A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960 ed. by Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan M. Jones (review)

This book is a much-needed intervention in the field of sexuality studies. It constitutes a rich, multilayered resource for any scholar or student interested in the late nineteenth-century emergence of "sexual science" and its powerful trajectory over the first half of the twentieth century. As the editors point out, a knowledge of this trajectory is vital for both a chronological and historically contextualized, deep understanding of contemporary sexuality studies, as well as for research on sexual rights–based activism and politics (21).

Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan M. Jones disentangle some often-misunderstood key terminology in their (highly teachable) introduction. They acknowledge the manifold interdisciplinary practices that were historically subsumed under the term Sexualwissenschaft (sexual science), as well as the fact that many of these sites of sexual science—endocrinology, physiology, psychoanalysis, psychology, anthropology, and so on—did not necessarily engage in collaborative or synthesized knowledge production. The term overlaps with, yet is distinct from, the later term "sexology," which gained more traction within a medicoclinical context (5). Despite this disambiguation, there has been significant interchangeable use of both terms in scholarship.¹ The editors also point out that in spite of its interdisciplinarity and vast impact on modern cultural and social history, sexual science is no longer a "formal field" in European and North American universities. This observation invites important questions about the evolution of "sexual science," via "sexology," toward the origin and role of contemporary gender and sexuality studies as we know it, warranting further (self-)reflection and investigation. One might argue that the institutional(ized) fragmentation of today's "sexual science" across disciplines is only partially remedied by the existence of humanities- and social science–dominated centers / programs / departments of women's / gender / sexuality studies, important as they are. This continued fragmentation and its implications for researching both sexualities and discourses on sexualities can perhaps only be fully understood and meaningfully interrogated against a historical backdrop, such as the one explored in this seminal book.

Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones make a convincing and timely case for the necessity of a truly "global turn" in the study of the history of sexual science and sexuality (9).² Their key argument is that the "traveling culture" of sexual science has never been sufficiently situated within the global history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nor have many of the global, multidisciplinary processes that were crucial to the formation of this discipline been adequately studied. This is especially true for the geographical and sociocultural sites of what some today call the "Global South." The editors argue that rather than being the homogeneous, European American–dominated discourse that scholars often describe, the development of sexual science was a highly interactive process, involving multidirectional flows of knowledge and many more, lesser-known agents and interlocutors from places like Asia, Latin America, and Africa.³ This innovative argument serves to unsettle familiar conceptions of "Otherness" that helped shape notions of European sexuality and modernity at large, especially within the colonial context.⁴ This, then, immediately renders sexual science an inherently global enterprise no longer woefully limited by national frames (3).

Two prominent examples of scholarship that shares this perspective of a global turn are repeatedly engaged with in the volume: Howard Chiang's work on sexuality in twentieth-century China, in which he describes the "double alterity" of sexual science, linking the post-Saidian importance given to Orientalist discourses to Foucauldian medical sexology; and Heike Bauer's edited volume Sexology and Translation, which traces the shaping of sexuality-related scientific practices within a time frame similar to that of the present volume.⁵ An important side note in the editors' introduction alerts the reader to the fact that numerous key agents from the era whose...