Suchergebnisse

Volkmar Sigusch: Kritische Sexualwissenschaft: Ein Fazit. Frankfurt am Main: Campus 2019. 9783593510576

Historians have pointed to overseas colonialism and 'race science' as influential in the construction of European sexual science. Soviet sexology arose on a 'semi-periphery' between Europe and colonised societies. The 'Others' against whom Russian sexual ideals were forged would be
'internally colonised' peasants and non-Russian ethnicities of the Soviet Union's internal orient. Pre-Stalinist sexology blended the 'sexual revolution' with European sexual science focused on workers in the Slavic urban industrial heartland; nationalities beyond this perceived heartland
lagged behind and their sex lives required modernisation. Stalin virtually curtailed sexological research. After 1945 the party revived it to spur fertility, especially in Slavic urban centres where births had dropped below replacement rate. Ideological control constrained sexologists, confining
them to silos, limiting internationalisation and cramping research. But new, heteronormative therapeutic measures, some from Western science, and others devised at home, were developed. Less vocal than Western or Eastern Bloc sexology, Soviet sex research continued to display anxiety about
internal national and ethnic Others into the 1980s and beyond.

Abstract
The author explores the thematics of transsexuality, untranslatability, and figuration in a recent volume of poetry by the Canadian poet and scholar Trish Salah, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1. Lyric Sexology confronts historical, aesthetic, and political questions that are best understood in the framework of translation and its failure. Drawing on Barbara Cassin's philosophical reflections on untranslatables, the author argues that gender as a representational system necessarily experiences trans configurations of gender as untranslatables, which it "never ceases (not) translating." The author deploys Salah's collection of poems, which explores a number of historical discourses and sciences oriented around understanding transsexuality, to help think through some of the questions that the paradigm of untranslatability opens. This article argues that Lyric Sexology stages an analogy between linguistic and literary translations and historical attempts to categorize transsexuality, thus rendering transsexuality legible within normative gender categories. In this account, categorization is treated as a historical analogue of translation, the repetitions and failures of which can be understood as a response to transsexuality as an untranslatable. Through a reading of Salah's poems, the author develops an interpretation of categorization as dependent upon figuration to achieve its intended effect of translating its targets into, in Salah's words, one "of those things you have words for." The author's interpretation of Lyric Sexology through the history it proposes thus helps her to develop a paradigm for understanding the functions of untranslatability and figuration in determining the past and present configurations of trans social relations.

It is well known that much of our modern vocabulary of sex emerged within nineteenth-century German sexology. But how were the 'German ideas' translated and transmitted into English culture? This study provides an examination of the formation of sexual theory between the 1860s and 1930s and its migration across national and disciplinary boundaries

Traces the history of sexual theory in three historical phases: (1) sexology & psychoanalysis in the early 20th century; (2) sociological, social-constructionist approaches developed in the 1960s; & (3) poststructuralist discourse analysis in the 1970s & 1980s. It is suggested that social-constructionist approaches to sexuality reacted to the explicit essentialism present in the early drive theory of sexological & psychoanalytic work. However, while offering a challenge to the biological & psychological determinism of drive theory, it left open the question of how desire comes to be constituted within the individual. It therefore has been unable to provide answers as to why heterosexual hegemony continues to persist at the individual level. From a poststructuralist perspective, the best efforts to overcome these deficiencies are described as blendings of sociological & cultural analysis that combine insights of psychoanalysis, symbolic interactionism, & discourse analysis to focus on the cultural scenarios that make sexual practices possible in culture. It is argued that this multilevel model offers the most promising avenue for future research in this field. 53 References. D. M. Smith