How to Do the History of Sexual Science

Abstract

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.

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.…”

“…This special issue thus contributes to ongoing discussions about the cross-disciplinary and cross-national development of sexual science as a field (Crozier and Bauer, 2017). Whether one sees sexology as fundamentally defined by medical and scientific disciplines that ranged from psychiatry and forensic medicine to the biological sciences and endocrinology, or as a broader interdisciplinary field that included literature, history, the social sciences, and law, the development of sexual science was a transnational and global project (Kahan and LaFleur, 2023). From its inception, sexual science responded to local concerns and had regional characteristics, yet sexologists also engaged with colleagues in other countries and continents.…”