Toward a Global History of Sexual Science: Movements, Networks, and Deployments

Abstract

This book examines the various circuits, nodes, and modes that enabled sexual scientific knowledge to spread worldwide. It shows how various actors such as Sueo Iwaya, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Swami Shivananda engaged with sexual science through their writings, as well as sexual science's relationship to modernity. The book suggests that European sexual science was constituted on the basis of conceptions of Others considered outside of “modernity” and that actors outside of Europe contributed to a globalizing sexual science through “unruly appropriations” of the field's emergent ideas. It also discusses the ways that ideas of sexual science circulated multidirectionally through travel, intellectual exchange, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. Essays written by historians, historians of science, anthropologists, and humanities scholars cover topics ranging from male homosexuality and female prostitution to the secularization of Christian marriage, popular sexology in early postwar Japan, the science of sexual difference, and female orgasm.

Modern European sexological and orientalist assimilations of medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bahto erotology

“…Stereotyped views of cultural difference informed by colonial power relations underlay the new European fantasies of the Middle Eastern, African, Indian, South American, South-East Asian, and Pacific cultures that flourished in the 19th century (Arondekar, 2005;Colligan, 2006;McClintock, 1995;Stoler, 1995). A similar fascination with exotic bodies and sexual practices was reflected in major works of French, English, and German sexology published between c.1880 and c.1930, as several important scholarly endeavours have explored (Bland and Doan, 1998;Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones, 2017;Funke, 2015;Schick, 1999: 82-6). The renowned Viennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing epitomised this kind of approach to Muslim cultures in one of the most widely read works of late 19th-century sexual science (von Krafft-Ebing, 1903).…”

“…In his own periodisation of sexuality in history, Foucault nonetheless appeared to accept implicitly the association of sexual science (with its focus on taxonomies of desire) uniquely with the modern West, and the association of pleasure techniques with all that preceded and exceeded it (Gautam, 2016: 21–2; Rocha, 2011). Scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler, Claire Cosquer, Leon Rocha, and several others have complained that Foucault's ambivalent evocation of the ars erotica / scientia sexualis dichotomy reflected an orientalist flattening and homogenisation of different cultures throughout world history, thus itself evincing a colonial habit of thought in which the West is reductively distinguished from ‘the rest’ (Cosquer, 2019: 16; Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones, 2017: 6–8; Rocha, 2011; Stoler, 1995: 14–15; 2010: 146). Other scholars have also destabilised the dichotomy by showing how even in the peak era of Europe's supposed scientia sexualis moment – between 1860 and 1930 – there were also important literary and artistic genres presenting both eroticised and medicalised perspectives that, in turn, impacted the development of modern scientific discourses of sexuality, something Foucault himself acknowledged but did not explore in satisfactory detail (Bauer, 2009; Byrne, 2013; Cryle, 2008, 2018; Downing, 2002; Finn, 2011; Funke et al , 2017; Schaffner and Weller, 2012; Sutton, 2018).…”

“…However, there has also been an important scholarly movement to consider more multidirectional global entanglements in the modern history of ideas about sexuality and gender generally, particularly those relating to Europe and the Middle East (El Shakry, 2020: 63-81;Leck, 2017;Massad, 2007;Najmabadi, 2005Najmabadi, , 2014Newman, 2014: 49-56;Surkis, 2019;Ze'evi, 2006). Some historians of sexology more specifically have also highlighted how European cultural translations of concepts derived from Middle Eastern, Asian, African, and North and South American indigenous cultures contributed to global ideas about inversion, perversion, and the enumeration of the sexes in the modern era, often with reference to colonial hierarchies and racist ideologies (Bauer, 2003(Bauer, , 2008(Bauer, , 2015Chiang, 2018;Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones, 2017;Funke, 2015;Wiesner-Hanks, 2011).…”

Violent Women: Photographic Evidence, Gender and Sexology in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany

“…Like other sexologists they had to navigate the 'closely connected theories of sexuality with late nineteenth-century understandings of evolution, racial hierarchies, crime, and social degeneration', but did so to different avail. 76 Alexander Jassny argued most passionately against what he perceived to be Wulffen's double standards, saying it was unfair to expect women to have a greater restraint in matters of sex than men; he passionately and politically argued that on the contrary, emancipation represented the solution to the Frauenfrage ('the woman question'). 77 Psychiatrist Otto Juliusburger, a close affiliate of Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, commented in an otherwise positive review of Das Weib als Sexualverbrecherin in the Socialist newspaper Vorwärts: 'I cannot agree with Wulffen when he argues that female criminality is less a product of social conditions than its male counterpart'.…”

Review Essay: Sexual Science as Global History

“…As we learn in the introduction, sexual science was 'a "traveling culture" that resulted in collisions and contestations', a set of 'unruly' and dynamic ideas that cut across geopolitical spaces. 11 The chapters demand that scholars return to sexual science through a global and trans-regional lens to reframe scholarly debates about the politics of sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The accessible and attentive introduction poses the intervention of the volume in three ways: 1) that European sexual science was always-already a science based on the colonial encounter and the production of 'others' outside the domain of the modern sexual subject, 2) that intellectuals outside of Europe shaped the sexual sciences in both metropole and colony and 3) that ideas of sexuality were perpetually dynamic, in constant exchange across geographies and societies.…”