This introduction maps the ways in which sexual scientific thought circulated during the fin de siècle, tracing the interconnections between and breaks in the global circuits of sexological thought and how this circuitry continues to structure sexuality in the present. In so doing, Kahan and LaFleur position their approach and that of the special issue as a whole within the larger field of sexology, placing it in more robust dialogue with sexuality studies and attending in particular to sexology's racial and imperial logics. They examine the ways in which racial science and colonial knowledge constitute sexual science as an amorphous object, one with a problematically vast reach that contributes to contemporary understandings of racialization and undergirding colonial infrastructures. And yet, they argue, sexual science is not something that can be wished away or easily left behind, for its taxonomies and ways of knowing continue to structure identitarian frameworks of gender and sexuality.
This article argues that residents of late eighteenth-century North America had access to a wide vocabulary for describing and experiencing variation in sexual behavior and self-presentation. Building on work in eighteenth-century science studies, this article reminds us that gender, a term that was used during the eighteenth century to describe groups of either sex, was increasingly understood as a way of characterizing men and women along specific behavioral or taxonomic lines. The article makes three claims: first, that the enormous body of scholarship on the relationality and contingency of eighteenth-century gender has not yet coalesced into an overarching narrative within eighteenth-century studies that reflects this understanding of the instability of gender during this period; second, that to center a historical narrative of the instability of eighteenth-century gender in our scholarship and teaching, we must center studies of gender that are theorized intersectionally (the history of gender in Caribbean colonies, rather than metropolitan spaces; the history of gender in working-class communities, rather than ruling-class communities; and so on) because this scholarship takes the relationality of gender as fundamental; and finally, that theorizing transhistorical “similarity” (as distinct from continuity) bears important potential as a framework for imagining a historically rigorous relationship between the politics of gender in the eighteenth century and the politics of gender today.
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