Modernism and Sexology

Abstract

Arising in the mid-nineteenth century, sexology has been viewed as central to the development of sexual modernism, conceived as a sex-saturated age in which sex became, as Havelock Ellis puts it, "the central problem of life." This essay examines several prominent trends in research exploring the relationship of sexology, modern U.S. and British society and literature, and the history of sexuality. The first trend is the deepening and expansion of a long-standing inquiry into the influence and effect of sexology on modernist literature. The second trend explores sexology's place in modern culture, suggesting that it was only one source (and sometimes not even the most important source) from which early twentieth-century British and American citizens learned about sex. The final trend involves a lively and growing debate about how to write the history of sexuality, a project in which sexology has previously played a prominent role. Some scholars have called for a queering of this endeavor, in part by departing from traditional practices of history-writing, whereas others have suggested that we can write the history of sexuality more complexly without completely abandoning recognized disciplinary practices. The essay ends by suggesting that some sexologists set the terms for a queer un-raveling of the identitarian and pathologizing legacy of sexology and that this may be the side of sexology that appealed most to some modernist writers.

Troubling Popularisation: On the Gendered Circuits of a ‘Scientific’ Knowledge of Sex

“…33 Over the last couple of decades, some specialists in sexuality studies have chipped away -albeit unknowingly -at popularisation to rethink sexology as 'more multifaceted and dynamic than monolithic and static'. 34 This scholarship demonstrates how, based on lived experience, readers and writers alike were active participants in questioning, subverting and revising the medicalised taxonomies of sexology. A good example of this approach is a study by the social historian Lisa Z. Sigel, who, although deeply invested in the category of popular culture, persuasively argues the great majority of readers turned to 'popular science, sexology, novels, magazines and ephemera', and rarely swallowed sexological concepts unquestioningly.…”

“…37 While the 'majority of people were more likely to find out about sex from a non-medical source', sexological ideas -fragmented and partial -filtered through 'popular forms of entertainment and news'. 38 More recently, Heike Bauer's notion of a 'literary sexology' and Benjamin Kahan's investment in 'vernacular sexology' highlight the precarious fault lines between sexologists and laypeople to argue there was a 'revolving door between literature and sexology'. 39 In developing these descriptors Bauer and Kahan recognise something is wrong with the fried-egg model, but their solution in naming new knowledge practices leapfrogs over critical questions relating to public dissemination.…”

Queer literary studies and the question of identity categories

“…Queer theory has always been characterized by an “entrenchment in literary criticism” (Hurley, , p. xiv), and even when queer scholars are not themselves from that field, their arguments typically engage with the intensive anatomization and interrogation of sexual identity in the work of literary critics like Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, David Halperin, and Michael Warner . Entangled with queer theory's deconstruction of sexual identities are concerns with historical temporality and periodization—topics of hot debate in queer studies over the past 15 years or so that have been well covered in previous issues of Literature Compass (Binhammer, ; Furneaux, ; Gajowski, ; Moddlemog, ; Roulston, ; Webster, ). If we can quibble with Tales of the City 's Shawna's identification of lesbianism with the 1990s, her quip nonetheless indicates how identity categories are always bound up with markers of historical passage (periods, centuries, decades) that are also of course categories—taxonomical divisions that help us to comprehend and organize time.…”