Abstract
This volume began by exploring various ways of approaching ‘what sexology is’ and writing its history. In the Introduction, Alain Giami distinguished ‘sexology’ from ‘theories of sexuality’ in order to examine the circulation of theories, both globally and between institutions and disciplines. An approach focused on circulations allows for a close investigation of the avenues through which theories were taken up or produced by sexology among other sciences and studies of sex around the world. Furthermore, with reference to Michel de Certeau’s (1987) comparison of psychoanalysis and historiography, Giami’s Introduction also suggested temporal ‘circulations’ of ideas past and present in intellectual history. This conclusion focusses in particular on this sort of circulation. It examines features of sexology’s boundary-work (Gieryn 1983) in establishing its ‘scientific’ and ‘medical’ value in the nineteenth century. We suggest that the case of the history of sexology can provide a particularly significant, yet often overlooked opportunity to think about the changing status of scientists’ subjective experiences in the history of science, medicine and the social sciences.
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Notes
- 1.
The anthropological discussion of ‘dirt’ as ‘matter out of place’ developed in Mary Douglas’ (1966) Purity and Danger has recently enjoyed new attention. See Pickering & Wiseman’s (2019) article, Dirty Scholarship and Dirty Lives: Explorations in Bodies and Belonging that introduces a special issue on this topic published in the Sociological Review Monographs. This discussion is particularly relevant to the point of view developed here.
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- 3.
Of course, this sort of semiological approach based on ‘clues’ and on ‘details’ that could reveal a hidden reality was a particular feature of nineteenth-century science and literature described by Carlo Ginzburg (1979) Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm, Theory and Society, 7(3), 273–288. But in the case of Freud, this approach did not dispense him from having to recur to disclaimers in order to show that the sexual content ‘revealed’ or the ‘sexual signifiers’ of mental life, needed other sources of justification in order to be acceptable forms of scientific inquiry.
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He probably knew this would ensure nothing of the sort, so one can take Freud’s position to be above all preventive. If people read with prurient interest, it had been made clear that the problem lay with them and not the author or the topic.
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Or in any case they needed to show that they were aware and concerned with these possible misreadings or mistrust of their interest in the matter.
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Levinson, S. (2021). Sexology and Sciences of Sex as an Observatory for Political Histories of Science. In: Giami, A., Levinson, S. (eds) Histories of Sexology. Global Queer Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65813-7_19
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