Medicalization Of Sexuality Research Articles

Disorders of Desire: Sex and Gender in Modern American Sexology (Revised and Expanded Form)

At the 2005 IASSAC conference, Irvine commented that if she were to write this book today she would approach her study of sex and gender in modern American sexology quite differently. Of course, few would write the same book twice, but Irvine was speaking directly to the shared sense of panic and despair U.S. scholars and activists expressed as they watched precious gains made in the 1970s and 1980s disappear faster than forces can be mobilized against the current assault on sexual rights and freedoms. As she remarks in the Afterword, critiques from the left were drowned out by the tidal wave of criticism from the right. Irvine’s comments were an apt reminder that whether we are constructing it, treating it, or writing about it, sex is politically charged territory where everyone has a position. Fortunately, the publisher recognizes that this volume’s sociohistorical analysis of modern American sexology is as relevant to readers today as it was when first released in 1990 (see Turner, 1992). Reissued in expanded form, the returning reader is offered additional material in the form of a short preface, Chapter 7 (which first appeared as an article in a 1993 issue of Social Text), and an Afterword that brings the book, and some of its arguments, up-to-date. Aside from minor editing for clarity, the original contents remain unchanged. Irvine’s approach refuses to assess the success—or failure—of any one technique, approach or theory. Like other historians of sexuality, she focuses on unpacking the cultural, ideological, and commercial foundations sexology rests upon. Influenced by social control and social construction theories, Irvine regards 20th century American sexologists as ‘‘agents for the medicalization of sex’’ (p. 243). A central theme that runs throughout the text is that sexology faces a double bind: on the one hand, because it relies on scientific rationality to stake a claim for cultural and political authority and legitimacy, sexology is doomed to fail since it refuses to engage with broader social and political theories of power and oppression. However, if it were to incorporate the critical insights of the feminist and gay activist left into their research and treatment approaches, sexology would have a tough time transforming their services and treatments into a viable product for the consumer marketplace. Social change will not occur when sex ‘‘problems’’ (many of which are constructed and defined by sexologists themselves) are treated as individual problems; neither can it be bought or sold in pharmaceutical or latex form. As she puts it, addressing social issues was ‘‘anathema to Masters, Johnson, and many other sexologists. In sex therapy, the ‘cure’ is orgasm, not social change. And this was vital, because orgasms can be marketed in a profit-making system, while social change cannot’’ (p. 149). Irvine’s broad thesis remains unchanged in the 2005 edition, except that now she regards bioscience and ‘‘Big Pharma’’ as the major challenge facing the future survival of sexology. To introduce this book to a new generation of scholars (and as a refresher for the rest of us), a brief recap is in order. Rather than focus on the ways that sexual ‘‘progressives’’ opened new discursive sites for the articulation of sexual politics outside of the moral paradigm that prevailed, section one focuses on the conservative leanings of ‘‘scientific sexologists.’’ Irvine argues that unlike European sexologists whose professional origins were grounded in the fight for social equality and against discrimination, U.S. experts ultimately helped to create and police sociosexual boundaries by providing a pseudoscientific basis for gender and heteronormativity (p. 7). Sex researchers like Kinsey and Masters and Johnson gained a successful foothold in the culturally conservative 1950s and 1960s by claiming an ability to solve complex social problems E. R. Chenier (&) Department of History, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6 e-mail: echenier@sfu.ca

'We were Green as Grass':: Learning about Sex and Reproduction in Three Working-class Lancashire Communities, 1900-1970

The history of sexual knowledge and behaviour often focuses on broad population or policy issues and covers large geographical areas. This article takes an alternative approach. Based on oral history evidence provided by 250 working-class residents of Barrow, Lancaster, and Preston, it explores the ways children learned about sex and reproduction during the first seventy years of the twentieth century. It argues that, during the first half of the twentieth century, normative and intentional parental silence about sexual matters was intended to protect family reputations. Sexual knowledge and behaviour were closely related to respectability, which was the key to the mutual aid networks so important to residents of pre-Second World War working-class neighbourhoods-particularly women and children. Attitudes and communication about sex changed dramatically between the generations born before about 1930 and those born afterwards. These changes related to broader social and economic changes in English society and helped make acceptable the medicalization of sex and reproduction. This article documents these changes.

`Hard Science': Gendered Constructions of Sexual Dysfunction in the `Viagra Age'

This article locates Viagra, as both a biotechnology and a cultural event, in relation to shifting and specifically gendered interpretations of sexual function and dysfunction. While the clinical and market success of Viagra has prompted biomedicine and its popularizers to speak of a `new age' in human sexual relations, and accord it causal agency in effecting social change, I suggest that we might profit by attending to the social claims that underlie such hyperbole. The story behind Viagra is a complex history of the manner in which sexual function has been constructed and reconstructed in relation to a range of distinctly modern phenomena, including the rationalization and medicalization of sexuality, the increased importance of expert systems and knowledges in managing everyday life, and the expansion of consumer culture. Conclusions suggest some ways that we might think about the `sexually dysfunctional' as yet another `strategic unity' consolidating various operations of knowledge and power.

The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950

Part 1 From the restoration to Victoria: introduction - histories of sex contexts - from the restoration to the accession of Queen Victoria medical folklore in high and low culture - Aristotle's Masterpiece. Appendices: editions of Aristotle's Masterpiece contents of Aristotle's Masterpiece contents of Version of Aristotle's Masterpiece contents of Version 3 of Aristotle's Masterpiece doctors and the medicalization of sex in the enlightenment masturbation in the enlightenment - knowledge and anxiety quackery and erotica. Part 2 The Victorians and beyond: introduction - towards Victoria the Victorian polyphony, 1850-85 from the primeval protozoa to the laboratory - the evolution of sexual science from 1889 to the 1930s the authority of individual experience and the opinions of experts - sex as a social science Good Sex - the new rhetoric of conjugal relations public faces in private places - sex, law, politics and pressure groups silent stares, smut, censorship and surgical stores - the makings of popular sexual knowledges.

Women's madness: misogyny or mental illness?

Madness and misogyny - my mother and myself misogyny witchcraft - wickedness or woman hatred? the female malady and the medicalization of sex - the Victorian madwoman 20th century madness - the heir to witchcraft and hysteria? dissension and revolt - antipsychiatry and psychopolitics the feminist critiques the challenge to the critics the route to madenss reconstructing women's madness.

The Medicalization of Sex

Like all human action, sexual acts involve the use of the human body, inviting the illusion that sexual problems are medical problems. Using sex crimes, surrogate motherhood, and the existential dilemmas created by AIDS as topical examples, the author presents a critique of the currently fashionable medicalization of sex.