Sexology in culture : labelling bodies and desires

The key founders of sexology, the "science of desire," were Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Magnus Hirschfeld. This volume examines the impact of their writings 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? 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. They address issues such as the relation of "sexual science" to the law, government policy, journalism, eugenics programs, marriage and sex manuals, and literary representation. They also map out new readings of transsexuality and bisexuality, and the centrality of race within sexology. Sexology in Culture and its companion Sexology Uncensored will interest all those concerned with understanding modern sexual discourse in its historical context. Contents Contributors Introduction by Rita Felski Notes PART I: A DANGEROUS NEW SCIENCE 1. Transformations: Subjects, Categories and Cures in Krafft-Ebing's Sexology by Merl Storr Bisexuality and categorization Gradations and acquisitions Imperfect inverts Distinctions and diagnoses Transformations? Notes 2. It's What You Do With It That Counts: Interpretations of Otto Weininger by Judy Greenway Notes 3. The Hidden Romance of Sexual Science: Eugenics, the Nation and the Making of Modern Feminism by Carolyn Burdett Francis Galton's New Religion Karl Pearson and the Calculable World National Socialism and the Perfectible World The Woman Question Warrior Maids Notes 4. Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body by Siobhan B. Somerville Visible Differences: Sexology and Comparative Anatomy The Mixed Body Sexual "Perversion" and Racialized Desire Troubling Science Notes PART II: LABELLING BODIES 5. Symonds's History, Ellis's Heredity: Sexual Inversion by Joseph Bristow I II III Notes 6. 'Educating the Eye': The Tattooed Prostitute by Jane Caplan Notes 7. Transsexuals and the Transsexologists: Inversion and the Emergence of Transsexual Subjectivity by Jay Prosser Notes PART III: CONSTRUCTING DESIRES 8. Feminist Reconfigurations of Heterosexuality in the 1920s by Lesley A. Hall Notes 9. Sex, Love and the Homosexual Body in Early Sexology by Suzanne Raitt Notes 10. Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State: Discourses of Homosexual Identity in Interwar Britain by Chris Waters Ellis and Freud Freudians, Criminologists and the 'Problem' of Homosexuality Notes PART IV: CULTURAL PERVERSIONS 11. Trial by Sexology?: Maud Allan, Salome and the 'Cult of the Clitoris' Case by Lucy Bland Notes 12. 'Acts of Female Indecency': Sexology's Intervention in Legislating Lesbianism by Laura Doan Notes 13. 'Sex Is An Accident': Feminism, Science and the Radical Sexual Theory of Urania, 1915-40 by Alison Oram The Legacy of Turn-of-the-Century Feminism Urania and Sexology Sexology and Science Conclusions Notes Index Edited By Lucy Bland And Laura Doan. Companion Volume To: Sexology Uncensored. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.