1950s. It argues that this was more collaborative and mutually influential than previous historians have assumed, even as, following the publication of the first ‘Kinsey report’, tensions grew between the Indiana team and the conservative brand of psychoanalysis that by this stage dominated 1950s North American psychiatry. A keen sense of professional competitiveness accelerated the growing split between these two fields, as Kinsey’s team developed a distinctly modern, technologized brand of statistically oriented sexology that contrasted with the older patient case history, and assumed a very different approach to conservative analysts on ideas of homosexuality and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour. Yet this story of divergence is also tempered through consideration of other aspects of ‘situated knowledge’ such as religion and gender identity, even as accounts of cross-disciplinary competitiveness are expanded by contrasting Kinsey’s positions on psychoanalysis with those of contemporaries such as Harry Benjamin. (shrink)

This article introduces a collection of articles written in response to a recently published intellectual and cultural history of normality by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens. It points to the fact that this special issue considerably extends and enriches the topical range of the book. The articles that follow discuss, in order, schooling in France at the time of the Revolution, phrenology in Europe and the US from 1840 to 1940, relations between commercial practice and scientific craniometry in 19th-century Britain (...) and France, psychology in late 19th-century France, case studies in sexology and psychoanalysis in Central Europe, and biotypology in Southern Europe and Latin America. (shrink)

This article presents a contextualisation of Belgian philosopher and historian of psychiatry and sexuality, Patrick Vandermeersch’s (1946–), unpublished analysis of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) interpretation of Methodius of Olympus’ (d.ca.311) views on virginity and chastity, in Histoire de la sexualité 4 ( Les aveux de la chair ), published in February 2018 at Gallimard in Paris under the editorship of Frédéric Gros. The article contributes to the reception and the ongoing analyses of Les aveux de la chair by exploring (...) Foucault’s reading while highlighting both the importance of Vandermeersch’s analysis and the sexological-historiographical significance of his broader oeuvre that spans over four decades. Vandermeersch shows that Foucault, as many other commentators of Methodius, did not substantially engage Methodius’ explicit indebtedness and persistent references to Plato (already evident in the title Symposium but especially regarding the Phaedrus ). Platonic homoeroticism is, according to Vandermeersch, as a consequence often too hastily, and therefore problematically, transposed on contexts of female virginity. Likewise, Foucault, when indicating already at the end of Histoire de la sexualité 2 ( L’usage des plaisirs 1984), the particular relevance of homoeroticism in the development of Western sexuality, seemed to adhere to this transposition. Could ‘beautiful boys’ truly be transposed onto ‘female virgins’ without severe sexual-discursive complications? And could Methodius’ encomium of virginity in any way be understood independent of his understanding of the ‘resurrection of the body’, with the integrity of its (virginised) sexual desire intact? These are among Vandermeersch’s valid and challenging questions to both Foucault and his contemporary readership. Contribution: Foucault’s reading of the church- and desert fathers in Histoire de la sexualité 4 ( Les aveux de la chair ) impacts early Medieval philosophy, early Medieval history, church history, patristics, philosophy of religion, psychology of religion and sociology of religion. Since these proximate disciplines are drawn towards Foucault’s text, they may well note its ongoing examinations. Foucault’s direct impact on these disciplines is illustrated in Vandermeersch’s significant analysis of Foucault’s reading of Methodius in Les aveux de la chair. Vandermeersch’s broader oeuvre in philosophy, theology, psychiatry, psychology, psychology of religion and the history of sexuality is concurrently contextualised as of ongoing contemporary importance for these disciplines. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 341 Petrus Liu Thinking Gender in the Age of the Beijing Consensus Originally formulated to dispute biologically deterministic explanations of women’s subordination, the analytical distinction between sex and gender has developed in unexpected ways in transitions from one language to another. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from John Money’s sexological writings to Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum, (...) “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” Anglophone feminists in the 1970s developed the distinction between sex (understood as anatomy) and gender (understood as social identity) to argue that a woman’s biological sex ought not dictate the kind of work she should do or the kind of life she should live.1 In her landmark 1975 essay, “The Traffic in Women,” Gayle Rubin coined the phrase “sex/gender system” to examine “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”2 In more recent years, however, the distinction 1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Paris: Gallimard, 1949; New York: Knopf, 1993), 281. Citations refer to the Knopf edition. For an account of feminist reformulations of John Money and Robert Stoller, see Jennifer Germon, Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 2. Gayle S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 34. It is worth mentioning that sex in Rubin’s sex/gender system refers to sexual practice rather than the distinction between male and female. This understanding forms the basis of her theoretical disagreements with Judith Butler, who preserves the semantic ambiguity of sex (as 342 Petrus Liu between sex and gender has taken on an entirely different meaning as it comes to inform transgender movements and politics seeking to decouple a person’s sex assignment at birth from their future gender identity. At the same time, theories of intersectionality, women-of-color feminisms, and transnational feminisms have all developed their own theses of gender variability to contest the myth of the universal woman. The life of gender—in academic theory, politics, and social movements— has confounded the original intentions of its American theorists. It is clear that there is no singular or stable account of gender; rather, gender is always in a state of flux, incessantly rethought and reforged by the demands of an increasingly complex and asymmetric world.3 Gender is always a translation—from one discipline, context, or language to another—ineluctably intertwined with the geopolitical problems created by the violences of imperialism, colonialism, and transnational capitalism. The translation of gender into non-European languages, such as Chinese, raises questions about whether spaces previously resistant or exterior to world capitalism are now being assimilated and enfolded into the structure of neoliberal globalization defined by the Washington Consensus. Against this view, some critics maintain that China’s precipitous ascent presents an alternative model of development for the Global South called the Beijing Consensus. Considering how gender has entered different languages, including Chinese, to create new coinages that may at times appear as instruments of an imperial takeover, Judith Butler argues that the translation of gender actually offers a path of linguistic humility for English, a reminder that we cohabit a multilingual world in which no one ever owned the term.4 But how exactly do we describe that complex, multilingual world and how does gender both gender and sexuality) as the point of departure for a different kind of feminist inquiry. See Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, “Interview: Sexual Traffic,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 67. 3. See Heather Love, ed. “Rethinking Sex.” Special issue, GLQ 17, no. 2 (2011): 1–221. This collection of essays conveys a sense of how Rubin’s methodological distinction between sex and gender has given rise to new ways of thinking across different disciplines about sex radicalism, crip sexuality, Black feminism, and sex trafficking. 4. Judith Butler, “Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism,” philoSOPHIA 9, no. 1 (Winter 2019). Petrus Liu 343 transform it? How is the translation of gender inflected by the material conditions... (shrink)