In the first of a 2-part series, Claudia Sterbini and Ash Jayamohan reevaluate the historical and contemporary landscape of sexology and its objects
When we first met, collaboration seemed unlikely. Claudia’s research on nonsexual pathology and fin de siècle medical texts seemed, at first blush, distinct from Ash’s work on epistemic ‘pressure’ and queer embodiment in modernist writing. Yet, despite our differences in fields and methods, we soon found that our discussions kept returning to the remits, objects, and legacies of theorising sexuality at the turn of the century. Our research projects shared an interest in sexual pathologisation, from the separate viewpoints of, respectively, the clinician and the ordinary observer. ‘Fin de Sexe?: A Symposium of Sexuality’ was thus born, first as a conversation and then in practice, held on 27 June 2024 at the University of Edinburgh.
In the call for papers, we settled on the word ‘sexology’ to describe, broadly, the work of sexual theorisation at the fin de siècle. Yet we discovered that the term was not without its troubles. There seemed to be a reticence in the humanities in using the term ‘sexology’ to make sense of the texts, archives, and various other objects that ‘made’ and continue to ‘make’ the modern sexual(ised) body. Could it be the intimidating (pseudo-)scientific baggage of the ‘-ology’? Could it be that sexology is still assumed to revolve around a definitive canon of male Western clinicians from the late nineteenth century? Could it be that this understanding of sexology simply has too little to offer us today? In other words, “why sexology, why now?”
Why sexology now?
Kadji Amin (2023) has recently argued that the current proliferation of micro-labels (e.g. asexual, aromantic, demi- or agender) recalls an older, dangerous epistemological project: that of Western fin de siècle sexologists working to categorise human desires and embodiments. We disagree with Amin’s claim that these newer sexual typologies necessarily iterate the violent logics of fin de siècle sexual and racial classification. Nonetheless, the article, and its many responses, identifies not only the depth of our continued fascination with sexual categorisation (Lubin & Vaccaro 2021), but also the ways in which contemporary discussions seem haunted by too-neat stories of the genesis of sexology. In these stories, now well-discredited (Kahan & LaFleur 2023), sexology is positioned as a unified and consolidated regime of knowledge, driven by the consensus of a circle of Western male medical professionals.
We wish to continue complicating the history of sexuality by returning to fin de siècle sexology in a more expansive way. Our interest lies in interrogating the very ‘object’ of sexology: first, by situating less-evidently sexological ‘things’ within the field’s remit, dismissing the idea of a preconceived canon; secondly, by reinterpreting sexology’s object of study as being not ‘sexuality’, but the desire to read sexuality. We understand sexuality – here, in its confluence with race – as sexology’s lost object.
The ‘thing’(s) of sexology
Recent criticism has examined the ways in which the sexological ‘canon’ works aesthetically in its construction of the sexual(ised) patient, reading sexological documents as engaging with rhetorical, visual, and affective strategies in their representation of sexual pathologies (see Lang, Damousi & Lewis 2017; Schuller 2017; Yao 2021). By ‘canon’, we mean the first-generation sexological works by recognised clinicians, particularly from Germany (e.g. Karl Heinrich Ulrich and Magnus Hirschfeld), as well as pseudo-medical writers from the United Kingdom (e.g. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds). This research has thrown into question sexology’s claims to the scientific method, and locates the ‘sexual sciences’, and their taxonomising impulses, less within the medical than within the humanities. Essential work continues to be done to reconsider sexology’s canonical texts in this light (see Fisher & Funke 2015; Prestell 2023).
However, understanding sexology as a medical-humanities endeavour also prompts us to destabilise our own attachment to the canon. It foregrounds how what we understand to be the sexological canon has always co-produced its sexual categories together with literature, visual culture, photography, and the arts more broadly. As Kahan and LaFleur argue, ‘Sexology is a shattered object that was never whole’ (2023, p. 1), and its fragments are things that are polymorphous and multidisciplinary.
We understand the fragments that ‘made’ the sexual(ised) patient as a mosaic of photographs, art pieces, canonical texts, medical articles, novels, and, crucially, patient-oriented life writing. The term ‘sexology’ loosens as we begin accounting for how multiple, sometimes unexpected cultural ephemera – or, simply, things – actively contributed to the categories we continue to employ. Most importantly, by releasing sexology from the constraints of the traditional medical archive, we open ourselves to being challenged by the abundant, and yet erased, sexological objects produced in, say, the Global South, or by vernacular Black sexologies (Gupta 2020; Stone 2023).
It follows that the things of this shattered object do not ‘make’ sexology, but are sexology.
Sexology’s fragments were pervasive. Their proliferation through an array of supposedly separate fields gave rise to the sexological climate that characterises the turn of the century. It is for this reason that texts from the period that may not be so explicitly sexological or medical in nature can be read as working within this broader climate, alert as they are to forms of sexual pathologisation and contemporaneous systems of observation and diagnosis. The ways of thinking about sexuality formulated by these artistic and (pseudo)scientific products reverberate to this day, explaining what we previously identified as our continued fascination with sexual categorisation.
We continue this discussion of the things that fragment sexology in our upcoming article on clinical photography.
Sexology’s lost object
Our symposium sought to loosensexology by troubling its most cherished object: sexuality. In particular, we take a step back to understand the object of sexology not as sexuality but, in fact, the desire to read sexuality.
By this, we mean to emphasise that sexology does not simply attempt to ‘observe’ sexual practices. Rather, it can appear, at every turn, to invent a ‘sexuality’ in a Foucauldian sense: one that can then be found, in order to be monitored, hierarchised, moralised, and so on. Building on Foucault and his readers, we spotlight the conflictual, processual nature of this ‘invention’, and the proliferation of categories instead of their institutionalisation. Sexuality, as sexology’s object-to-be-found – that is, its ‘lost’ object – is what compels the period’s fervent cataloging, categorising, taxonomising, and nosological impulses. These interpretative impulses coalesce and clash in sexological writing, producing sexual pathologies and taxonomies that are paradoxical, overlapping, and unfixed. The (pseudo-)medical language of case studies, for example, reveals always idiosyncratic discrepancies and slippages (see Somerville 2000).
Underscoring the ‘desire to read sexuality’ is an interpretative move that foregrounds how ‘sexuality’, as it has been categorised and continues to be categorised, will always escape the boundaries of its terms. This provisional quality of sexology’s sexuality has been explored in a variety of contemporary queer theory and medical humanities texts (e.g. Seitler 2004; Kahan 2019). This research seeks to destabilise the primacy of the diagnosis and to reveal the long-lasting legacies of contested fin de siècle sexual labels that were much less fixed than they may now appear (e.g., bisexuality, lesbian, homosexuality). Similarly, returning to the minutiae of now-lost but nevertheless prominent terminology (e.g., third sex, onanism, sexual anesthesia) can question the hegemony of certain inherited categories. All this helps to critically account for how some sexual taxonomies gained speed, despite or even because of their contradictions; why some slowly evolved or quickly vanished; and why some sexual labels, more than others, linger to this day.
This critical perspective centers, above all, the structural violence through which sexology found its lost object: that is, through the objectification of colonised peoples. It returns us to a brutal history of bodies, relations, and interiorities violently managed through experimentation and systematisation. These historical peoples were thus reduced to flesh, simultaneously used to perpetuate an imperialist project that required sexual difference to be ontologised in racial terms (Spillers 1897; Snorton 2017; Gill-Peterson 2018). The clinic, the colony, the prison, the slave ship, and (always) the page and the photograph become essentially fin de siècle spaces that co-produce race with sexuality. In these spaces, and through these violences, medical-sexual taxonomies emerged inextricably from a desire to read the sexuality of Black, Indigenous, and other minoritised populations as “disorganized” (Macharia 2020) against a White sexuality that could be more easily taxonomised (see Somerville 2000; Snorton 2017; Stone 2023).
Therefore, the lost object that is sexuality depends on finding the object that is race. But sexology is a ‘grasping’ endeavour, insistently searching for further alterities for its own survival: class, caste, non-sexuality, the more-than-human …Thinking about sexology’s desire to read sexuality in this way invites us to sit with what the discipline has amassed, discarded, and abjected more broadly in the name of preserving its object(s). What remains essential is expanded research on what has been left outside of ‘human sexuality’ in order to mount its façade of stability. This is not to continue reifying them as absences, but to allow the very construction of these exclusions to undermine assumptions of medical objectivity and to inform a more holistic approach to the history of sexual categorisation.
Why not sexology?
As part of this reevaluation of sexology’s objects and objectives, we join a growing scholarly landscape committed to interrogating the sexual terms and categories we employ in research today. This scholarship draws attention to a century’s worth of attempts at stabilising, through paradox and violence, the lost object at the heart of the sexological project.
Expanding the discipline ‘sexology’ to include an array of other cultural objects from across the globe, works alongside what we identified as the desire to read sexuality. They both destabilise the ‘sexual sciences’, revealing it as fluid in terms of its disciplinary boundaries and promiscuous in search of its lost object. To see sexology in these capacious and cross-disciplinary terms will be central to sexuality studies and, certainly, to our own practice.
We are in the process of finalising a collection of essays on ‘the objects and objectives of sexology’, loosely based on the topics discussed in this article series. If you are interested in participating in the collection, please email us about your work at findesexe@gmail.com.
About the authors
Claudia Sterbini is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Her project, funded by AHRC through SGSAH, explores the construction of pathological asexuality in Victorian fiction. She has published on the challenges of medical humanities methods in The Polyphony and organised workshops on methodology exchange. As Medical Humanities Project Assistant, she has helped revive the Edinburgh Health and Medical Humanities Network. She tweets at @ClaudiaSterbini.
Ash Jayamohan is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Their research, supported by the University’s Global Research Scholarship, explores the queer aesthetics of the ‘grasp’ in modernist writing. They tweet at @ajayamoh.
References
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