Time for Sex

This chapter examines attempts to standardize, internalize, and globalize sexual temporality—captured in the conceptualization of the body as clock—in the sexological advice offered to men and women in India in the early twentieth century. It first describes the constitution of “Hindu erotica” during the period and how these English translations gave rise to a set of foundational texts that would become the basis of global/Hindu sexology while filling them up with clock time. It then considers the ways that these texts attached life cycles to the chronological ordering of time by recasting brahmacharya—a prescription for a stage of life devoted to celibacy and learning—as an age-stratified organization of sexual behavior and a schema for sex education. By using the example of bodily temporality, the chapter addresses questions of sexuality and space in relation to globalization and transnational capitalism, colonialism and development.

Mexican Sexology and Male Homosexuality

This chapter examines the development of Mexican sexual science and its relationship to homosexuality during the period 1860–1957 by focusing on the murder trial of a merchant named Margarito. It first considers the sexological, criminological, and ideological genealogies that Margarito's case and similar cases brought to the fore before discussing sex reassignment surgery as a supposed “cure” for homosexuality and as a “solution” that demonstrated both the body's importance and the preeminence of modern science in restructuring that body to fit national aims and cultural sensibilities. It also describes the inherent eclecticism of Mexican sexology as a deliberate praxis that gave rise to a specific form of knowledge useful in disciplining sexual deviance. The chapter suggests that Margarito's case was a key example of the “Freudianization” and “Lombrosianization” of Mexican sexology as local jurists drew upon sexual science to selectively appeal to assumed universals.

“Tyranny of Orgasm”

This chapter examines the global governance of sexuality from the 1930s to the 1950s through a close textual reading of the discussions on female orgasms in the International Journal of Sexology (IJS), issued from Bombay between August 1947 and August 1955, with A. P. Pillay as editor in chief. The IJS featured views by contributors from India, Europe, and the United States about the “authenticity, normality, abnormality, of women's orgasms.” While some participants were sexual scientists, the public, especially women themselves, also shared their opinions in the form of letters and commentary. The chapter considers some of the issues addressed in the IJS in relation to female orgasm, including women's frigidity, pregnancy, female sterility, and miscarriage. It shows that the story of sexology was a global rather than an exclusively modern “Western” scientific enterprise.

Latin Eugenics and Sexual Knowledge in Italy, Spain, and Argentina

This chapter explores how a specific kind of sexology emerged and spread worldwide during the interwar period. Focusing on Italy, Spain, and Argentina, it shows how southern Europe and Latin America developed an active exchange of sexual knowledge. It first considers the strong internationalism of sexology and eugenics before discussing the views of a small sample of Latin eugenicists on sexuality in its relation to male homosexuality. It then describes how a Latin circuit that originated in Italy enabled the movement of shared scientific traditions such as biotypology, Lamarckianism, and criminal anthropology among medical communities associated with Latin eugenics. It also examines how criminal anthropology stood at the beginning of a particular “Latin” version of sexual science that incorporated insights from southern European endocrinology and eugenics, and thus could ultimately be put into the service of fascist Italy—for example, by the Italian scientist and eugenicist Nicola Pende.

The Science of Sexual Difference

This chapter examines theories of male–female difference and female identity in Japan by focusing on the intersection of sexology and feminism in the country during the early twentieth century. In particular, it shows how sexologist Ogura Seizaburō and feminist Hiratsuka Raichō drew upon European conceptions of sexual difference, especially those developed by Havelock Ellis, to proffer new ideas about female characteristics and sexuality. The chapter also offers a fresh perspective on Ogura's contribution to the development of early feminism in Japan and considers how he and Hiratsuka strategically used sexology for their own purposes. It argues that while theories of sexual difference have more often supported a maternalist ideology, their use also served other purposes, such as the prioritizing of sex over racial difference.

The “Ellis Effect”

This chapter examines the tension between claims to universal translatability and practices of unruly or subversive appropriations by focusing on the changing character of a series of translations of Havelock Ellis's work into Chinese during the period 1911–1949. Traces of Ellis's ideas reappeared in the context of rising interest in Republican China in issues of gender differences, sex, and (homo)sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. Ellis's Chinese translators such as Zhou Zuoren, Zhang Jingsheng, and Pan Guangdan adapted his ideas to validate their own perspectives regarding social and sexual reform. The chapter discusses the heterogeneous approaches to and multiform adaptations of Ellis's sexology in Republican China to show how the “Ellis effect” revealed the sociocultural significance of popularizing sexual science and modern sex education.

Understanding R. D. Karve

This chapter examines how global concepts of sexual science were appropriated in western India during the period 1927–1953 by focusing on the case of R. D. Karve, a sexual scientist and birth-control advocate who engaged in an intensely Indian politics of sexuality—that is, the ongoing debates over sexual practices and their relationship to modernity. Karve invoked sexual science to counter nationalist contentions and relied on the iconic European and American figures of sexology to undermine the logic of brahmacharya (sexual self-constraint), a practice believed to be essential to the regeneration of Indian masculinity and the nation. He also argued that the Kamasutra was superior to its ancient counterparts in Europe. The chapter suggests that Karve was highly selective in drawing ideas from European sexual science that served his iconoclastic critique of the place of religion in Indian society.

Sexology in the Southwest

This chapter examines how state power and sexual science converged in German Southwest Africa during the early twentieth century by focusing on the case of Victor van Alten. Between 1904 and 1906, van Alten, a German colonist, was tried three times for “indecent conduct contrary to nature” after making sexual assaults on several African men in colonial Southwest Africa. His story offers important insights into the legal terrain for male homosexuality in the German-speaking world and foreshadows the impact that influential sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Carl Westphal would have worldwide. The chapter first provides a background on paragraphs 175 and 51 of the German Penal Code before discussing how the van Alten case cast light on some of the common assumptions about liberal progress in the histories of sexology, science, and medicine, as well as the relationship of these disciplines to genocide, racism, and colonialism.

Westermarck’s Morocco

This chapter examines the role played by Edward Westermarck, a Finnish/British scholar who was considered the world's leading authority on sexual “morality and marriage,” in the disciplinary transition from the ethnocentrism of Darwinian anthropology to cultural relativism. Westermarck wrote extensively on Morocco and expressed his views based on emerging conceptions of anthropology that sometimes challenged earlier imperial tenets. The chapter analyzes Westermarck's scholarship, particularly his sexual anthropology, in the context of parallel epistemic crises in the disciplines of anthropology and sexual science. It also discusses Westermarck's Moroccan anthropology of homosexuality and argues that it was contradictory. Finally, it looks at the emergence of a new relativist epistemology, first in European sexual science and later in British cultural anthropology, and shows how the integration of anthropology with sexual science gave rise to a more interdisciplinary, less medical view of sexuality.

Global Modernity and Sexual Science

This chapter examines how the social history of urbanization influenced the emergence of sexual science by focusing on the case of male homosexuality and female prostitution during the period 1850–1950. It first considers the notions of sexual chaos and order that emerged within nineteenth-century anthropology and how they were related to urbanization, with an emphasis on the case of Buenos Aires. It then discusses some aspects of the global history of transportation and urbanization and how it affected prostitution and homosexuality in different parts of the world. It also explores the simultaneous emergence and similarity of the so-called cities of sin and how they became incubators of a sexual science in which the evolution or devolution of human society was debated in sexual terms and described as a fact of daily life. The chapter suggests that “civilization encourages prostitution” as the sexual drive is increasingly put under control.