‘All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex’: Development and the social function of the sexual instinct in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexology (2023)
Fisher, Kate (Author)
Jana Funke (Author)
History of the Human Sciences
Volume: 36
Issue: 5
Pages: 42-67
This article explores the relationship between sexual science and evolutionary models of human development and progress. It examines the ways in which late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexual scientists constructed the sexual instinct as an evolutionary force that not only served a reproductive purpose, but was also pivotal to the social, moral, and cultural development of human societies. Sexual scientists challenged the idea that non-reproductive sexualities were necessarily perverse, pathological, or degenerative by linking sexual desire to the evolution of sociality, often focusing on forms of relationality and care that exceeded biological kinship. As a result, non-reproductive sexual expressions, including homosexual and non-reproductive heterosexual behaviours, were interpreted as manifestations of a sexual instinct operating in the service of human development. These claims were reliant on cross-cultural and historical comparisons of sexual values, behaviours, and customs that rehearsed and reinforced imperial narratives of development premised on racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies. Sexual scientists mapped diverse sexual behaviours in terms of their perceived evolutionary benefits, contributing to colonial narratives that distinguished between different cultures according to imagined trajectories of development. These contestations around the sexual instinct and its developmental functions played a vital role in allowing sexual science to authorize itself as a field of knowledge that promised to provide expertise required to manage sexual life and secure the global development of human civilization.
...MoreArticle Chiara Beccalossi; Kate Fisher; Jana Funke (2023) Sexology and development. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-14).
Similar Citations
Book
Heike Bauer;
(2015)
Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters across the Modern World
Book
Carla Christina Hustak;
(2024)
Politics of Love: Sex Reformers and the Nonhuman
Thesis
Frederickson, Kathleen;
(2008)
The Content of Instinct: Fiction, Liberalism, and the Sciences of Sexuality,1870--1900
Article
Alison M. Downham Moore;
(2023)
Modern European sexological and orientalist assimilations of medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah to erotology
Article
Ryan M. Jones;
(2023)
Defeating the ‘social danger’ of homosexuality while ‘forging the fatherland’: Sexual science and biotypology in Mexico’s national development, 1927–57
Book
Frederickson, Kathleen;
(2014)
The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance
Article
Sunhee Han;
(2019)
The Connection between Charles Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory of ‘Heredity of Behaviors’ and the 19th Century Neuroscience: The Influence of Neuroscience on Darwin’s Overcoming of Lamarck’s Theory of Evolution
Article
Mariagrazia Portera;
Mauro Mandrioli;
(2021)
Who's afraid of epigenetics? Habits, instincts, and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory
Article
Noon, David Hoogland;
(2005)
The Evolution of Beasts and Babies: Recapitulation, Instinct, and the Early Discourse on Child Development
Article
Leng, Kirsten;
(2015)
The Personal is Scientific: Women, Gender, and the Production of Sexological Knowledge in Germany and Austria, 1900--1931
Article
Laura C. Forster;
(2023)
Sex, science and curated community at the World League for Sexual Reform 1929 conference
Article
Rovel Sequeira;
(2023)
The sciences of love: Intimate ‘democracy’ and the eugenic development of the Marathi couple in colonial India
Article
K. Liskova;
(2016)
Now You See Them, Now You Don't. Sexual Deviants and Sexological Expertise in Communist Czechoslovakia
Book
McEwen, Britta Isabelle;
(2012)
Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900--1934
Book
Kirsten Leng;
(2018)
Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900–1933
Chapter
Jane Russo;
Sérgio Carrara;
Alain Giami;
Sharman Levinson;
(2021)
Politics, Religion, and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the Brazilian Publishing Market in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century
Book
Heike Bauer;
(2017)
The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture
Article
Browne, Derek;
(2005-2006)
Konrad Lorenz on Instinct and Phylogenetic Information
Book
Engels, Eve-Marie;
Glick, Thomas F.;
(2008)
The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe
Book
Mario Coglitore;
(2020)
Viaggi coloniali. Politica, letteratura e tecnologia in movimento tra Ottocento e Novecento
Be the first to comment!