Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science

Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science

Author: Roy Porter

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1994-09

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780521448918

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This volume is about those who have investigated sex from antiquity to the present day.


A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960

A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960

Author: Veronika Fuechtner

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 0520293398

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Sex has no history, but sexual science does. Starting in the late nineteenth century, scholars and activists all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists influenced their German, British and American counterparts, and vice versa, sexuality, modernity, and imaginings of exotified “Others” became intimately linked. The first anthology to provide a worldwide perspective on the birth and development of the field, A Global History of Sexual Science contends that actors outside of Europe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—became important interlocutors in debates on prostitution, birth control or transvestitism. Ideas circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. Twenty scholars tackle specific issues, including the female orgasm and the criminalization of male homosexuality, to demonstrate how concepts and ideas introduced by sexual scientists gained currency throughout the modern world.


Sexual Science and the Law

Sexual Science and the Law

Author: Richard Green

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780674802681

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A rape victim charges that pornography caused her attacker to become a sex offender. A lesbian mother fights for custody of her child. A transsexual pilot is fired by a commercial airline after undergoing sex change and sues for sex discrimination. A homosexual is denied employment because of sexual orientation. A woman argues that her criminal behavior should be excused because she suffers from premenstrual syndrome. The law has much to say about sexual behavior, but what it says is rarely influenced by the findings of social science research over recent decades. This book focuses for the first time on the dynamic interplay between sexual science and legal decisionmaking. Reflecting the author's wide experience as a respected sex researcher, expert witness, and lawyer, Sexual Science and the Law provides valuable insights into some of the most controversial social and sexual topics of our time. Drawing on an exhaustive knowledge of the relevant research and citing extensively from case law and court transcripts, Richard Green demonstrates how the work of sexual science could bring about a transformation in jurisprudence, informing the courts in their deliberations on issues such as sexual privacy, homosexuality, prostitution, abortion, pornography, and sexual abuse. In each case he considers, Green shows how the law has been shaped by social science or impoverished by reliance on conjecture and received wisdom. He examines the role of sexual science in legal controversy, its analysis of human motivation and behavior, and its use by the courts in determining the relative weight to be given the desires of the individual, the standards of society, and the power of the state in limiting sexual autonomy. Unprecedented in its portrayal of sexuality in a legal context, this scholarly but readable book will interest and educate professional and layperson alike--those lawyers, judges, sex educators, therapists, patients, and citizens who find themselves standing nonplussed at the meeting place of morality and behavior.


Sexual Knowledge

Sexual Knowledge

Author: Britta McEwen

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0857453386

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Vienna’s unique intellectual, political, and religious traditions had a powerful impact on the transformation of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century. Whereas turn-of-the-century sexology, as practiced in Vienna as a medical science, sought to classify and heal individuals, during the interwar years, sexual knowledge was employed by a variety of actors to heal the social body: the truncated, diseased, and impoverished population of the newly created Republic of Austria. Based on rich source material, this book charts cultural changes that are hallmarks of the modern era, such as the rise of the companionate marriage, the role of expert advice in intimate matters, and the body as a source of pleasure and anxiety. These changes are evidence of a dramatic shift in attitudes from a form of scientific inquiry largely practiced by medical specialists to a social reform movement led by and intended for a wider audience that included workers, women, and children.


Sexual Politics and Feminist Science

Sexual Politics and Feminist Science

Author: Kirsten Leng

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-02-15

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1501713248

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Introduction : women and sexology : knowledge, possibilities, and problematic legacies -- The emergence of sexology in early twentieth century Germany -- As natural as eating, drinking, and sleeping : redefining the female sex -- Challenging the limits of sex : envisioning new gendered subjectivities and sexualities -- Troubling normal, taking on patriarchy : criticizing male (hetero)sexuality -- The erotics of racial regeneration : eugenics, maternity, and sexual -- New social and moral values will have to prevail : negotiating crisis and opportunity in the First World War -- Fluid gender, rigid sexuality : constrained potential in the post-war period


Sexual Science

Sexual Science

Author: Cynthia Russett

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1991-03-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0674043022

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One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry. The spectacle presented, in Cynthia Russett's splendid book, of nineteenth-century white male scientists and thinkers earnestly trying to prove women inferior to men--thereby providing, along with "savages" and "idiots," an evolutionary buffer between men and animals--is by turns appalling, amusing, and saddening. Surveying the work of real scientists as well as the products of more dubious minds, Russett has produced a learned yet immensely enjoyable chapter in the annals of human folly. At the turn of the century science was successfully challenging the social authority of religion; scientists wielded a power no other group commanded. Unfortunately, as Russett demonstrates, in Victorian sexual science, empiricism tangled with prior belief, and scientists' delineation of the mental and physical differences between men and women was directed to show how and why women were inferior to men. These men were not necessarily misogynists. This was an unsettling time, when the social order was threatened by wars, fierce economic competition, racial and industrial conflict, and the failure of society to ameliorate poverty, vice, crime, illnesses. Just when men needed the psychic lift an adoring dependent woman could give, she was demanding the vote, higher education, and the opportunity to become a wage earner! No other work has treated this provocative topic so completely, nor have the various scientific theories used to marshal evidence of women's inferiority been so thoroughly delineated and debunked. Erudite enough for scholars in the history of science, intellectual history, and the history of women, this book with its stylish presentation will also attract a large nonspecialist audience.


The Facts of Life

The Facts of Life

Author: Roy Porter

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 9780300062212

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This remarkable study presents the first detailed and scholarly analysis of the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain. Surveying the period between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, it examines the major texts which established and authorised sexual knowledge and sexual practices. Porter and Hall then explore the various kinds of backgroundssexual, moral, religious, scientific, medical, domestic, social and cultural - without which these texts are unintelligible. And they examine their authors (some famous, some obscure, some anonymous), their careers, and the motives for involvement in medico-moral campaigns that were often thought unsavoury and commonly led to criticism and censure. The Facts of Life also assesses the wider impact of the publication of sexual knowledge and especially of sex advice literature, and explores the interplay between expertise, therapy, social mores and behaviour. Chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries discuss prostitution, contagious diseases and gender relations, and consider debates on sexual issues and associated revelations of personal experience.


The Catholic Church and Modern Sexual Knowledge, 1850-1950

The Catholic Church and Modern Sexual Knowledge, 1850-1950

Author: Lucia Pozzi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-09-24

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 3030797864

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This book is the first to present a comprehensive historical picture of the modern Catholic concern with the body and sexuality. The Catholic church is commonly believed to have always opposed birth control and abortion throughout the centuries. Yet the Catholic encounter with modern sexuality has a more complex and interesting history. What was the meaning of sexual purity? Why did eugenics matter to Catholicism? How did the Society of Jesus interpret the idea of overpopulation? Why did Pius XI decide to issue the notorious encyclical Casti connubii on Christian marriage – the first modern papal pronouncement on birth control, abortion, and eugenics? In answering these questions, Lucia Pozzi uncovers new archival and unpublished records to dig into Catholic responses to modern sexual knowledge, showing the Catholic church at times resisting, but also often welcoming, scientific modernity.