IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB001251152

Carney Landis and the Psychosexual Landscape of Touch in Mid-20th-Century America (2012)

Serlin, David (Author)

History of Psychology
Volume: 15, no. 3
Issue: 3
Pages: 209-216
Publication date: 2012
Language: English

Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Special Section: Beyond Kinsey, Sex and American Psychology

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Disabilities; disability; accessibility Women Sexual behavior Sexology Psychology Touch; haptic perception 20th century, early Landis, Carney Columbia University Committee for Research on the Problems of Sex (CRPS) (1920-1965)

In the last quarter of the 1930s, Carney Landis, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University affiliated with the Psychiatric Institute of New York, headed a Committee for Research in Problems of Sex-funded research project in which he conducted interviews with 100 women between the ages of 18 and 35 who self-identified as physically disabled. Landis interviewed the women about their sex lives, their sexual identities, and their relationship to their bodies and published the results in 1942 under the title The Personality and Sexuality of the Physically Handicapped Woman. The book represents conventional psychosexual presumptions about disabled women's stunted personality and frustrated sexuality stemming from the absence of a Freudian sexual moment. Yet, the original research notes, housed at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, reveal that many of these women engaged in acts of erotic touching that played a far more dynamic and complex role in the development of their sexual subjectivities than Landis or his researchers could recognize. This article examines how touch and tactility produced meanings for Landis' research subjects and thus illuminated forms of sexual subjectivity not regularly associated with either histories of disability or histories of sexuality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

...More

Included in

Article Hegarty, Peter (2012) Beyond Kinsey: The Committee for Research on Problems of Sex and American Psychology. History of Psychology (pp. 197-200). unapi

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB001251152

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Hegarty, Peter; (2012)
Getting Miles Away from Terman: Did the CRPS Fund Catharine Cox Miles's Unsilenced Psychology of Sex? (/p/isis/citation/CBB001251151/)

Article Hegarty, Peter; (2012)
Beyond Kinsey: The Committee for Research on Problems of Sex and American Psychology (/p/isis/citation/CBB001260561/)

Book McLaren, Angus; (2012)
Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain (/p/isis/citation/CBB001212414/)

Chapter Sylvie Chaperon; Camille Noûs; Alain Giami; Sharman Levinson; (2021)
Marie Bonaparte and Female Frigidity: From Physiology to Psychology (/p/isis/citation/CBB970490543/)

Article Pettit, Michael; (2012)
The Queer Life of a Lab Rat (/p/isis/citation/CBB001260562/)

Article Beccalossi, Chiara; (2009)
The Origin of Italian Sexological Studies: Female Sexual Inversion, ca. 1870--1900 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030579/)

Article Mary McAlpin; (2019)
Denis Diderot and the Masturbating Girl (/p/isis/citation/CBB698197348/)

Article Bauer, Heike; (2009)
Theorizing Female Inversion: Sexology, Discipline, and Gender at the Fin de Siècle (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030578/)

Book Kateřina Lišková; (2018)
Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 (/p/isis/citation/CBB942663111/)

Book Downing, Lisa; Morland, Iain; Sullivan, Nikki; (2014)
Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money's Diagnostic Concepts (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422044/)

Article Catriel Fierro; (2021)
“A backdrop for psychotherapy”: Carl R. Rogers, psychological testing, and the psycho-educational clinic at Columbia University’s Teachers College (1924–1935) (/p/isis/citation/CBB463043538/)

Article Sokal, Michael M.; (2011)
Cattell, Columbia, and Academic Freedom: Rarely Used Sources Enrich Analyses of This Significant Episode (/p/isis/citation/CBB001033715/)

Article Kirsten Leng; (2019)
Historicising ‘Compulsory Able-bodiedness’: The History of Sexology meets Queer Disability Studies (/p/isis/citation/CBB832581356/)

Article Leng, Kirsten; (2015)
The Personal is Scientific: Women, Gender, and the Production of Sexological Knowledge in Germany and Austria, 1900--1931 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001552611/)

Book Joseph Moshenska; (2014)
Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (/p/isis/citation/CBB821947313/)

Article Pitts, Yvonne; (2012)
Disability, Scientific Authority, and Women's Political Participation at the Turn of the Twentieth-Century United States (/p/isis/citation/CBB001450306/)

Article Smith, Kate; (2012)
Sensing Design and Workmanship: The Haptic Skills of Shoppers in Eighteenth-Century London (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201116/)

Article Philip Kuhn; (2020)
The Sexual Life of Our Time: Medical Censorship in Early-20th-Century England (/p/isis/citation/CBB677285948/)

Article Miller, Allison; (2013)
Am I Normal? American Vernacular Psychology and the Tomboy Body, 1900--1940 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320022/)

Book Hegarty, Peter; (2013)
Gentlemen's Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men (/p/isis/citation/CBB001213145/)