Sexology in Culture Labelling Bodies and Desires

by Bland, Lucy; Doan, Laura

• ISBN13: 9780745619828
• ISBN10: 0745619827
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-10-19
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

Sexology in Culture examines the impact of key writings by sexologists on English-speaking culture from the 1880s to the early 1940s. How influential a field was sexology during this period, and how much power did sexologists wield? What was the impact of their work on popular and official attitudes to sex? In this volume, Lucy Bland and Laura Doan have brought together leading historians of sex, cultural and literary critics, and scholars in gay, lesbian and queer studies, to reassess current debates on sexology in light of its history. Issues addressed include the relation of "sexual science" to the law, government policy, journalism, eugenical programmes, marriage and sex manuals, and literary representation. Other chapters map out new readings of transsexuality and bisexuality, and the centrality of race within sexological discourse. This book will be of interest to all those concerned with understanding modern sexual discourse in its historical context, and will be essential reading for researchers, teachers, and students interested in the history and study of sex.

Author Biography

Lucy Bland is Senior Lecturer in Women's Studies at the University of North London.

Laura Doan is Professor of English at the State University of New York.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

Editors' Note

Introduction

A Dangerous New Science

Transformations: Subjects, Categories and Cures in Krafft-Ebing's Sexology

It's What You Do With It That Counts: Interpretations of Otto Weininger

The Hidden Romance of Sexual Science: Eugenics, the Nation, and the Making of Modern Feminism

Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body

Labelling Bodies

Symonds's History, Ellis's Heredity: Sexual Inversion

'Educating the Eye': The Tattooed Prostitute

Transsexuals and the Transsexologists: Inversion and the Emergence of Transsexual Subjectivity

Constructing Desires

Feminist Reconfigurations of Heterosexuality in the 1920's

Sex, Love and the Homosexual Body in Early Sexology

Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State: Discourses of Homosexual Identity in Interwar Britain

Cultural Perversions

Trial by Sexology?: Maud Allan, Salome and the 'Cult of the Clitoris' Case

'Acts of Female Indecency': Sexology's Intervention in Legislating Lesbianism

'Sex is an Accident': Feminism, Science and the Radical Sexual Theory of Urania, 1915-40

Index

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