Starting in the late nineteenth century, scholars and activists all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists influenced their German, British, and American counterparts and vice versa, sexuality, modernity, and imaginings of exotified “Others” became intimately linked. The first anthology to provide a worldwide perspective on the birth and development of the field, A Global History of Sexual Science contends that actors outside of Europe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—became important interlocutors in debates on prostitution, birth control, and transvestism. Ideas circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. Twenty scholars tackle specific issues, including the female orgasm and the criminalization of male homosexuality, to demonstrate how concepts and ideas introduced by sexual scientists gained currency throughout the modern world.

About the Author

Veronika Fuechtner is Associate Professor of German at Dartmouth College and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine. She is the author of Berlin Psychoanalytic and coeditor of Imagining Germany Imagining Asia.

Douglas E. Haynes is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India and Small Town Capitalism in Western India and coeditor of Contesting Power and Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia.

Ryan M. Jones is Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Geneseo and the author of a forthcoming book on Mexican sexuality entitled Erotic Revolutions.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Toward a Global History of Sexual Science: Movements, Networks, and Deployments Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan M. Jones

PART ONE: EVOLUTION, SEXUAL SCIENCE, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE OTHER
1 • Global Modernity and Sexual Science: The Case of Male Homosexuality and Female Prostitution, 1880–1950 Pablo Ben
2 • “Let Us Leave the Hospital; Let Us Go on a Journey around the World”: British and German Sexual Science and the Global Search for Sexual Variation Kate Fisher and Jana Funke
3 • Westermarck’s Morocco: The Epistemic Politics of Cultural Anthropology and Sexual Science Ralph Leck
4 • Monogamy’s Nature: Global Sexual Science and the Secularization of Christian Marriage Angela Willey
5 • The “Hottentot Apron”: Genital Aberration in the History of Sexual Science Rebecca Hodes

PART TWO: SCIENCE BY THE BOOK AND UNRULY APPROPRIATIONS
6 • Sexology in the Southwest: Law, Medicine, and Sexuality in Germany and Its Colonies Robert Deam Tobin
7 • Understanding R. D. Karve: Brahmacharya, Modernity, and the Appropriation of Global Sexual Science in Western India, 1927–1953 Shrikant Botre and Douglas E. Haynes
8 • The “Ellis Effect”: Translating Sexual Science in Republican China, 1911–1949 Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu
9 • Takahashi Tetsu and Popular Sexology in Early Postwar Japan, 1945–1970 Mark McLelland
10 • Mexican Sexology and Male Homosexuality: Genealogies and Global Contexts, 1860–1957 Ryan M. Jones
11 • The Science of Sexual Difference: Ogura Seizaburo, Hiratsuka Raicho, and the Intersection of Sexology and Feminism in Early-Twentieth-Century Japan Michiko Suzuki
12 • Time for Sex: The Education of Desire and the Conduct of Childhood in Global/Hindu Sexology Ishita Pande

PART THREE: MOBILITY, TRAVEL, EXILE, AND THE CIRCUITS OF SEXOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE
13 • Latin Eugenics and Sexual Knowledge in Italy, Spain, and Argentina: International Networks across the Atlantic Chiara Beccalossi
14 • “Forms So Attenuated That They Merge into Normality Itself”: Alexander Lipschütz, Gregorio Marañón, and Theories of Intersexuality in Chile, circa 1930 Kurt MacMillan
15 • “Tyranny of Orgasm”: Global Governance of Sexuality from Bombay, 1930s–1950s Sanjam Ahluwalia
16 • Magnus Hirschfeld’s Onnagata Rainer Herrn
17 • Agnes Smedley between Berlin, Bombay, and Beijing: Sexology, Communism, and National Independence Veronika Fuechtner
18 • The Limits of Transnationalism: The Case of Max Marcuse Kirsten Leng
Afterword: In the Shadow of Empire: The Words and Worlds of Sexual Science Howard Chiang

List of Contributors
Index

Reviews

"Full of compelling critical observations and original historical insights, [A Global History of Sexual Science] makes an important addition to the histories of sex, science, and modernity."
— Isis Journal

"This groundbreaking volume of essays offers the first historical account of the impact that the work of sexual scientists, doctors, writers and political activists from around the world had on the field of sexology and on wider sociopolitical changes during the 1880–1960 period."
— Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society

"A thoroughly vivid, nuanced, and much more inclusive picture of the historical making of sexual science and sexualities than previously available. This important volume will not only serve as a welcome resource in a variety of classrooms but also certainly remain standard reading for future scholars of (the history of) sexuality, colonialism, and science, as well as a range of area studies disciplines."
— Journal of the History of Sexuality

“This rich and diverse collection offers the first overview of the globalization of sexual science and of the ways in which men and women on four continents used what they thought they knew about that most mysterious of human qualities—the nature of our sexual desires—to make and understand the social and political worlds in which they lived. It is also a superb collective case study of the global creation and circulation of knowledge that will engage not only people interested in sex—most of us—but also those interested in social studies of science and in globalization more generally.”—Thomas W. Laqueur, author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

“Histories of sexuality have been experiencing a boom during the past decade, but nearly all of the published work focuses on single countries. This book presents an imposingly broad and thorough grounding of the claim that the spread of thinking about sexual science as a distinctive set of intellectual and institutional practices was both remarkably global and complexly interactive. No other book comes close to the impressive breadth of A Global History of Sexual Science.”—Geoff Eley, University of Michigan, author of Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany 1930–1945

“A Global History of Sexual Science is an impressive accomplishment that deserves to become a key text in anthropology, history, gender studies, religion, queer studies, and the histories of medicine, psychiatry, and sexuality. No other volume offers as thorough an account of the interactions among Anglo-European (largely German) scientific approaches to the study of sex and local traditions in India, Argentina, Morocco, Africa, China, Mexico, Japan, Chile, and Israel. The gracefully written contributions to this superbly assembled anthology are accessible to both specialists and general readers and assure it will enjoy a spirited reception for many decades to come.”—Edward Dimendberg, Professor of Humanities and European Languages and Studies, University of California, Irvine

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews