Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, and: Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (review)

Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds. Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. x + 236 pp. $40.00 (cloth), $18.00 (paperbound); £31.95 (cloth), £14.50 (paperbound). Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds. Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xv + 261 pp. $45.00 (cloth), $18.00 (paperbound); £35.95 (cloth), £14.50 (paperbound).

This brace of books should be welcomed by anyone interested in the study of sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. One is a collection of "the documents of sexual science." The other is a set of essays drawing on these documents (and others) to examine from many perspectives the body of work called sexology, and to trace its cultural meanings. The focus here is on England, which, with Germany and Austria, seems to have been particularly rich in this field of study.

Beginning around the 1880s, scientists and medical men undertook a systematic examination of the types of sexual practices they were discovering--sometimes in the patient-doctor relationship, sometimes through interviews. They hoped, with the aid of their case studies, to develop theories that would make sense of the varieties of sexual behavior. It was a goal of the new sexology to remove sexuality from the realm of moral judgment and to place it firmly in the realm of science. To that end, despite the reservations of some sexual reformers--"[H]ow can one classify and label the different kinds of love!" wrote Kate Salt to Edward Carpenter (Sexology in Culture, p. 39)--men like the Austrian Richard Krafft-Ebing and England's Havelock Ellis worked to tabulate and classify the forms of sexual expression and their attendant psychologies.

Subsequent attitudes toward the work of the sexologists have followed a trajectory seen in other movements billed as liberatory and modernizing: first, general praise for breaking new ground; then, on closer scrutiny, harsh criticism of some of the implications of the new ideas. In this case, there is evidence that a great many intellectuals, feminists, social reformers, and others welcomed these studies of sexuality as finally throwing off the veil of Victorian propriety about sex. So fundamental an aspect of human life, they felt, needed to be examined in the light of new scientific knowledge in biology, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. For those who did not fit the respectable married heterosexual norm, the findings of sexology promised to identify and explain their deep, perhaps only half-understood, longings and desires. At last one could speak and write about things hitherto unmentionable in public.

More recently, the work of the sexologists has been subjected to a skeptical, even hostile, second look. This has come especially from those in gay and lesbian studies, who have sharply rejected the kind of categorizing and labeling that was so characteristic of turn-of-the-century writing about sexuality. Havelock Ellis's term for homosexuality, inversion, was, to be sure, intended as a neutral term, but the medicalization of homosexuality all too often moved toward branding it as pathological. In any case, this viewpoint has argued, categorizing tends to suggest a greater certitude and stability in the categories than is warranted.

Against this background what is particularly refreshing about these two books is their refusal to offer either praise or blame unreservedly. It is easy to reject the uncritical enthusiasm of those who saw in sexology simply the first brave strike for sexual liberation. Havelock Ellis, for example, has long been taken to task for his ambivalence about feminism; wishing to seem wholly modern, he yet saw women's central function as reproduction. But the gay and lesbian challenge is much more sophisticated, and its tempering in these volumes is perhaps their most interesting aspect. It is important, after all, to remember that however confused...