Veronika Fuechtner; Douglas E. Haynes; Ryan M. Jones (Editors). A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960. xiii + 437 pp., notes, index. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. $34.95 (paper). ISBN 9780520293397.

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, this book contends that actors outside of Europe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—became important interlocutors in debates on prostitution, birth control, and transvestism. Ideas circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. This book tackles 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.

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A Global History of Runaways. Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism 1600–1850. Ed. by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum. University of California Press, Oakland (CA)2019. viii, 261 pp. Maps. Ill. $95.00; £78.00. (Paper, E-book: $34.95; £29.00).

International Review of Social History ◽

10.1017/s002085902000022x ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 65 (1) ◽

pp. 151-152

Author(s):

Gad Heuman

Keyword(s):

University Of California ◽

Global History ◽

History Of

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Toward a Global History of Sexual Science: Movements, Networks, and Deployments

Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1960 ◽

10.1525/california/9780520293373.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Veronika Fuechtner ◽

Douglas E. Haynes ◽

Ryan M. Jones

Keyword(s):

Scientific Knowledge ◽

Sexual Difference ◽

Female Orgasm ◽

Male Homosexuality ◽

Global History ◽

Postwar Japan ◽

Sexual Science ◽

Magnus Hirschfeld ◽

History Of

This book examines the various circuits, nodes, and modes that enabled sexual scientific knowledge to spread worldwide. It shows how various actors such as Sueo Iwaya, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Swami Shivananda engaged with sexual science through their writings, as well as sexual science's relationship to modernity. The book suggests that European sexual science was constituted on the basis of conceptions of Others considered outside of “modernity” and that actors outside of Europe contributed to a globalizing sexual science through “unruly appropriations” of the field's emergent ideas. It also discusses the ways that ideas of sexual science circulated multidirectionally through travel, intellectual exchange, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. Essays written by historians, historians of science, anthropologists, and humanities scholars cover topics ranging from male homosexuality and female prostitution to the secularization of Christian marriage, popular sexology in early postwar Japan, the science of sexual difference, and female orgasm.

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