- 1University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Abstract
This
article addresses the roles women and gender played in the production
of sexological knowledge in the early 20th century, particularly in
German-speaking Europe. Although existing scholarship focuses almost
exclusively on the work of "founding fathers"
such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld, women in fact
made important contributions to the field. Based on analysis of texts
written between 1900 and 1931, this article shows how women were able to
successfully mobilize their gender as a privileged form of "situated
knowledge," and thereby assert their authority over and superior
insights into certain subject areas, namely, female sexualities and
sexual difference. At the same time, however, this article also
highlights the constraints upon women's gendered standpoint. It shows
that women's sexological writing was not just informed by their gender
but also by their class and race. Moreover, because gender threatened to
cast their work as insufficiently objective and scientific, women
cleaved to sexology's rules of evidence and argumentation, and adopted
the field's ideological trappings in order to participate in discursive
contestations over sexual truths. By interrogating gender, this article
introduces much-needed nuance into existing understandings of sexology,
and reframes sexology itself as a site wherein new sexual subjectivities
were imagined, articulated, and debated. However, it also raises
fundamental questions about women sexologists' capacity to create
knowledge about women and female sexualities that was truer, more
correct, and more authentic than that produced by men.
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