Suchergebnisse

While much has been written about the pathologizing of Jewish bodies by European sexologists, and while the role of Jewish scholars in the study of deviance has been recognized, next to nothing has been written about how European Jews theorized their own sex, in their own deviant tongue. This article proposes to rectify this lack by turning to a completely neglected body of work: sexology written in Yiddish. Yiddish sexology, produced globally across the first half of the twentieth century, reveals an array of new imaginaries of corporeality and sociality, coming from diverse transnational Jewish communities and reflecting varying engagements with the emergent science of sex. This article focuses on the work of one doctor, Leonard Landis, working at the turn of the twentieth century in New York, who was by far the most prolific (and controversial) author of Yiddish sexology and yet remains entirely unstudied. Recovering his unique voice and exposing some of its intricate intertextual and cross-cultural dialogues, this article argues for the vitality of including Yiddish sexology within global histories of sexuality.

AbstractIs sexology over? What does one do with its history, at once a seemingly remote relic and a persistent logic of biopolitics today? "Sexology and Its Afterlives" begins from the premise that the history of sexology lives in the infrastructures of the present. Locating the afterlives of sexology in material and aesthetic form, this introduction to the special issue engages the largely unmarked detritus of a disaggregated sexological project, whose components have found renewed life in the biopolitical apparatus. The contributors to this issue identify not only familiar sites of sexological persistence (the sex-segregated public toilet) but also less immediately obvious ones (the Moynihan report, redlining, the army base) as executing the unfinished business of the sexological project. This breadth of sexological diffusion makes its analysis a necessarily interdisciplinary prospect, and the contributors call on disability studies, trans studies, Black studies, women-of-color feminism, visual culture, and the history of sexuality, generating emergent concepts, including crip-of-color critique (Kim), binary-abolitionist praxis (Stryker), a "trans-mad" aesthetic (Crawford), and a shift toward expressivity as a framework (Musser). Across the issue, newly imagined sites of collective politics come into view as a payoff for working through the stalled-out imaginaries of sexological binarisms.

By the turn of the twentieth century, race science, ethnology, and sexology had conspired to calcify the racial and sexual limits of the "human." This article posits that contemporaneous African American novelists responded to the anti-Blackness of American sexual scientific discourse by presenting their own investigations of sexual behavior through literary narrative. This practice, which we might call "Black vernacular sexology," adapted the language and methods of institutionalized sexual science to refute the claims of scientific racism and to generate sexual knowledge from a Black standpoint. This essay examines Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) as a powerful example of Black vernacular sexology, arguing that the novel performs a case study of a Southern aristocrat to reveal how whiteness is constructed through a perverse and sexualized obsession with Blackness. Placing the novel in dialogue with American racial and sexual scientists, the article demonstrates how Chesnutt adapts the methods and refutes the racist claims of official sexology while also refusing to duplicate that field's pathologization of individuals. This analysis suggests that the study of American sexual scientific discourse requires an understanding of how turn-of-the-century African American literature provided a Black vernacular sexology to combat anti-Black scientific truth-claims about sex itself.

This article explores articles about circumcision that appeared in Sexology: Sex Science Magazine, with particular attention to how the debates shifted and changed over a forty-year period. The articles on circumcision in Sexology begin in November 1934 and end in the May 1973 issue, with every decade of publication includes articles on circumcision, corresponding with growing debates about the medicalization of routine neonatal circumcision. The first article sought to understand "circumcision among savage peoples," which was quickly followed by an article on "Circumcision among the Jews," and then "Medical view of circumcision." In its earliest issues, Sexology advanced arguments in favor of routine circumcision, but in its final article on the topic, Sexology asks, "what's so good about circumcision?"