Publications

Making Sense of Sexology: A Short History of Sexual Science in Twentieth-Century America

Sarah Jones published this new essay as part of Adam Matthew Digital’s new online archive Sex and Sexuality, which is dedicated to the unpublished papers of prominent sexologists, sex researchers, societies, advocacy groups and campaigners working across America and beyond during the twentieth century.

The essay can be found at http://www.sexandsexuality.amdigital.co.uk/Explore/Essays/Sexology

Sculpture, Sexuality and History Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (2019)

Supported by Wellcome

Our team members Jana Funke and Jen Grove are editors of a new volume Sculpture, Sexuality and History Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Palgrave, 2019).

This volume:

  • Offers a new understanding of the different ways in which the reception of statuary has been shaped by debates about sexuality and history
  • Explores how sculptures have opened up debates about queer desires and identities, as well as obscenity, censorship and morality
  • Brings together leading international experts and cutting-edge scholars from an extensive range of disciplines

For more details see here.

German and British Sexual Sciences Across Disciplines at the Fin de Siècle: ‘Homosexuals’, Inverts and ‘Uranians’ (Linge I, 2017)

Dr Ina Linge, Associate Research Fellow on the Rethinking Sexology project, published a chapter on “German and British Sexual Sciences Across Disciplines at the Fin de Siècle: ‘Homosexuals’, ‘Inverts’ and ‘Uranians'” in The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts, ed. Josephine Guy (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

Biological Discourses: The Language of Science and Literature around 1900 (Linge I)

Dr Ina Linge, Associate Research Fellow on the Rethinking Sexology project, published a co-edited volume (with Dr Robert Craig, University of Bamberg) entitled Biological Discourses: The Language of Science and Literature around 1900 (2017). Several chapters within this volume, in particular in ‘Part II: Constructions of Desire’ discuss the history and literature of sexology and psychoanalysis.

Abstract:

The relationship between biological thought and literature, and between science and culture, has long been an area of interest by no means confined to literary studies. The Darwin Anniversary celebrations of 2009 added to this tradition, inspiring a variety of new publications on the cultural reception of Darwin and Darwinism. With a fresh scope that includes but also reaches beyond the «Darwinian» legacy, the essays in this volume explore the range and diversity of interactions between biological thought and literary writing in the period around 1900.

How did literature uniquely shape the constitution and communication of scientific ideas in the decades after Darwin? Did literary genres dangerously distort, or shed critical light upon, the biological theories with which they worked? And what were the ethical and social implications of those relationships? With these broad questions in mind, the contributors consider the biological embeddedness of human nature, perspectives on sexual desire, developments in racial thinking and its political exploitation, and poetic engagements with experimental psychology and zoology. They also range across different literary traditions, from Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, to Britain and the USA. Biological Discourses provides a rich cross-section of the contested relationship between literature and biological thought in fin-de-siècle and modernist cultures.

Reference: Ina Linge and Robert Craig (eds.), ‘Biological Discourses: The Language of Science and Literature around 1900’ (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017).

“Let Us Leave the Hospital […]; Let Us Go on a Journey Around the World: Sexual Science and the Global Search for Variation and Difference” (Fisher K and Funke J 2017)

Supported by Wellcome

Fisher K and Funke J, “Let Us Leave the Hospital […]; Let Us Go on a Journey Around the World: Sexual Science and the Global Search for Variation and Difference”, in Fuechtner, V, Hayes D, Jones R (eds) A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1960, Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

Illustrating Phallic Worship (Funke, Fisher, Grove and Langlands, 2017)

Supported by Wellcome

Abstract: This article reveals previously overlooked connections between eighteenth-century antiquarianism and early twentieth-century sexual science by presenting a comparative reading of two illustrated books: An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus, by British antiquarian scholar Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824), and Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (The World Journey of a Sexologist), by German sexual scientist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). A close analysis of these publications demonstrates the special status of material artefacts and the strategic engagement with visual evidence in antiquarian and scientific writings about sex. Through its exploration of the similarities between antiquarian and sexual scientific thought, the article demonstrates the centrality of material culture to the production of sexual knowledge in the Western world. It also opens up new perspectives on Western intellectual history and on the intellectual origins of sexual science. While previous scholarship has traced the beginnings of sexual science back to nineteenth-century medical disciplines, this article shows that sexual scientists drew upon different forms of evidence and varied methodologies to produce sexual knowledge and secure scientific authority. As such, sexual science needs to be understood as a field with diverse intellectual roots that can be traced back (at least) to the eighteenth century.

Full citation: Funke J, Fisher K, Grove J, and Langlands, R, “llustrating phallic worship: uses of material objects and the production of sexual knowledge in eighteenth-century antiquarianism and early twentieth-century sexual science”, Word and Image, Volume 33, 2017 – Issue 3: Mediating the Materiality of the Past, 1700–1930

This article is available open access.