Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters across the Modern World ed. by Heike Bauer (review)

This welcome volume explores the intersections between sexology, translation, and modernity, and the provocative notion of "translation as invention" lies at the volume's heart. The focus on translation—"the dynamic process by which ideas are produced and transmitted" (2)—enables the authors to move beyond medicoforensic studies of sexology in favor of examining the history of this discipline within cultural, political, and geographical contexts. The volume's contributors aim to revise notions that "sexuality" and sexology itself were Western constructs disseminated from imperial cores. Instead, they argue that sexual ideas were formed in complex cultural negotiations in multiple, contemporaneous sites through multidirectional movements of ideas and people "across the modern world," a phrase used explicitly instead of "global" or "transnational." The result is a series of historical, theoretical vignettes exploring movements that produced sexual knowledge and modernity itself "across" local, national, and global scales and between scholars, writers, pundits, and the public. The volume uses this notion of moving "across" to eschew political debates surrounding the term "queer" while also invoking the term's praxis of "reading against the grain," in this case, through an exploration of multiple sexological texts. The authors largely succeed in this aim, and their contributions are organized into three sections—"Conceptualizations," "Formations," and "Dis/Identifications"—each of which includes first-rate scholarship. Some essays offer new insights into familiar figures, for example, Magnus Hirschfeld, Charles Darwin, and Edward Carpenter, as well as terminological translation, such as in Peter Cryles's examination of nineteenth-century neologisms derived from Greek and Latin. Overall, six essays focus on Western Europe and North America and six on China, Russia, Peru, Japan, and the Middle East. This review focuses on these latter essays due to their novelty.

All six authors explore sexology in translation as part of nation building and nonnormative identity/community invention. Michiko Suzuki and Jennifer Fraser both show how women played critical roles in shaping sexology, a field long framed as dominated by men. Suzuki's essay is one of the volume's best. She reminds us that the movement of "texts, terms, and ideas around the globe . . . is a story of unexpected and unforeseen events" (195). In Japan, women translated Carpenter's writings and invoked his international reputation to deploy selective translations of his arguments on same-sex relations between men in order to advance their own positive version of same-sex love between women. Eschewing earlier sexological terms and their associated negative meanings, these women advanced instead the term Chūsei—an intermediate/neutral sex. Fraser, in turn, demonstrates how women novelists shaped Peruvian sexology by providing culturally relevant, influential alternatives to male-dominated scientific writing. Through these novels, women claimed scientific authority to speak on nonnormative desires, they introduced sexology into the homes of a wide audience, and they made new claims to citizenship previously only defined by and for men. As a Latin Americanist, I find Fraser's claim that Peru's sexual science emerged from positivism rather than medicoforensic sexual science a bit dubious because it suggests that the two were separate rather than mutually constitutive.

Howard Chiang and Leon Antonio Rocha tackle Chinese sexologies. Chiang is committed to the notion of Foucauldian "rupture," an epistemic break before which modern (homo)sexuality did not exist and after which appeared the "psychiatric style of reasoning" that defined it. As he shows in his reading of The Carnal Prayer Mat, the condemnation of same-sex behaviors in China as homosexual only became possible after this rupture. Chiang thus argues for a temporal, rather than geographical, version of Foucauldian epistemic breaks. Rocha, on the other hand, shows how sexologist Ye Dehui claimed that Western sexology was "old news from afar" and created a local version based on classic sources in Japanese texts; his sexology became the ars erotica Foucault popularized (and misread as authentic) as the counterpart to Western sexual science...