front cover of An American Obsession
An American Obsession
Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society
Jennifer Terry
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Drawing on original research from medical texts, psychiatric case histories, pioneering statistical surveys, first-person accounts, legal cases, sensationalist journalism, and legislative debates, Jennifer Terry has written a nuanced and textured history of how the century-old obsession with homosexuality is deeply tied to changing American anxieties about social and sexual order in the modern age.

Terry's overarching argument is compelling: that homosexuality served as a marker of the "abnormal" against which malleable, tenuous, and often contradictory concepts of the "normal" were defined. One of the few histories to take into consideration homosexuality in both women and men, Terry's work also stands out in its refusal to erase the agency of people classified as abnormal. She documents the myriad ways that gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities have coauthored, resisted, and transformed the most powerful and authoritative modern truths about sex. Proposing this history as a "useable past," An American Obsession is an indispensable contribution to the study of American cultural history.
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The Book of Minor Perverts
Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality
Benjamin Kahan
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Assocation Book Prize

­Statue-fondlers, wanderlusters, sex magicians, and nymphomaniacs: the story of these forgotten sexualities—what Michel Foucault deemed “minor perverts”—has never before been told. In The Book of Minor Perverts, Benjamin Kahan sets out to chart the proliferation of sexual classification that arose with the advent of nineteenth-century sexology. The book narrates the shift from Foucault’s “thousand aberrant sexualities” to one: homosexuality. The focus here is less on the effects of queer identity and more on the lines of causation behind a surprising array of minor perverts who refuse to fit neatly into our familiar sexual frameworks. The result stands at the intersection of history, queer studies, and the medical humanities to offer us a new way of feeling our way into the past.
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The Classification of Sex
Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge
Donna J. Drucker
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014
Alfred C. Kinsey’s revolutionary studies of human sexual behavior are world-renowned. His meticulous methods of data collection, from comprehensive entomological assemblies to personal sex history interviews, raised the bar for empirical evidence to an entirely new level. In The Classification of Sex, Donna J. Drucker presents an original analysis of Kinsey’s scientific career in order to uncover the roots of his research methods. She describes how his enduring interest as an entomologist and biologist in the compilation and organization of mass data sets structured each of his classification projects. As Drucker shows, Kinsey’s lifelong mission was to find scientific truth in numbers and through observation—and to record without prejudice in the spirit of a true taxonomist.

Kinsey’s doctoral work included extensive research of the gall wasp, where he gathered and recorded variations in over six million specimens. His classification and reclassification of Cynips led to the speciation of the genus that remains today. During his graduate training, Kinsey developed a strong interest in evolution and the links between entomological and human behavior studies. In 1920, he joined Indiana University as a professor in zoology, and soon published an introductory text on biology, followed by a coauthored field guide to edible wild plants.

In 1938, Kinsey began teaching a noncredit course on marriage, where he openly discussed sexual behavior and espoused equal opportunity for orgasmic satisfaction in marital relationships. Soon after, he began gathering case histories of sexual behavior. As a pioneer in the nascent field of sexology, Kinsey saw that the key to its cogency was grounded in observation combined with the collection and classification of mass data. To support the institutionalization of his work, he cofounded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947. He and his staff eventually conducted over eighteen thousand personal interviews about sexual behavior, and in 1948 he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, to be followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.

As Drucker’s study shows, Kinsey’s scientific rigor and his early use of data recording methods and observational studies were unparalleled in his field. Those practices shaped his entire career and produced a wellspring of new information, whether he was studying gall wasp wings, writing biology textbooks, tracing patterns of evolution, or developing a universal theory of human sexuality.
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Disorders Of Desire
Janice Irvine
Temple University Press, 1991
Disorders of Desire is the only book to tell the story of the development and impact of sexology—the scientific study of sex—in the United States. In this era of sex scandals, culture wars, "Sex in the City," and new sexual enhancement technologies (like erectile dysfunction drugs), its critique of sexology is even more relevant than it was when the book was first published in 1990.

This revised and expanded edition features new chapters addressing:

  • The diagnosis of "sex addiction"in the 1970s and its social and political implications.
  • New developments within the field of sexology, including the "Viagra Revolution" that began in the 1990s.
  • The pharmaceutical industry's role in the development of sexual enhancements and the search for the female equivalent of Viagra.
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Disorders Of Desire Rev
Sexuality And Gender In Modern American Sexology
Janice Irvine
Temple University Press, 2005
Disorders of Desire is the only book to tell the story of the development and impact of sexology—the scientific study of sex—in the United States. In this era of sex scandals, culture wars, "Sex in the City," and new sexual enhancement technologies (like erectile dysfunction drugs), its critique of sexology is even more relevant than it was when the book was first published in 1990.

This revised and expanded edition features new chapters addressing:

•The diagnosis of "sex addiction"in the 1970s and its social and political implications.
•New developments within the field of sexology, including the "Viagra Revolution" that began in the 1990s.
•The pharmaceutical industry's role in the development of sexual enhancements and the search for the female equivalent of Viagra.
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Fuckology
Critical Essays on John Money's Diagnostic Concepts
Lisa Downing, Iain Morland, and Nikki Sullivan
University of Chicago Press, 2014
One of the twentieth century’s most controversial sexologists—or “fuckologists,” to use his own memorable term—John Money was considered a trailblazing scientist and sexual libertarian by some, but damned by others as a fraud and a pervert.  Money invented the concept of gender in the 1950s, yet fought its uptake by feminists. He backed surgical treatments for transsexuality, but argued that gender roles were set by reproductive capacity. He shaped the treatment of intersex, advocating experimental sex changes for children with ambiguous genitalia. He pioneered drug therapy for sex offenders, yet took an ambivalent stance towards pedophilia. In his most publicized case study, Money oversaw the reassignment of David Reimer as female following a circumcision accident in infancy. Heralded by many as proof that gender is pliable, the case was later discredited when Reimer revealed that he had lived as a male since his early teens.

In Fuckology, the authors contextualize and interrogate Money's writings and practices. The book focuses on his three key diagnostic concepts, “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia,” but also addresses his lesser-known work on topics ranging from animal behavior to the philosophy of science. The result is a comprehensive collection of new insights for researchers and students within cultural, historical, and gender studies, as well as for practitioners and activists in sexology, psychology, and patient rights.
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An Interpretation of Desire
Essays in the Study of Sexuality
John Gagnon
University of Chicago Press, 2003
An Interpretation of Desire offers a bracing collection of major essays by John Gagnon, one of the leading and most inspiring figures in sexual research. Spanning his work from the 1970s, when he explored the idea that sexuality is mediated through social processes and categories—thus paving the way for Foucault—and then extending through his turn to issues of desire during the 1990s, these essays constitute an essential entrée to the study of sexuality in the twentieth century.

Gagnon may be best known as the coauthor of Sexual Conduct—a book that introduced the seminal concept of sexual scripting—and as one of the coauthors of The Social Organization of Sexuality, a foundational work that is widely considered to be the most important study of human sexual behavior since the Kinsey report. The essays collected here first trace the influence of scripting theory on Gagnon, outlining the radical departure he took from the dominant biological and psychiatric models of sex research. The volume then turns to more recent essays that consider such vexed issues as homosexuality, the theories of Sigmund Freud, HIV, hazardous sex, and the social aspects of sexually transmitted diseases.
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Kiss and Tell
Surveying Sex in the Twentieth Century
Julia A. Ericksen
Harvard University Press, 2001

Learning the details of others' sex lives is the most enticing of guilty pleasures. We measure our own practices against the "normalcy" that sex surveys seek to capture. Special interest groups use or attack survey findings (such as the claim that 10% of Americans are gay) for their own ends. Indeed, we all have some stake in these surveys, be it self-justification, recrimination, or curiosity--and this testifies to their significance in our culture.

Kiss and Tell chronicles the history of sex surveys in the United States over a century of changing social and sexual mores. Julia Ericksen and Sally Steffen reveal that the survey questions asked, more than the answers elicited, expose and shape the popular image of appropriate sexuality. We can learn as much about the history and practice of sexuality by looking at surveyors' changing concerns as we can by reading the results of their surveys. The authors show how surveys have reflected societal anxieties about adolescent development, teen sex and promiscuity, and AIDS, and have been employed in efforts to preserve marriage and to control women's sexuality.

Kiss and Tell is an important examination of the role of social science in shaping American sexual patterns. Revealing how surveys of sexual behavior help create the issues they purport merely to describe, it reminds us how malleable and imperfect our knowledge of sexual behavior is.

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Samuel Steward and the Pursuit of the Erotic Sexuality, Literature, Archives
Sexuality, Literature, Archives
Debra A. Moddelmog, Martin Joseph Ponce
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Samuel Steward and the Pursuit of the Erotic: Sexuality, Literature, Archives examines one of the most fascinating sexual renegades of the twentieth century and the social, cultural, pedagogical, and erotic projects with which he was engaged. This innovative collection, edited by Debra A. Moddelmog and Martin Joseph Ponce, examines the life and work of Samuel Steward at their most daring and controversial. Samuel Steward—writer, literature professor, visual artist, tattoo artist, sexual archivist, unofficial sexologist, and vernacular pornographer—gave voice and vision to some of the central concerns of twentieth-century U.S. gay culture and politics. These essays frame Steward not merely as an associate or a lover of more well-known luminaries but as a significant cultural figure in his own right, one whose work anticipated some of the current aims and methods of queer studies.
With work by prominent scholars in queer, transgender, and sexuality studies, and with topics such as the queer archive, hoarding, masochism, the queer mystery, race and desire, sexology, and gay pornography, Samuel Steward and the Pursuit of the Erotic will appeal to a wide range of readers across a variety of disciplines invested in queer experience. Closing on a personal recollection from one of Steward’s last close friends, the volume will also appeal to readers interested in the personal aspects of this fascinating, idiosyncratic figure’s multifaceted life.
 
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Sex between Body and Mind
Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s-1930s
Katie Sutton
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Ideas about human sexuality and sexual development changed dramatically across the first half of the 20th century. As scholars such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, Albert Moll, and Karen Horney in Berlin and Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Stekel, and Helene Deutsch in Vienna were recognized as leaders in their fields, the German-speaking world quickly became the international center of medical-scientific sex research—and the birthplace of two new and distinct professional disciplines, sexology and psychoanalysis.
 
This is the first book to closely examine vital encounters among this era’s German-speaking researchers across their emerging professional and disciplinary boundaries. Although psychoanalysis was often considered part of a broader “sexual science,” sexologists increasingly distanced themselves from its mysterious concepts and clinical methods. Instead, they turned to more pragmatic, interventionist therapies—in particular, to the burgeoning field of hormone research, which they saw as crucial to establishing their own professional relevance. As sexology and psychoanalysis diverged, heated debates arose around concerns such as the sexual life of the child, the origins and treatment of homosexuality and transgender phenomena, and female frigidity. This new story of the emergence of two separate approaches to the study of sex demonstrates that the distinctions between them were always part of a dialogic and competitive process. It fundamentally revises our understanding of the production of modern sexual subjects.
 
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Sexology and Translation
Cultural and Scientific Encounters across the Modern World
Heike Bauer
Temple University Press, 2015

Sexology and Translation is the first study of the contemporaneous emergence of sexology in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Heike Bauer and her contributors—historians, literary and cultural critics, and translation scholars—address the intersections between sexuality and modernity in a range of contexts during the period from the 1880s to the 1930s. 

From feminist sexualities in modern Japan to Magnus Hirschfeld’s affective sexology, this book offers compelling new insights into how sexual ideas were formed in different contexts via a complex process of cultural negotiation. By focusing on issues of translation—the dynamic process by which ideas are produced and transmitted—the essays in Sexology and Translation provide an important corrective to the pervasive idea that sexuality is a “Western” construct that was transmitted around the world. 

This volume deepens understanding of how the intersections between national and transnational contexts, between science and culture, and between discourse and experience, shaped modern sexuality. 

 
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Sexology in Culture
Labelling Bodies and Desires
Edited by Lucy Bland and Laura Doan
University of Chicago Press, 1998
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.

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Sexology Uncensored
The Documents of Sexual Science
Edited by Lucy Bland and Laura Doan
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Sexology Uncensored brings together, for the first time, many of the key documents of the modern science of sexuality that emerged in the late nineteenth century. The early pioneers of the new field of sexology examined and classified sexual behaviors, identities, and relations. For years much of the material here has been "censored" in the sense that it is difficult to obtain, subject to restrictive circulation, or available only in medical archives. The extracts (which date from the 1880s to the 1940s) cover a variety of topics including gender and sexual difference; homosexuality; transsexuality and bisexuality; heterosexuality; marriage and sex manuals; reproductive control; eugenics; race; and various sexual proclivities.

Offering readers access to the primary materials on which contemporary sexology is founded, Sexology Uncensored is an invaluable record for all those interested in how we have come to think about sex and sexuality over the last hundred years.

Sexology in Culture and its companion Sexology Uncensored will interest all those concerned with understanding modern sexual discourse in its historical context.

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Stepchildren of Nature
Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity
Harry Oosterhuis
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) played a key role in the construction of the modern concept of sexuality. As the author of the famous Psychopathia sexualis, he named and classified virtually all nonprocreative sexualities, synthesizing knowledge on sadism, masochism, fetishism, homosexuality, and exhibitionism. His influence on the study of sexuality cannot be overstated, but it is often misunderstood. In the wake of Michel Foucault's influential sexual histories, Krafft-Ebing is often maligned as a contributor to the repressed Victorian construction of sexual deviancy.

But in this powerful new cultural history Harry Oosterhuis invites us to reconsider the quality and extent of Krafft-Ebing's influence. Revisiting the case studies on which Krafft-Ebing based his findings, and thus drawing on the voices of his patients and informants, Oosterhuis finds that Krafft-Ebing was not the harsh judge of perversions that we think he was. He argues that Krafft-Ebing had a deep appreciation of the psyche, and that his work reveals an attempt to separate sexual deviancies from ideas of immorality. In the tradition of Freud, then, Krafft-Ebing should stand not as a villain, but as a contributor to more modern notions of sexual identity.
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Studying Human Behavior
How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality
Helen E. Longino
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In Studying Human Behavior, Helen E. Longino enters into the complexities of human behavioral research, a domain still dominated by the age-old debate of “nature versus nurture.” Rather than supporting one side or another or attempting to replace that dichotomy with a different framework for understanding behavior, Longino focuses on how scientists study it, specifically sexual behavior and aggression, and asks what can be known about human behavior through empirical investigation.
 
She dissects five approaches to the study of behavior—quantitative behavioral genetics, molecular behavior genetics, developmental psychology, neurophysiology and anatomy, and social/environmental methods—highlighting the underlying assumptions of these disciplines, as well as the different questions and mechanisms each addresses. She also analyzes efforts to integrate different approaches. Longino concludes that there is no single “correct” approach but that each contributes to our overall understanding of human behavior. In addition, Longino reflects on the reception and transmission of this behavioral research in scientific, social, clinical, and political spheres. A highly significant and innovative study that bears on crucial scientific questions, Studying Human Behavior will be essential reading not only for scientists and philosophers but also for science journalists and anyone interested in the engrossing challenges of understanding human behavior.
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Vita Sexualis
Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science
Ralph M. Leck
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Karl Ulrichs's studies of sexual diversity galvanized the burgeoning field of sexual science in the nineteenth century. But in the years since, his groundbreaking activism for the emancipation of homosexuality has overshadowed his scholarly achievements.Ralph M. Leck returns Ulrichs to his place as the inventor of the science of sexual heterogeneity. Leck's analysis situates sexual science in thematic contexts that include political history, aesthetics, amatory studies, and the language of science. Although he was the greatest nineteenth-century scholar of sexual heterogeneity, Ulrichs retained certain traditional conjectures about gender. Leck recognizes these subtleties and employs the analytical concepts of modernist vita sexualis and traditional psychopathia sexualis to articulate philosophical and cultural differences among sexologists.Original and audacious, Vita Sexualis uses a bedrock figure's scientific and political innovations to open new insights into the history of sexual science, legal systems, and Western amatory codes.
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