KränkungandErkrankung: Sexual Trauma before 1895

A tropology of moral injury and corruption long framed the plight of the sex crime victim. Nineteenth-century psychiatric acknowledgment of adverse sexual experience reflected general trends in etiological thought, especially on ‘epileptic’ and hysteric seizures, but on the whole remained descriptive, guarded and limited. Various experiential threats to the modern sexual self beyond assault and rape were granted etiological significance, however: illegitimate motherhood, masturbatory guilt, sexual enlightenment, ‘homosexual seduction’ and chance encounters leading to fetishistic fixation. These minor early appeals to medical psychology help us appreciate the multiple nuances of ‘sexual trauma’ advanced in Breuer and Freud’sStudies on Hysteria(1895) and Freud’s subsequent work.

A Small Business of Sexual Enlightenment: Zhang Jingsheng’s “Beauty Bookshop”, Shanghai 1927-1929

This paper addresses the history and historiography of sexual knowledge during the May Fourth New Culture Movement (ca. 1910s-1930s) in China. Chinese intellectuals engaged in an ambitious project to build a “New Culture”, translating and appropriating a wide range of foreign ideas including European and American works on sexology, reproduction, and eugenics. I focus on “Dr Sex”, Zhang Jingsheng (1888-1970), well-known for his 1926 publication Sex Histories. Zhang wanted to introduce the scientific study of sex to China and to overthrow what he regarded as repressive Chinese traditions. Between 1927 and 1929, Zhang operated the “Beauty Bookshop” in Fuzhou Road, Shanghai’s “cultural street”, to disseminate his writings and translations. He also published a short-lived journal called New Culture, which carried articles on politics, aesthetics, and most interestingly, readers’ inquiries on sexual and reproductive practices. The case study on Zhang Jingsheng’s “small business of sexual enlightenment”––to adapt a term from Leo Ou-fan Lee (in turn borrowed from Robert Darnton)––sheds light on local entrepreneurial and commercial dynamics in the publishing field of 1920s Shanghai that were crucial to the distribution of knowledge. It also offers an opportunity to see how China’s urban, bourgeois, educated readers engaged with modern medico-scientific knowledge.

Anxiety ( continued )

Chapter 13 of Clinical Notes on Disorders of Childhood. In this chapter, Winnicott comments on the roles of the child’s doctor and of the child’s parents in the gestation and treatment of anxiety disorders, making particular reference to the sexual enlightenment of the child.

What Is an Enlightenment Film?Cinema and the Rhetoric of Social Hygiene in Interwar Germany

This paper examines the discursive production of risk and its management in the German “enlightenment film” of the interwar period. From the sexual enlightenment films of the immediate postwar era to the Nazi-era sterilization films, public health campaigns mobilized new ideas about hygiene and the new resources of the mass media. Depicting a world composed of discrete risks (venereal disease, hereditary illness), on the one hand, and supplying information on how to manage such risks, on the other, public officials and experts invested considerable resources in this project of public education. Yet insofar as this project addressed controversial aspects of human behavior, and often proposed controversial solutions, this campaign of state-sponsored enlightenment remained an ambivalent one. Particularly in campaigns against venereal disease, leading advocates were frequently drawn into debates both about film's value as medium of mass instruction and the nature of the public they sought to address, a public perceived in fundamental ways as “at risk.” Their efforts routinely provoked charges that enlightenment films on sexual conduct could incite the very behaviors they strove to warn audiences against. By the end of the 1920s, the hopes placed in public enlightenment campaigns seemed to have waned. And yet the enlightenment film underwent a significant revival during the Nazi era. The paper concludes by examining the interconnections between the Nazis' reconceptualization of public enlightenment, risk, and strategies for managing it.