Upcoming conference: New Histories of Sexology: Genealogies of Race, Sex, Colonialism, April 20-21, 2018.

Event description: 

New Histories of Sexology: Genealogies of Race, Sex, Colonialism

Co-Organized by Benjamin Kahan and Greta LaFleur

Yale University on April 20-21, 2018.

 A burst of scholarly interest in sexology’s transmission and reception has begun to recast its history in a variety of registers: reconsidering its racial and imperial legacies, tracing its national contours and institutional circuitry, mapping its encounter with the sexual cultures of Western and non-Western geographies, and exploring its repurposing by its putative racialized and primitivized objects of knowledge. This conference will build on this renewed scholarly interest that has animated such recent projects as Melissa Stein’s Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity (2015), Paul Peppis’s Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology (2015), Margot Canaday’s The Straight State (2011), Heike Bauer’s edited collection Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World (2016), and the 2013 faculty seminar hosted by the Leslie Center Humanities Institute at Dartmouth College titled “Toward a Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1950.”

While this scholarship provides an important beginning, we believe that studies of sexology have not fully grappled with its imbrication in projects of racial making and being. We seek to track sexology’s implementation as both a colonial and imperial tactic, and as an arm of the human sciences that was adopted, transformed, and implemented in turn by colonial scientists, lawmakers, and public health officials. In this way, we hope to consider what Stephanie Foote has termed “vernacular” sexologies, alongside official discourses. Instead of reading sexological science as primarily or exclusively an intellectual precursor to later scientific movements such as psychoanalysis or modern identity formations, we hope to think more broadly and generatively about the impact of sexology, putting this variegated body of nineteenth-century science into conversation with the history of race and racisms, the global trade in medical technologies and ideas, and the rise and fall of both colonial and imperial infrastructures.

We intend this conference to both build on the aims and insights of recent scholarship, but also to think in a more capacious historical mode about the transnational flows (translations, adaptations, collaborations) and habitations of global sexology movements (journals, conferences, collaborations, institutes) and its reception by the so-called primitives, racial degenerates, and evolutionary left-behinds who found resources and sites of resistance in its dissemination. What new perspectives might we gain if we, for example, shift scholarship on sexology from its current national and (occasionally) international frames to a transnational or regional one? Scholars have insisted for a long time on the centrality of sexological science to the development of modern sexuality, but scholarship in both queer and black feminist studies has simultaneously critiqued the implicit universalism that inheres in even the idea of “modern sexuality.” What kinds of revisions might these scholarly frameworks demand of us, as we trace the transnational histories of sexological science, and alternately, what might new readings of sexology contribute to histories of race, imperialism, or modernity itself?

Event time: 
Friday, April 20, 2018 - 9:00am