This article discusses the term erotology, which was applied to medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah (the science of coitus), as well as other world traditions of sexual knowledge, by European sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who contrasted it with their own forms of inquiry into sexual matters in the modern field of sexual science. It argues that the homogenisation and minimisation of all ancient and non-European forms of medical knowledge about sex, even one as substantial as the (...) ‘ilm al-bah tradition, supported a particular story about the origins of sexology's own emergence as a new and unprecedented biomedical and scientific way of knowing, characterised by an opposition assumed between sexuality and religion, by a view of sexual variations as perversions or pathologies, and by a view of Arabs and Muslims as sexually excessive. The article focusses on French, English, German, Austrian, and Italian sources of the 19th century that discussed the history of sexual medicine, relating these accounts to recent attempts to historicise sexology. It considers how forms of colonial hierarchy and exoticist views of non-European cultures impacted the dismissal of ‘ilm al-bah among European sexual scientists and how they may continue to exert an influence on forms of modern historical inquiry that are not attentive to scholarship on medieval Islamicate sexual medicine. (shrink)

Homosexual aversion therapy enjoyed two brief but intense periods of clinical experimentation: between 1950 and 1962 in Czechoslovakia, and between 1962 and 1975 in the British Commonwealth. The specific context of its emergence was the geopolitical polarization of the Cold War and a parallel polarization within psychological medicine between Pavlovian and Freudian paradigms. In 1949, the Pavlovian paradigm became the guiding doctrine in the Communist bloc, characterized by a psychophysiological or materialist understanding of mental illness. It was taken up by (...) therapists in Western countries who were critical of psychoanalysis and sought more ‘scientific’ diagnostic and therapeutic methods that focused on empirical evidence and treating actual symptoms. However, their attitude towards homosexuality often played a decisive role in how they used aversion therapy. Whereas Czechoslovakian researchers cautioned readers about low success rates and agitated for homosexual law reform in 1961, most of their anglophone counterparts selectively ignored or misrepresented the results of ‘the Prague experiment’, instead celebrating single-case ‘success’ stories in their effort to correct ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation. In histories of queer sexuality and its pathologization, the behaviourist paradigm remains almost entirely unmapped. This article provides the most detailed study to date of aversion therapy literature from both sides of the East/West border. In doing so, it contributes to the project not only of ‘decentring Western sexualities’, but of decentring Western sexological knowledge. Given its Pavlovian origins, the history of homosexual aversion therapy can be fully understood only in the context of Cold War transnational sexological knowledge exchange. (shrink)

This article provides insight into the entwinement of the allegedly neutral category of handedness with questions of sex/gender, reproduction, dis/ability, and scientific authority. In the 1860s, Paul Broca suggested that the speech centre sat in the left brain hemisphere in most humans, and that right-handedness stemmed from this asymmetry. One century later, British psychologists Marian Annett and Chris McManus proposed biologically unconfirmed theories of how handedness and brain asymmetry were passed on in families. Their idea to integrate chance into genetic (...) models of handedness was novel, and so was their use of computerized statistics to parse out the incidence of handedness genotypes and phenotypes. Notwithstanding significant conceptual and methodological overlaps, McManus and Annett did not collaborate and proposed competing theories. I analyse the sexed/gendered dimensions of their controversy by drawing on published literature, unpublished documents, and oral history interviews. I first attend to the epistemological importance of sex/gender. Both psychologists published several iterations of their models, which increasingly relied on questions of sex/gender and reproduction. Annett additionally linked handedness with stereotypically gendered cognitive abilities. Second, I argue that using masculine-coded computer technologies contributed to Annett’s professional marginalization whereas similar methods endowed McManus with surplus authority. Finally, I show that Annett’s complicity in stabilizing sociocultural hierarchies within her theory mirrored her personal experience of marginalization based on sex/gender, age, education, and lack of institutional affiliation. This analysis exemplifies the entanglement of cognitive and social factors in scientific controversies and adds to the literature on 20th-century British women psychologists. (shrink)

Historians and philosophers of science have furnished a wide array of theoretical-historiographical terms to emphasize the discontinuities among different systems of knowledge. Some of the most famous include Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm”, Michel Foucault’s “episteme”, and the notion of “styles of reasoning” more recently developed by Ian Hacking and Arnold Davidson. This paper takes up this theoretical-historiographical thread by assessing the values and limitations of the notion of “style” for the historical and philosophical study of science. Specifically, reflecting on various methodological (...) and theoretical concerns prompted by sexuality, translation, and East Asian studies, this paper argues that the heretofore ways in which historians and philosophers of science have used the notion of “style” are severely restricted in terms of its mere applicability to the intellectual history of Western science. The particular example of the translation of “homosexuality” into Chinese during the May Fourth era reveals that the notion of “style” has the potential of carrying a much more dynamic conceptual weight, as when used in “styles of argumentation”. The paper also engages briefly with the historiography of scientific “national styles” and ends with some concluding remarks on the limitations of “social histories from below” and the under appreciated importance of “epistemological histories of possibilities”. (shrink)

This study considers the role of epistemic turning points in the historiography of sexuality. Disentangling the historical complexity of scientia sexualis, I argue that the late 19th century and the mid-20th century constitute two critical epistemic junctures in the genealogy of sexual liberation, as the notion of free love slowly gave way to the idea of sexual freedom in modern western society. I also explore the value of the Foucauldian approach for the study of the history of sexuality in non-western (...) contexts. Drawing on examples from Republican China (1912—49), I propose that the Foucauldian insight concerning the emergence of a ‘homosexual identity’ in the West can serve as a useful guide for thinking about similar issues in the history of sexuality and the historical epistemology of sexology in modern East Asia. (shrink)