Histories of sexology today: Reimagining the boundaries of scientia sexualis

Introduction

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. Beginning in the 1970s, the rise of gay and lesbian history, propelled by the gay liberation movement, and the publication of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, inspired a wave of scholarly interest in what Foucault called the scientia sexualis (Foucault, 1998). Histories of sexology written under the influence of these late-20th-century catalysts have been indelibly marked by genealogical concerns with the emergence of modern sexual categories and taxonomies, the development of hierarchies of normal and abnormal sexual acts, desires, and identities, and the effects of these developments on the contours of subjectivities and communities. They have concentrated on key texts and authors, largely male psychiatrists and biologists: figures such as Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who in 1886 compiled the first forensic-psychiatric case study collection of the sexual perversions with his Psychopathia Sexualis, or Berlin-based physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who just over a century ago founded the world’s first dedicated Institute for Sexual Science in Weimar Republic Berlin. These studies have also centred primarily on Northern and Western Europe.

In recent years, scholars have challenged the strictures of these particular foci by drawing attention to the roles of scientific subjects in the creation of sexological knowledge (Lišková, 2016; Oosterhuis, 2000; Savoia, 2010; Spector, 2016), by highlighting the importance of studying and situating sexology beyond Europe (Bauer, 2015; Chiang, 2009; Stoler, 1995), and by advocating a critical as opposed to genealogical historical practice (Doan, 2013). Scholars have also endeavoured to tease out the relationship between sexual knowledge and sexual politics, and how the complex tangle of the two effected what Howard Chiang has characterized as ‘epistemic turning points’ (Chiang, 2010). Research initiatives have sprung up at universities in the United Kingdom and United States that seek to reconceptualize sexology by making it more interdisciplinary and transnational, attending more closely to gender politics, and interrogating relationships between fields and disciplines within sexology.

A recent scholarly exchange between Ivan Crozier and Heike Bauer published by History of the Human Sciences attests to both the timeliness and the significance of these questions for the history of sexuality at large. This exchange draws attention to the significance of translation – of concepts and epistemological frameworks as well as of language – for the historical development of sexology as a field, while also questioning how and where one might draw boundaries around this historical entity. While Crozier argues, for example, that literary texts engaging with sex ‘in that earnest late-nineteenth century way’ might be better understood as ‘formed by the rearticulation of sexual knowledge into and out of the field of sexology’ rather than as sexology proper, Bauer and others have argued for a more expansive conception of sexual science as a ‘porous field’ that encompassed law, social science, anthropology, and literature, among others: ‘Sexual debates as we known [sic] them today emerged on the intersections between these different fields rather than just within a distinct, clearly disciplined sexual science’ (Crozier and Bauer, 2017). Yet even in the narrower sense outlined by Crozier, whereby sexology’s remit is seen as pertaining primarily to medical and scientific approaches to human sexuality, we have a definition that permits of an impressive range of approaches from the biological sciences, chemistry, endocrinology, and the numerous ‘psy’-sciences.

This special issue takes stock of these new directions in the history and historiography of sexology, 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.

The urge to pin down the limits of sexology’s ‘disciplinarity’, evident in the debate between Bauer and Crozier, can also open up pertinent questions about the ‘grey’ areas in the spaces across and between disciplines and objects of study. To turn to the first of the five contributions to this special issue, Sarah Bull’s article interrogates the shifting boundaries of knowledge production and dissemination between sexology and genres of knowledge traditionally categorized as ‘smut’. Her work engages explicitly with the socially taboo and marginalized nature of sexology’s objects of study – perversions, fetishes, practices usually performed behind closed doors – and with questions of censorship, often justified, even for openly pornographic cultural products, on the basis of their ‘scientific’ value, to open up new lines of inquiry at the nexus of the history of erotica and the history of sexual science. According to Bull, erotic material was integral to sexological knowledge creation and its transnational dissemination, yet, given its social status, had to be strenuously disavowed and clearly divorced from the scientific endeavour. Bull’s contribution thus highlights the significance of a politics of ‘respectability’ for the professionalization of sexology as it attempted to distinguish itself from the pornographic or erotic – despite its deep imbrication with, and dependence upon, these realms.

The difficulty of drawing discrete lines around sexology’s objects of study is given a new angle, meanwhile, in Ina Linge’s contribution, a rare investigation of the connections between the animal and the human in scientific sex research. This article brings new theoretical impetuses from the burgeoning field of animal studies to bear on a field best known for its studies of human sexual ‘perversions’ and ‘pathologies’. Richard B. Goldschmidt’s 1910s research on ‘intersex butterflies’ and moths, as Linge shows, sparked a wave of reactions from German sexologists, many affiliated with Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science (sometimes known as the Institute of Sexology) in Berlin. These studies of non-human actors provided crucial support for scientists keen to establish a natural basis for sexual diversity, including Hirschfeld’s theory of sexual intermediacy, the Zwischenstufenlehre. Their findings fed into wider debates with decidedly human political implications, including the criminalization of homosexuality under Germany’s notorious Paragraph 175, while also underscoring sexology’s status as a natural science capable of expanding knowledge about the sexual ‘constitution’ of biological organisms. This interplay between human and non-human research was ultimately immortalized, as Linge explores, in the naming of one of these butterfly species after Hirschfeld himself, Perrhybris lypera Magni Hirschfeldi.

Recent years have also seen increasing critical attention paid to historical categories of the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ (see, for example, Cryle and Stephens, 2017; Daston, 2019; Doan, 2013). These categories strongly influenced the taxonomies and theories of the human sciences, particularly in Anglosphere and European contexts, from the mid to late 19th century. Benjamin Kahan’s contribution pursues this question of how the ‘normal’ as a category shaped sexual knowledge in this period, investigating the ways in which such investigations were closely intertwined with understandings of race and racialization. Whereas scholars have attended to developments in US sexology in the mid 20th century (Drucker, 2012), Kahan focuses on the emergence of sexual science in the United States in the mid 19th century to trace a different genealogy of sexology informed by politics and philosophies specific to the North American continent during that time. Namely, he highlights the centrality of transcendentalism and phrenology in the initial stirrings of American sexology, drawing attention to the works of figures like Orson Squire Fowler. US-based sexologists, Kahan argues, entertained different preoccupations than their German counterparts: unlike German-language sexologists, who dedicated significant attention to subjects like ‘inversion’ and ‘contrary sexual instincts’, American sexologists were concerned primarily with reproduction and enhancing marital sex relations (which concomitantly involved the denigration of prostitution, contraception, and non-reproductive sex acts). Kahan further asserts that American sexologists were among the first to develop novel, modern scientific theories of gender. All of these developments, however, were forged within the context of distinctly American preoccupations with race (and practices of racism). By examining the specificities of 19th-century US sexology and its diverse intellectual inputs, Kahan reminds us that the development of sexual science, while undoubtedly a transnational project, had distinctive regional preoccupations and theoretical innovations.

Indeed, balancing sexology’s global dimensions with its regional specificities has become a central preoccupation, as scholars unearth both sexology’s transnational exchanges and its unique and uneven development in locales around the world. Recent years have seen a rapid increase in scholarship on Eastern European sexological histories, including in the pages of this journal (Lišková, 2016; Marks, 2018; Savelli, 2018) and at international meetings such as the European Social Science History conference; such work has also been popularized by works such as Kristen Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism (2018). These and other scholars are charting an increasingly nuanced account of the many region-specific factors at play across different socialist contexts such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, highlighting the ways in which ‘scientific’ knowledge about sexuality in the 20th century was always caught up in broader sociopolitical ideologies and structures, including gender politics. These differences are too often underplayed in the work focusing on Western European male pioneers outlined above.

Kate Davison offers an important contribution to this growing body of work with her investigation of ‘Cold War Pavlov’, investigating the creation and communication of knowledge around male homosexuality, and in particular homosexual aversion therapy. Davison charts the ways in which new ideas and therapies not only circulated between Eastern bloc contexts such as East Germany and Czechoslovakia, but also travelled across major geopolitical fault lines, thanks not least to the work of particular individuals and schools. A key factor shaping post-war clinical experimentation around homosexual aversion therapy, Davison shows, was the growing polarization of Freudian and Pavlovian paradigms of psychology and mental illness. While cross-border translations of knowledge are an important part of this story, so too are omissions and misrepresentations of scientific research, with anglophone researchers in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, drawing only selectively on the progressive earlier work of the ‘Prague experiment’. As a result, they continued to emphasize pathologization and therapy rather than following Czechoslovakian moves towards homosexual law reform.

Finally, intersections between sexual scientific and psychoanalytic research are at the centre of Katie Sutton’s contribution examining the immediate post-war decades in the United States. As the work of Alfred C. Kinsey and his team was coming to stand for a distinctly North American brand of empirical sex research, Freudian psychoanalysis began to dominate mainstream US psychiatry. Sutton argues that the relationship between Kinsey and psychoanalytic researchers in the years surrounding the two groundbreaking ‘Kinsey Reports’ was, at least initially, less antagonistic than has often been assumed, and examines how the increasing split between these fields by the early to mid 1950s was overlaid by ideas about religion and sexuality. At this point, mainstream US psychoanalysis was transitioning from a field strongly influenced by Jewish analysts and émigrés to a much more puritanical Christian model – a transition recently charted by Dagmar Herzog (2017) – while the Kinsey Reports were paying surprising levels of attention to differences between Orthodox and more liberal appraisals of Jewish sexuality, despite what these texts reveal about Kinsey’s own situatedness as a secular researcher of Protestant background. Contrasting approaches to homosexual and transgender phenomena further complicate this picture of mid-century sex research and highlight the limits of Kinsey’s celebrated scientific openness.

These scholarly interventions shed new light on the ways in which the creation of new, ‘scientific’ forms of knowledge about human – and animal – sexuality were inflected by questions of censorship, race and species, and new statistical formulations of the ‘normal’. Together, they deepen our understanding of the geographies and inter/disciplinarity of modern sex research.