Histories of sexology today: Reimagining the boundaries of scientia sexualis

Abstract

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.

‘All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex’: Development and the social function of the sexual instinct in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexology

“… 5. As several scholars have acknowledged, Western sexual scientists at the turn of the 20th century explicitly and determinedly identified sexology as a cross-disciplinary field of knowledge (Bauer, 2015; Fisher and Funke, 2015; Leng, 2018; Leng and Sutton, 2021). Existing accounts of the history of sexology suggest that this interdisciplinary agenda was the result of a broadening out from an earlier, primarily psychiatric, starting point of sexological knowledge production.…”

Sexology and development

“…Over half a century after Michel Foucault's foundational exploration of scientia sexualis, the history of sexology is a well-established area of scholarly investigation animated by ongoing contestations around the disciplinary boundaries, political outlook, and transnational dimensions of the sexological field (Bauer, 2015;Haynes, Fuechtner, and Jones, 2018;Giami and Levinson, 2021;Kahan and LaFleur, 2023;Leng and Sutton, 2021). This special issue focuses on the multivalent concept of development to address some of the most pressing questions driving current historiographical conversations in this area.…”