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Article ID: CBB001022560

Historicizing the Emergence of Sexual Freedom: The Medical Knowledge of Psychiatry and the Scientific Power of Sexology, 1880--1920 (2009)

Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies
Volume: 24
Pages: Approx. 14,000 words
Publication date: 2009
Language: English

Publication Date: 2009
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Apparatus XY: Gender Praxes in the History of Chinese and Western Medicine.” URL: http://www.genderforum.org/issues/apparatus-xy/historicizing-the-emergence-of-sexual-freedom (Accessed on March 28, 2011)

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Psychiatry Science and culture Science and gender Sexology 19th century 20th century, early

This paper develops an historical analysis of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century discourse of sexology that accounts for its heterogeneity, attending to the complex interactions and distinctions between medicine and science. Between 1880 and 1920, I argue, the conceptual possibilities for the articulation of a modern notion of sexual freedom emerged from two stages of historical development: first, the psychiatric implantation of sexual psychopathology around the 1880s and 1890s that gave sexuality for the first time in history both a psychological and a pathological character under the name of medicine; and second, the subsequent sexological impulse in the 1900s and 1910s to deploy the existing vocabularies of perverse sexuality in a new system of normalizing and liberalizing scholarly endeavors under the name of science. It was not until this transition from the "psychiatrization" of sex to a more general "scientification" of sex around the turn of the twentieth century did people gradually adopt and participate in the making of a modern notion of sexual freedom that demarcated sexual desire from heterosexual obligations. This new sense of sexual self, positioned in a constant political struggle with its cultural legitimacy and intelligibility, would remain central to the concept of sexual freedom throughout the rest of the century.

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