‘Histories of sexology today: Reimagining the boundaries of scientia sexualis’ is the current issue of History of the Human Sciences, guest edited by Kirsten Leng and Katie Sutton. Special issue co-editor Katie Sutton spoke to the journal’s web editor Hannah Proctor about how the essays in the issue contribute to extending our understandings of histories of sexology.
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HHS: First of all, could you say a little about the genesis of the Special Issue? What did you, as editors, hope to achieve with this collection of essays?
KS: Kirsten Leng and I have both been working in various areas of the history of sexology for some time and with this special issue we really wanted to push some of the boundaries of the field.
Michel Foucault influentially turned his attention to the history of sexual science in the History of Sexuality and since then there’s been a tendency to prioritize certain kinds of analytical questions within the field – for example, how has our understanding of homosexuality developed over time? Or, how have scientists gone about diagnosing “deviants”? This has been a history with a decidedly Western, male, white and European focus. The history of sexology has also often been limited to the “medical” and “scientific”. We were interested in opening up the historiography in more interdisciplinary directions, including by problematizing the disciplinary boundaries of the field from its very early days onwards. We were also interested in how we could use this issue to explore more of the transnational connections that have influentially shaped this field across time, as well as pushing further at questions around gender and intersectionality that historians have been turning their attention to in recent years.
In these respects, this issue connects in interesting ways to a debate that was published a couple of years ago in this journal between Heike Bauer and Ivan Crozier, a back and forth about the disciplinary limits of sexology that asked, among other things, how we might use concepts like translation to push those a bit further.
In your introduction you discuss the historiography of sexology, which, as you point out is still relatively young – how do you see the essays in this collection as intervening in or extending this historiography?
Firstly, in a geographic sense. The essays extend a historiography that has often focused on Western European and specific national contexts. For example, they shed light on how Eastern European sexologies and sexologists crossed the iron curtain during the Cold War era, or the prominence of North American thinkers at various key moments.
Secondly, they extend it by looking backwards and forwards in time. We’ve got essays such as Benjamin Kahan’s, which looks right back to the mid 19th century in the US, but we also have pieces that look forward through to the post World War II era. These expand the parameters of a historigoraphy that has tended to focus on the early 20th century.
But as well as pushing at conventional limitations of space and time, we were interested, as I’ve already noted, in approaching questions of disciplinarity in more open ways. For example, one essay engages explicitly with animal studies, and shows how scientists turned to the natural world to make new kinds of arguments about human sexual and gender diversity. As Ina Linge shows in this essay, animal research has always been part of the sexological project, but it has been a decidedly neglected aspect of historical scholarship. Other essays in this issue explore the porous boundaries between sexology and various traditions of psychotherapy (both Western Freudian traditions and Eastern European traditions of Pavlovian psychotherapy), as well as with fields more at the edges of scientific tradition, such as phrenology and transcendentalism.
How do you see scholarship on the history of sexology as contributing to explorations of ‘the relationship between sexual knowledge and sexual politics’?
Ina Linge’s piece is a good example of this. It shows not only how research into intersex moths and butterflies in early 20th century Germany was used to make arguments about the naturalness of sex and gender variation, but also how the scientists very consciously applied their experimental findings to quite politicized arguments around decriminalizing homosexuality, particularly during the Weimar Republic.
Another good example is Kate Davison’s essay, which opens up questions around the understudied context of sexual politics in the Cold War. Sexologists in socialist countries were examining homosexuality just as their colleagues on the other side of the iron curtain were. Yet the history of gay “conversion” therapies in Czechoslovakia points to more progressive paths than were taken elsewhere. Researchers there argued for legal reforms around homosexality, but their ideas were taken in much less politically progressive directions when they were drawn on, selectively, by scientists in the West.
These essays also contribute to thinking about sexual politics and sexual science in relation to race. Scholars such as Heike Bauer and Laurie Marhoefer have shown that racializing frameworks have always been a critical, if often invisible, part of how sexual scientific knowledge was produced and conceptualized. Such ideas have continued to shape our thinking, though often in quite implicit ways, such as by feeding the colour blindness of much contemporary LGBTQ politics. Even someone quite progressive like Magnus Hirschfeld, who is often lauded as a left-wing pioneer of gay rights, was very much tied up in imperialist and rationalizing frameworks, from which we haven’t quite extricated ourselves, even in the present. Benjamin Kahan’s piece is an example of work that furthers this project by pushing at the racial dimensions of some of the earliest sexological thought, and showing how this was tied up with discussions in other fields such as phrenology that were thoroughly infused with underlying racializing and racist thought.
Finally, recent work has started to pay more attention to rethinking the place of pleasure and desire in the history of the sexual sciences. What are the political implications of bringing pleasure and ideas of the erotic back into the equation? Sarah Bull’s piece on the complex relationships between sex researchers and erotic and explicit print cultures does this particularly well, but this is a question that has often been sidelined.
As you underline in the introduction, one of the strengths of the issue is its emphasis on transnational conversations between sexologists –what was significant about these kinds of exchanges?
We’ve tended to do research that has been quite constrained by national boundaries, or sometimes by the linguistic boundaries of the German speaking world or the English speaking world. We’ve also often tended to assume that there was a distinctly German origin of modern sexual science. But if we pay a bit more attention to the conversations that were always going on, such as between North American and European researchers in the mid 19th century, we can develop a more nuanced account of sexology as a field that has always looked beyond national boundaries, even from its earliest beginnings.
The trade in erotic books and the non-scientific circulations of medical and scientific writing on sex discussed by Bull is a good example here. Erotic book trade dealers in North America saw a strong market in trading in European sexual scientific works in the 1930s and 1940s, and publishing new editions of works by sexologists like Havelock Ellis. These kinds of circulations brought ideas that had been originally formulated in a distinctly medical-scientific space to a much wider mid-century US audience of lay readers.
Ina Linge’s essay explores how research into ‘intersex butterflies’ influenced sexologists at the Institute of Sexology in Germany. What are the implications of the case she makes for ‘paying attention to non-human actors in the history of sexology’?
Ina Linge’s essay, which we touched on earlier, makes a strong case for paying more attention to non-human actors in the history of sexual science. Many of us may know that Kinsey, for example, made a name for himself studying insects before he turned his attention to his students at Indiana University and human sexual behaviors, but in general, animals have been sorely lacking from the historiography of sexology, and that’s not really justified. When you look at the earliest sexological journals, animal research, along with ethnological comparisons, were frequently used as reference points. What was naturally occurring in animals could be used to argue for what was also naturally occurring in humans, and for what by extension could be considered “normal” or legally justifiable. Similarly, my co-editor Kirsten Leng has shown that German feminists in this era were busy drawing on nature comparisons to justify their political demands as in line with what nature intended.
Linge points out that pop culture today is really fascinated with stories about queer animals, such as penguins showing same-sex desires. Those comparisons tend to be used to argue for the naturalness of sex and gender variation in humans as well, and what Linge does that is new is to situate these comparative moves in that early 20th century moment. She draws on what Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal have referred to as the ‘moral authority of nature’ to show how some scientists were starting to advocate for more progressive sexual politics. Jewish German geneticist Richard Goldschmidt knew very well when he was publishing his research on intersex moths that this might be drawn on to make political points about humans as well, especially when it came to defending homosexuality. These kinds of analogy were intensely politicized in Germany at that time because of the criminalization of gay sex under Paragraph 175. At the same time, Linge’s essay shows how these ‘natural is normal’ arguments could be put to more sinister use, such as by those arguing against interracial sexual contact or in favor of sterilizing homosexual men.
Sarah Bull’s contribution, which explores the relationship between sexual science and erotic print culture, raises questions about respectability and the sources of scientific knowledge – what light does this shed on what she describes as the ‘porous’ boundaries of sexology as a discipline?
Sarah Bull’s piece really problematizes those border areas between sexual science, on the one hand (with practitioners working to establish a respectable scientific field of inquiry not weighed down by older notions of religion, morality and taboo), and on the other hand, ways of looking and talking about sex that were more aligned with traditions of erotica and pornography. From the late 19th century British sexologists in particular were constantly vulnerable to censorship, prosecutions and to their works being labeled obscene, although censorship was also an important factor shaping the development of sexual science elsewhere.
Bull shows that sexual scientists were both loudly disavowing any connection to these seemingly dubious realms of smut and porn, but, at the same time, they were absolutely dependent on those “grey” areas of the publishing world for their evidence. They were also dependent on them for disseminating new kinds of knowledge about sex, including across national boundaries, as I mentioned earlier. She points out that the borders between these fields were always porous, but they were also always policed, with appeals to “science” often used to justify protecting work from the censors.
She points to some interesting examples of that porosity over time, especially as erotic literature traders began republishing older sexological works and circulating across their original national origins in ways that targeted less specialist audiences. By the 1970s sexologists were themselves publishing in erotic magazines like Playboy. There is still a lot that we don’t know about these interplays between the “erotic” and the “scientific” in the history of sexology.
You highlight the importance of ‘balancing sexology’s global dimensions with its regional specificities’. Both your essay and Benjamin Kahan’s contributions examine sexology in the US at different historical moments – what was distinctive about the trajectory of sexological research in North America?
This is a really interesting question and I like how you bring those two pieces together, because they do speak to different ends of the history of sexology in North America, which has often played second fiddle to its European counterparts.
Kahan’s piece, which we touched on earlier, shows how mid-19th century American researchers such as Elizabeth Osgood were highly influential in coining key terms in sexual science, as early as several decades before terms like ‘Sexualwissenschaft’ were introduced in Germany. My own work as a cultural historian of Germany, meanwhile, has tended to follow the narrative around the German “invention” of modern sexuality—an explanation that sees the German speaking world as crucial in coming up with many of the identity categories, such as “homosexual” or “trans” identities, that have stayed with us in into the present. But Kahan’s work shows that if we pay more attention to North American actors, and to what was going on in science-adjacent fields like phrenology and transcendentalism, then we can develop much more nuanced and transnational narratives of the sexual sciences.
My piece hones in on Kinsey’s research in the late 1940s and 1950s. I do see sexology as shifting its global centre of gravity in this period, from the German speaking world following the rise of the Nazis across the Atlantic to North America. Many Jewish medical practitioners, analysts, and scientists emigrated from Europe to North America, and they shifted these conversations in very distinct ways. By the mid twentieth century North America had become the international centre of both sexology and psychoanalysis, but we also need to examine the distinctly national interests that shaped these disciplines in that context, such as the fundamental shifts in US psychoanalysis compared to early Freudian thinking due to the prominence of a certain brand of Protestant Christianity.
Finally, would it be possible to reflect on how work into the historiography of sexology engages with the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ as historical categories?
I would say that work on the historiography of sexology has played a key role in encouraging researchers working across all sorts of fields, not just the history of sexuality, to engage more critically with ideas of the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ – to ask how these categories have changed over time and to recognise that they’ve always been historically contingent. There are some really interesting connections between the essays in this special issue and those in another issue coming out soon in the History of the Human Sciences on the history of normality (edited by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens). Their work and work by scholars such as Laura Doan shows that the “normal” has always been a contested and contingent idea, and one that only really came to carry the meanings it does now in the mid 20th century. Some of this critical attention on the “normal” is now also shifting to the “natural”, with scholars pushing at how the natural and the normal are sometimes seen as interchangeable categories, but also how and where they can, or must, be teased apart.