Sexology and Its Afterlives

As a field of study, sexology emerged in the nineteenth century bringing together academics, non-medical professionals, and reformers in Europe and North America who sought to systematically study human sexuality and sexual behavior. The field reached its peak in the postwar United States in projects like the Kinsey Reports before gradually being discredited and fading from public consciousness. The contributors to this special issue engage with the contemporary material and aesthetic detritus of the sexological project and ask how the remnants of its history persist to the present. Using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, they critique the way sexology embedded bodily difference in public policy and infrastructure. The contributors show how Blackness disrupts visual representations of female pleasure, articulate an aesthetics of trans-madness, and reflect on the broader implications of sex segregation in public toilets.

Contributors. Lucas Crawford, Jina B. Kim, Joan Lubin, Amber Musser, Susan Stryker, Jeanne Vaccaro