How to Do the History of Sexual Science

Abstract

This introduction maps the ways in which sexual scientific thought circulated during the fin de siècle, tracing the interconnections between and breaks in the global circuits of sexological thought and how this circuitry continues to structure sexuality in the present. In so doing, Kahan and LaFleur position their approach and that of the special issue as a whole within the larger field of sexology, placing it in more robust dialogue with sexuality studies and attending in particular to sexology's racial and imperial logics. They examine the ways in which racial science and colonial knowledge constitute sexual science as an amorphous object, one with a problematically vast reach that contributes to contemporary understandings of racialization and undergirding colonial infrastructures. And yet, they argue, sexual science is not something that can be wished away or easily left behind, for its taxonomies and ways of knowing continue to structure identitarian frameworks of gender and sexuality.