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Reviewed by:
  • The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge by Donna J. Drucker
  • Michael Bronski
The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge. By Donna J. Drucker. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. Pp. 256. $30.00 (paper).

Alfred Kinsey occupies or, perhaps, occupied (none of my students have ever heard of him) a vital, if polarizing, place in the American popular and scientific imagination. His major works, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), were seen at the time, and even now, as attacks on morality and religion, but they radically altered not only how Americans think about sexuality but how, and how much openly, they talk about it.

As the founder of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, Kinsey moved the case study approach of men such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and John Addington Symonds securely into the realm of statistically based scientific methodology. Indeed, the attacks on Kinsey from the late 1940s to the present are often predicated on the charge that his approach to sexual desire and activity was only scientific and that it avoided or eschewed moral judgments. Revered by social progressives and sexual liberationists and loathed by political and religious conservatives, Kinsey continues to be attacked today. In a 2011 column “Sexual Anarchy: The Kinsey Legacy,” the conservative Catholic Culture website accused him of igniting rampant plagues of HIV, pedophilia, divorce, and child sexual abuse in America.1

Donna J. Drucker’s The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge—which won the 2015 Bullough Book Award from the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality—does an excellent job of introducing Kinsey to those unfamiliar with his work, placing him firmly in the scientific realm, and deftly mapping out many of the ramifications of the reception and legacy of his work. There is a wealth of work on Kinsey’s personal and scientific ideas, most recently, James H. Jones’s critical 1997 Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life and Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s 1998 praiseful Sex, the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey, as well as Bill Condon’s lauded 2005 film Kinsey.2 His work is also extensively discussed in contemporary historical and analytical works on the history of sexuality. Much of the recent attention on, and critique of, Kinsey has, regrettably, focused less on his scientific methodology than on aspects of his personal life, including his bisexuality, his varied sexual practices, and his filming of his own and others’ sexual acts as part of his research.

The Classification of Sex, however, is the first book to discuss Kinsey’s unique place in knowledge organization at a specific historical moment. [End Page 520] Drucker notes that “his classification methods produced quantitative knowledge about living … objects at a time in academia when scholars in life and human sciences were moving from qualitative analysis of individual specimens or small groups to large-scale quantitative analysis using machines” (5). Kinsey’s career as an entomologist and taxonomist began in the 1920s with a focus on the gall wasp. By 1936, when The Origin of Higher Categories in Cynips, his final book on the subject, was published, Kinsey had collected, sorted, and studied 7.5 million specimens. His book was considered “the best single source on variation and speciation in natural populations” to date (51). This stage of Kinsey’s work took place at the very moment that the multidisciplinary, highly debated, and profoundly influential concept of evolutionary synthesis—a break from traditional Darwinian and Mendelian concepts of evolution—was emerging. (The term had been coined by 1942 by Julian Huxley in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis.) It is in this context that Kinsey’s next phase of his life work can be best understood. Drucker notes that “one of Kinsey’s earliest and lasting knowledge-making practices was to separate the evidence of a single entity into distinct parts and to record each of the data points individually for later examination and reassembly next to like data” (22).

Kinsey’s work on gall wasps is well...

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