Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900-1933
Kirsten Leng
Abstract
Sexual Politics and Feminist Science examines German-speaking women’s heretofore-neglected contributions to the rethinking of sex, gender, and sexuality taking place within sexology between 1900 and 1933. At a time when sex and gender were sites of intense political contestation, women engaged with new medico-scientific paradigms for understanding sex in order to theorize bodies, drives, and desires in ways that challenged the status quo, refuted misogynistic scientific pronouncements, and imagined new possibilities for gendered and sexual subjectivities. While pointing out sexology’s empoweri ... More
Sexual Politics and Feminist Science examines German-speaking women’s heretofore-neglected contributions to the rethinking of sex, gender, and sexuality taking place within sexology between 1900 and 1933. At a time when sex and gender were sites of intense political contestation, women engaged with new medico-scientific paradigms for understanding sex in order to theorize bodies, drives, and desires in ways that challenged the status quo, refuted misogynistic scientific pronouncements, and imagined new possibilities for gendered and sexual subjectivities. While pointing out sexology’s empowering feminist potential, Sexual Politics and Feminist Science also explores the ways in which women’s efforts to understand sex through science were laced with cognitive biases and sociological prejudices that ultimately circumscribed the transformative potential of their ideas. Sexual Politics and Feminist Science thus seeks to excavate the full range of sexology’s discursive effects and contend with the complex legacy of women’s scientized sexual theories.
Keywords:
Sexology,
Feminism,
Germany,
Sexual Politics,
History of Sexuality,
History of Gender
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501709302 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: September 2018 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501709302.001.0001 |
