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This chapter analyses the sexual discourse and intimate life of Patrick Geddes, the Edinburgh-based natural scientist and social reformer. Geddes was the co-author of the Evolution of Sex (1889), whichasserted that sexual difference was present at the cellular level and therefore immune to modification. Yet this extreme form of biological essentialism belies the text’s utility to several contemporary feminists, due to its insistence upon sexual equality, its emphasis on altruism as a female quality and its discussion of birth control. Regarding sexual relationships, Geddes claimed that they were subject to evolutionary forces and predicted a future in which a ‘more than earthly paradise of love’ would become the daily reality for all. He attempted to realise this earthly paradise, both in his intimate relationship with his wife Anna, and in the bohemian subculture he fostered in Edinburgh, through schemes such as his Summer Meetings. Overall, this chapter argues that while Geddes was motivated by radical purposes, his life and work suggest an indecisiveness over issues such as marriage and sexual pleasure: while he encouraged the celebration of sexuality when found in nature, and decried marriages of convenience, he was rendered profoundly anxious by the sexual misdemeanours of some of his male students.

This chapter places Ulrichs' scholarship within the larger constellation of sexual science. The major motifs discussed here include: the methodology of the case study, debates as to whether sexual research should become public knowledge or remain sequestered among experts, the civic meaning of discourses of nature, Ulrichs' influence on British sexologists, and an explanation of how the story of sexual science is altered by a narrative that commences with and centers around Ulrichs' legacy. The chapter shows how examinations of Ulrichs' political and scientific innovations are a wedge opening new insights into the history of sexual science, legal systems, and Western amatory codes.

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.

This chapter recognizes Iwan Bloch as the first sexual theorist since Ulrichs to rebuke sexual degeneration as a viable scientific hypothesis. Bloch accomplished this deconstruction via the invention of a new subfield of sexual science: historical sexology. Bloch's deconstructive stencil traced a logical pattern: if the sexual fantasies of Marquis de Sade—history's greatest sexual degenerate— could be normalized, then the authority of degeneration as an explanatory science would be destroyed once and for all. Bloch attempted to break out of the analytical realm of mainstream sexual science and embark on a new science of sexual diversity. His complexities allow for the perception of interpretive tension not simply between sexual scientists but within the scholarship of individual sexologists as well.

This chapter examines how the global search for sexual variation across different historical and cultural contexts helped British and German scholars to move away from the narrow medical focus of early sexology—in which sexual deviance and criminality had figured prominently—to better understand the unstable relation between the healthy and the pathological, and the normal and abnormal. The chapter first charts and explains the global turn in British and German sexual science during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before discussing how sexual scientists from both countries, using historical and anthropological evidence, were able to differentiate between sexual pathology and sexual perversion. British and German sexual scientists also proved that some perversions were normal and could be found in healthy individuals.

Chapter 6 depicts the history of urban bachelorhood and discusses the different visions and representations of the bachelor as non-father: from the pious Christian shepherd to the urban bohemian and the incorporation of modern masculinity out of control. These many potential facets of being a bachelor in turn-of-the-century urban America merge in the life course of YMCA director Robert R. McBurney. Historical writings by and on him as well as his archival papers provide ample material to unfold the history of unmarried men in the context of the history of sexuality and of what historian George Chauncey called “the gay male world.” The chapter also discusses how the perception of bachelorhood changed against the backdrop of the evolving sexual and social sciences, which depicted fatherhood as the “natural” development of every man’s life and pathologized any other form of male existence.

This chapter argues that degeneration was the dominant interpolative code of the late-nineteenth-century sexual science movement. As a regulative concept of sexual variance and a master trope, it epitomized psychopathia sexualis. However, it is crucial to note that degeneration as a scientific and cultural code did not possess a singular civic meaning. The political meaning of degeneration depended upon the object defined as degenerative. The chapter analyzes sexologist Edward Reich's denunciation of bourgeois-capitalist culture as degenerative. Reich's sexual scholarship demonstrates the political malleability of degeneration as an explanatory concept. Despite this malleability, degeneration functioned disproportionately as the conceptual linchpin of psychopathia sexualis. It was a conservative trope and one that affirmed bourgeois normalcy.

This chapter examines how global concepts of sexual science were appropriated in western India during the period 1927–1953 by focusing on the case of R. D. Karve, a sexual scientist and birth-control advocate who engaged in an intensely Indian politics of sexuality—that is, the ongoing debates over sexual practices and their relationship to modernity. Karve invoked sexual science to counter nationalist contentions and relied on the iconic European and American figures of sexology to undermine the logic of brahmacharya (sexual self-constraint), a practice believed to be essential to the regeneration of Indian masculinity and the nation. He also argued that the Kamasutra was superior to its ancient counterparts in Europe. The chapter suggests that Karve was highly selective in drawing ideas from European sexual science that served his iconoclastic critique of the place of religion in Indian society.

This chapter examines the role played by Edward Westermarck, a Finnish/British scholar who was considered the world's leading authority on sexual “morality and marriage,” in the disciplinary transition from the ethnocentrism of Darwinian anthropology to cultural relativism. Westermarck wrote extensively on Morocco and expressed his views based on emerging conceptions of anthropology that sometimes challenged earlier imperial tenets. The chapter analyzes Westermarck's scholarship, particularly his sexual anthropology, in the context of parallel epistemic crises in the disciplines of anthropology and sexual science. It also discusses Westermarck's Moroccan anthropology of homosexuality and argues that it was contradictory. Finally, it looks at the emergence of a new relativist epistemology, first in European sexual science and later in British cultural anthropology, and shows how the integration of anthropology with sexual science gave rise to a more interdisciplinary, less medical view of sexuality.

This chapter examines the tension between claims to universal translatability and practices of unruly or subversive appropriations by focusing on the changing character of a series of translations of Havelock Ellis's work into Chinese during the period 1911–1949. Traces of Ellis's ideas reappeared in the context of rising interest in Republican China in issues of gender differences, sex, and (homo)sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. Ellis's Chinese translators such as Zhou Zuoren, Zhang Jingsheng, and Pan Guangdan adapted his ideas to validate their own perspectives regarding social and sexual reform. The chapter discusses the heterogeneous approaches to and multiform adaptations of Ellis's sexology in Republican China to show how the “Ellis effect” revealed the sociocultural significance of popularizing sexual science and modern sex education.

This chapter explores Chile's contributions to sexual science in the late 1920s and early 1930s by focusing on the case of a twenty-two-year-old woman who was found to possess what appeared to be a pair of testes and asked the doctors at San Agustín Hospital in Valparaíso to remove them. Gregorio Marañón, a Spanish doctor and intellectual, provided the Valparaíso physicians with their clinical framework for diagnosing and treating the woman's case through his analysis of “intersexual conditions.” The chapter shows how Marañón's theory of intersexuality and its appropriation in Valparaíso had been facilitated by the Latvian-Chilean physiologist Alexander Lipschütz. It also considers how Marañón incorporated Lipschütz into a Hispanic network of sexual science through the formulation of his theory of intersexuality.

This chapter examines how the social history of urbanization influenced the emergence of sexual science by focusing on the case of male homosexuality and female prostitution during the period 1850–1950. It first considers the notions of sexual chaos and order that emerged within nineteenth-century anthropology and how they were related to urbanization, with an emphasis on the case of Buenos Aires. It then discusses some aspects of the global history of transportation and urbanization and how it affected prostitution and homosexuality in different parts of the world. It also explores the simultaneous emergence and similarity of the so-called cities of sin and how they became incubators of a sexual science in which the evolution or devolution of human society was debated in sexual terms and described as a fact of daily life. The chapter suggests that “civilization encourages prostitution” as the sexual drive is increasingly put under control.

This chapter examines the role played by racial scientists in the sexual scientific readings of the “Hottentot apron,” a perceived elongation of the labia associated with the Khoisan women of South Africa. It begins with the story of Georges Cuvier, a zoologist from the French academy who in 1816 performed a postmortem on Sarah Baartmann. Known in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus,” Baartmann became a popular fixture in “freak shows” and salons across Britain and France. The chapter rejects the liberationist claims made by sexual science and shows how the systemic study of perceived genital anomalies became a means for South African whites and European scholars to categorize who was civilized or barbaric. It argues that scientific claims about the “Hottentot apron” spread and evolved worldwide in relation to the doctrine of scientific racism and other important developments in the history of science and empire, including the onset of the “new imperialism.”

This chapter examines the circulation of sexual scientific knowledge between Germany and Japan by focusing on onnagata (Japanese “female impersonators”), which was included by Magnus Hirschfeld as cultural figures in his so-called Wall of Sexual Transitions. Hirschfeld created the Wall of Sexual Transitions to illustrate his “theory of sexual transitions” for the 1913 international Physicians' Congress in London. The chapter first provides an overview of the beginnings of the homosexual movement in Germany and the controversies it engendered, highlighting the important role played by the first reception of the traditions of Japanese samurai and male homosexuality in Japanese theater. It then considers Hirschfeld's idea of transvestitism and his 1931 visit to Japan, and how his reinterpretation of the onnagata influenced his own conception of transvestitism. It also shows how sexual ethnography emerged as an important field of sexual science that served to delineate ideological differences between European scientists and activists.

This chapter examines how the global circulation of sexology intertwined with communism and national independence by focusing on the writings of American journalist Agnes Smedley as well as the letters written to her by the Indian revolutionary Bakar Ali Mirza. More specifically, it considers sexual science's connections to leftist psychoanalysis and to the Indian independence movement during the 1920s. It discusses Smedley's self-conscious mobilization of the language of sexual science as a path toward revolution and modern selfhood, doing so by shuttling between India, Germany, China, and the United States. The Berlin–India nexus and Mirza's correspondence with Smedley highlight the intrinsic interrelationships among the liberational rhetoric of leftist politics, feminism, sexual rights, national independence, and psychoanalytic introspection. The chapter also considers how Smedley and her Indian revolutionary interlocutors negotiated new definitions of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality emerging from the global movements of sexual science, radical politics, and psychoanalysis.

This chapter examines the development of Mexican sexual science and its relationship to homosexuality during the period 1860–1957 by focusing on the murder trial of a merchant named Margarito. It first considers the sexological, criminological, and ideological genealogies that Margarito's case and similar cases brought to the fore before discussing sex reassignment surgery as a supposed “cure” for homosexuality and as a “solution” that demonstrated both the body's importance and the preeminence of modern science in restructuring that body to fit national aims and cultural sensibilities. It also describes the inherent eclecticism of Mexican sexology as a deliberate praxis that gave rise to a specific form of knowledge useful in disciplining sexual deviance. The chapter suggests that Margarito's case was a key example of the “Freudianization” and “Lombrosianization” of Mexican sexology as local jurists drew upon sexual science to selectively appeal to assumed universals.

This chapter examines attempts to standardize, internalize, and globalize sexual temporality—captured in the conceptualization of the body as clock—in the sexological advice offered to men and women in India in the early twentieth century. It first describes the constitution of “Hindu erotica” during the period and how these English translations gave rise to a set of foundational texts that would become the basis of global/Hindu sexology while filling them up with clock time. It then considers the ways that these texts attached life cycles to the chronological ordering of time by recasting brahmacharya—a prescription for a stage of life devoted to celibacy and learning—as an age-stratified organization of sexual behavior and a schema for sex education. By using the example of bodily temporality, the chapter addresses questions of sexuality and space in relation to globalization and transnational capitalism, colonialism and development.

This chapter examines how monogamy was imagined as a facet of human nature, and thus for a secularization of Christian marriage, by reading the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis. In particular, it analyzes narratives that emerge about monogamy in Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and Ellis's Sex in Relation to Society, volume 6 of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Both Krafft-Ebing and Ellis claimed that monogamy marked the superiority of European societies—either because it was rooted in Christianity or because it was “natural.” Using the specter of Islam, Krafft-Ebing operationalizes monogamy as the distinguishing feature between the subjects of sexual science for whom sexual normality (and pathology) are even possible from the always already degenerate. For Ellis, the meaning of monogamy is not Christian religious doctrine enshrined in law. The chapter also considers sexuality in relation to discourses of evolutionism in sexology.

This book has presented a fresh history of sexual science, one that is oriented toward a global perspective, by exploring themes ranging from the concept of transvestitism to sexology's connections with anthropology and political ideologies such as communism. Using a series of localized and transregional case studies, the book has highlighted new interpretive approaches and new historical interlocutors in order to draw the field out of the shadow of Western intellectual hegemony. Well-known sources and figures in the history of sexual science have been discussed, from Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis to Magnus Hirschfeld and Max Marcuse. What the book calls the shadow of empire and its workings have fueled and at the same time compounded sexological circulations outside the West, but it has also tackled aspects of the “global” approach that go beyond the networks of imperialism.