Abstract
English Literary Sexology explores how sexology — the sustained theorisation of sex — emerged and how it was transmitted across linguistic and disciplinary boundaries between the 1860s and the 1930s. It asks specific questions about the ways in which a theory of sex was established and translated. If sexology first evolved in German-speaking scientific contexts, then how did it migrate across Europe and North America? To what an extent did English sexology distinguish itself from its European counterparts and why did British culture prove increasingly responsive to sexual ideas? How did women contribute to a discourse that from the outset was so heavily dominated by male experts and lay readers? In short, what were the kinds of narratives that first made up the scientia sexualis, and what do their translations reveal about the links between the discourses of sexuality and the experiential realities of the sexual theorists, and their gendering?
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Notes
See Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists (London: Penguin, 1995);
Joseph Bristow, Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1997).
Franz X. Eder, Lesley Hall and Gert Hekma (eds), Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) and their Sexual Cultures in Europe: Themes in Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
See also Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Cambridge: Polity, 1998);
Carolyn J. Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture (New York: Twayne, 1996);
John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988);
Vernon A. Rosario (ed.), Science and Homosexualities (New York: Routledge, 1997).
Important studies include Bland, Banishing the Beast; Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000);
Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004);
Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007);
Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homosexual Writing After 1885 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995);
Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990);
Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Gert Hekma, ‘“A Female Soul in a Male Body”: Sexual Inversion as Gender Inversion in nineteenth-Century Sexology’, in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 213–39.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: a Medico-Legal Study, trans. from the 12th German edition by F.J. Rebman (New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1934), 396.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: an Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1990). See also, for instance, Bristow, Sexuality;
Lisa Duggan, ‘From Instincts to Politics: Writing the History of Sexuality in the U.S.’, The Journal of Sex Research, 27.1 (1990), 95–109;
David Halperin, ‘Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality’, Representations, 63 (1998), 93–120;
Chris Waters, ‘Sexology’, in H.G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook (eds), Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 41–63.
Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard, ‘Preface’ in her Sexology as the Philosophy of Life: Implying Social Organisation and Government (Chicago: J.R. Walsh, 1867), no page. This is also discussed by Waters, ‘Sexology’. Willard’s biblical concerns are mirrored by an early twentieth century publication, Sidney C. Trapp, Sexology of the Bible: The Fall and Redemption of Man, A Matter of Sex (Kansas City: International Biblical Society, 1915).
See Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (eds), The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Randolph Trumbach, ‘London Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture’, in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 111–36.
Lawrence Birken, Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance, 1871–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 49.
Numa Numantius [Karl Heinrich Ulrichs], Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Leipzig: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1864), 1.
See Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexualpsychologie und Volkspyschologie: eine epikritische Studie zum Harden Prozess (Leipzig: Georg H. Wigand, 1908), 1–2.
Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontent: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 75.
Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship & Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Junction Books, 1981);
Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880–1930 (London, Boston and Henley: Pandora, 1985).
Bland and Doan (eds), Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science and Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (both published Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). See also Bland, Banishing the Beast; Doan, Fashioning Sapphism; Erin G. Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1998).
Ambroise Tardieu, Questions Médico- Légale de l’Identité dans ses Rapports avec les Vices de Conformations des Organs Sexuels (Paris: J.B. Baillière et Fils, 1874), 41.
Lesley Hall, ‘Sexual Cultures in Britain: Some Persisting Themes’, in Eder, Hall and Hekma (eds), Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories, 41. Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks, Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis (London: Pluto, 1977).
Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981).
See Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989);
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);
Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
See Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994);
Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);
Dennis Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Heike Bauer, ‘“The idea of development”: Decadence, Aestheticism and late-Victorian Notions about Sexual Identity in Marius the Epicurean’, Australasian Journal for Victorian Studies 9 (2003), 1–15.
Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures (Adelaide: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2002), 10–11. The lecture on ‘Plato and the Doctrine of Motion’, from which this quotation is taken, was first published in 1893.
See Lesley A. Hall and Roy Porter, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995);
Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981);
Jeffrey Weeks, Jane Holland and Matthew Waites, ‘Introduction’ to their (eds), Sexualities and Society: A Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 1–6.
See Chris White, ‘“She Was Not Really Man At All”: The Lesbian Practice and Politics of Edith Ellis’, in Elaine Hobby and Chris White (eds), What Lesbians Do in Books (London: The Women’s Press, 1991), 68–85; Joseph Bristow, ‘Symonds’ History, Ellis’ Heredity: Sexual Inversion’;, in Bland and Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture, 79–99; and Bristow’s Sexuality, 19–56.
Yvonne Ivory, ‘The Urning and His Own: Individualism and the Fin-De-Siècle Invert’, German Studies Review, 26.2 (2003), 333.
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Doan, Fashioning Sapphism; Erin G. Carlston, Thinking Fascism.
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 2.
Claudia Breger, ‘Feminine Masculinities: Scientific and Literary Representations of “Female Inversion” at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14. 1/2 (2005), 76–106.
Esther Newton, ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness’, Signs, 9.4 (1984), 557–75.
George Chauncey Jr, ‘From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualisation of Female Deviance’, Salmagundi, 58–9 (1982–83), 116.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870–1936’, in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey Jr. (eds), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (London: Penguin, 1991), 265.
Patricia Marks has collected some key images in her Bicycles, Bangs and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990). See also Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham (eds), New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture (London: Routledge, 2004);
and Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-De-Siècle Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. Joanna Richardson (1835; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). Talia Schaffer provides an excellent study of women and aestheticism, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late- Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).
J.S. Bratton, ‘Irrational Dress’, in Viv Gardner and Susan Rutherford (eds), The New Woman and her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre, 1850–1914 (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 77–91;
John Stokes, Michael R. Booth and Susan Bassnett (eds), Bernhard, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Ann Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 192.
See Heike Bauer, ‘“Not a translation but a mutilation”: The Limits of Translation and the Discipline of Sexology’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 16.2 (2003), 381–405.
William Robinson, ‘Sexological Literature Pirates’, Medical Critic and Guide, 32 (1934), 151.
Laurence Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1992).
See also Fritz Gutbrodt, ‘Poedelaire: Translation and the Volatility of the Letter’, Diacritics, 22 (1992), 49–68;
Terry Eagleton, ‘Translations and Transformation’, Stand, 19.3 (1977), 72–7;
Jose Lambert, ‘Literary Translation’, in Monica Baker with Kirsten Malmkjae (eds), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), 130–33.
Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Walter Pater, ‘Introduction’, in Dante Alighieri, The Purgatory, trans. Charles Lancelot Shadwell (London: Macmillan, 1892), xxxvi.
For Benjamin see Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto, 2000).
Walter Benjamin, ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), vol. 4 (1) 20–1.
Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, Nachdruck der Erstauflage von 1914 mit einer kommentierten Einleitung von E.J. Haeberle (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984), 1024–25.
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone, 1987), 20.
See Edward Carpenter, Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk: A Study in Social Evolution (London: Grant Allen, 1914);
Magnus Hirschfeld, Women East and West: Impressions of a Sex Expert, trans. Oliver Green (London: William Heinemann, 1935).
Véronique Mottier, ‘Sexuality and Sexology: Michel Foucault’, in Terrell Carver and Véronique Mottier (eds), Politics of Sexuality: Identity, Gender, Citizenship (London: Routledge, 1998), 114.
George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
Sally McConnell-Ginet, ‘“Queering” Semantics: Definitional Struggles’, in Kathryn Cambell-Kibler, Robert J. Podesva, Sarah J. Roberts and Andrew Wong (eds), Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice (Stanford: CSLI, 2002), 151 and 153.
See Asa Briggs and Patricia Clavin, Modern Europe: 1789—Present (London: Longman, 2003), 115–245;
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Phoenix Press, 2000).
Ralf Dose, ‘The World League for Sexual Reform’, in Franz X. Eder, Lesley Hall and Gert Hekma (eds), Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 242–59;
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848—c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
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© 2009 Heike Bauer
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Bauer, H. (2009). Introduction. In: English Literary Sexology. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234086_1
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