A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1960
496
A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1960
496eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520966673 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 11/07/2017 |
| Series: | California World History Library , #26 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Douglas E. Haynes is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India and Small Town Capitalism in Western India and coeditor of Contesting Power and Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia.
Ryan M. Jones is Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Geneseo and the author of a forthcoming book on Mexican sexuality entitled Erotic Revolutions.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Global Modernity and Sexual Science
THE CASE OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND FEMALE PROSTITUTION, 1850–1950
Pablo Ben
INTRODUCTION
In the decades up to the 1860s, migration brought to Paris a "huge male proletariat." Historian Alain Corbin argues that such a mass of men were in a "state of sexual deprivation" and oft en turned to female prostitutes. By the late nineteenth century, however, the situation had changed. The "assimilation of the conjugal model of the home" led to the decline of commercial sex. Many other cities of the world experienced a transformation of sexuality similar to that of Paris. The first decades of modern urbanization oft en led to an expansion of commercial sex, and of sexual activities in public areas, including sex between men. As urbanization continued, however, commercial and public sex oft en declined. This rise and fall of what I will call "cities of sin" shaped the "scientific" study of sexuality. It was against the backdrop of this rise and fall that sexual scientists began to interrogate the reasons why "sexual chaos" emerged and how such chaos could transition into "sexual order."
If promiscuity, immorality, lasciviousness, and pathology as they existed in the first moments of urbanization implied chaos, another set of opposed items, such as domesticity, family sociability, modesty, monogamy, normality, sexual restraint, and respectability, pointed to the possibility of "order." Scholars rarely used the term "chaos" and only sometimes referred to "order." Using this dichotomy in the twenty-first century helps us follow the threads of an implicit opposition of terms that was assumed by the writers who lived in the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The dichotomy between the notions of chaos and order was at times explicit, but for the most part it constituted a "background assumption" shared by a vast number of scholars. Those who studied sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century oft en used the opposition between sexual chaos and order as "invisible cement for linking together postulations" about the evolution of sexuality. Their very understanding of sexuality as an evolutionary phenomenon made sense only through these " 'silent partners' in theoretical enterprise": the notions of chaos and order. Without these two opposites, the idea of an "evolution" changing from one pole to another would not have existed, since these were the two poles between which evolution moved.
The discussion about the evolution of sexuality between these two poles — chaos and order — constituted the background against which sexual science emerged. The rise and fall of prostitution, sex between men, and other non-normative sexual activities prominent in the turn to twentieth-century urbanization was taken for granted by scholars in that field. The rapid rise of cities, and its impact on sexuality, constituted one of the most obvious social transformations that observers who were writing about changes over time in the human past could see within their lifetime. Questions about the "evolution" of sexuality throughout time, I will argue, were among other factors brought into consideration owing to the need to grasp the changing nature of sexual practices in the cities of this era. In examining the turn-of-the-century emergence of ideas in sexual science in relation to the social and cultural historiography of sexuality in the rising cities of the world, I bring together recent fields of study developed parallel to one another rather than in dialogue.
Since the 1980s the historiography of female prostitution and male homosexuality has thrived. The study of ideas about sexuality among a variety of scholars has also become prominent in the last decades. Both fields, however, have rarely engaged in a mutual analysis. It is through a consideration of both fields that I attempt to understand how the social history of urbanization shaped the emergence of sexual science. I will start first by analyzing how the notions of sexual chaos and order emerged within nineteenth-century anthropology, considering later how these notions were related to urbanization (with an emphasis on the case of Buenos Aires), and finally coming back to how global social history shaped these two dichotomous notions among sexual scientists.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND SEXUAL EVOLUTION
As evolutionary theory gained ground in the emerging discipline of anthropology during the late nineteenth century, it was a common assumption that sexual promiscuity had prevailed in the earliest stages of human evolution. This is what Swiss antiquarian Johann Jakob Bachofen meant when he named such a state "Hetairism" in his classic 1861 book Das Mutterrecht (The mother right). Another canonical text in the history of anthropology followed suit about two decades later in the United States. In his famous Ancient Society (1877), Lewis H. Morgan chose even more explicit terms to characterize "the bottom of the evolutionary scale," which he labeled "[p]romiscuous Intercourse." At the time of this "lowest conceivable state of savagery," humans were "ignorant of marriage," and they "possessed a feeble intellect and a feebler moral sense." As humanity had progressed, Bachofen and Morgan argued, the sexual drive had been restrained. By the early 1890s a large number of intellectuals in the West embraced this evolutionary analysis of sexuality. In 1884 Frederick Engels popularized the idea in his famous and widely read Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In his canonical History of Human Marriage, written in 1891, Edward Westermarck summarized the study of sexual evolution, claiming that "most sociologists who have written upon the early history" of humanity agreed that "man lived in a state of promiscuity." In addition to Bachofen and Morgan, Westermarck mentioned "McLennan, Lubbock, Bastian, Giraud-Teulon, Lippert, Kohler, Post, Wilken and several other writers" as promoters of the association of promiscuity and primitivism.
Aft er Westermarck, evolutionary approaches to the history of sexual morality began to discuss where to locate promiscuity within the evolutionary scale: either in the ancient past or as a result of an excess of fin de siecle civilization. The idea that promiscuity characterized the dawn of humanity was strong enough for Westermarck to dedicate his History of Human Marriage to debunking what he viewed as a misconceived myth. Echoing eighteenth-century philosophe Emile Rousseau, Westermarck claimed that it was European expansion in modern times that threatened to spread promiscuity all over the world. Prostitution, sex between men, and other forms of sexual chaos were the by-products of urbanization, not the manifestations of primitivism. Westermarck's analysis challenged the direction of sexual evolution, from blaming primitivism to pointing the finger toward civilization, but he did not question the evolutionary framework.
Criminology, psychiatry, legal medicine, and even literary criticism discussed whether promiscuity stemmed from too little or too much "civilization." In his famous 1892 work Degeneration, for instance, the Jewish literary critic Max Nordau illustrated this tension. Nordau believed that "[n]o task of civilization has been so painfully laborious as the subjugation of lasciviousness," and yet, the work of civilization was threatened by pornographers, who "would take from us the fruit of this, the hardest struggle of humanity." Although Nordau was convinced that promiscuity had for the most part been overcome by civilization, he argued that some recent developments in the pinnacle of civilization could come to endanger sexual morality, provoking a "relapse" into an earlier stage. Like Nordau, many other scholars were also concerned with how modern civilization brought some form of sexual chaos.
The evolutionary opposition of chaos versus order discussed in this chapter was especially strong in the articulation of "scientific" ideas regarding female prostitution and male homosexuality — two forms of sexuality challenging propriety at the time and thus associated with chaos. This is why it is crucial to examine the ideas about both against the background of the social history of the period at a global level. In the following section I will briefly review some aspects of the global history of transportation and urbanization, considering its impact on prostitution and homosexuality in different parts of the planet. This contextualization will illuminate the way in which the concern with the rise of sexual chaos among scholars constituted a response to a historical process taking place at the time that could be especially observed in the rising cities of the world.
TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION, URBANIZATION, AND PROSTITUTION
In the nineteenth century the world became interconnected to an extent that had no precedents. As regional economies in different parts of the planet increasingly relied on one another within an international division of labor, cities experienced a demographic explosion as well as other social and cultural transformations leading to a reorganization of sexuality. In 1835 the railways bridged only relatively short distances within Europe and the United States. Between 1840 and 1870 the West developed a dense network of railways, and by 1907 trains were running along some 168,000 miles of track outside of Europe and the United States. The new means of transportation led to an unprecedented circulation of people and objects, transforming demography, culture, and sexuality. The vast and unprecedented magnitude of human displacement across the planet oft en severed the bonds between individuals and their families and communities. Far from their places of origin, people oft en achieved a degree of autonomy from their families and communities that they had never enjoyed before. Also, the demand for a male workforce in the booming cities of the world transformed the male-to-female ratio of entire regions of the planet. Together with other issues also associated to modern globalization, these trends facilitated the rise of "cities of sin," — that is to say, urban spaces where the historical transformations of global modernity at the time eroded sexual norms, a sort of "sexual chaos" in the eyes of the rising social sciences.
Today, living in a different world where cities of sin have practically vanished from our vision, we fail to understand how their existence made the "background assumptions" of evolutionary scholars legible to their audience. Only by recuperating the social history of cities of sin we can replicate the conditions under which it made sense to wonder why sexual chaos existed, and whether it was too much or too little civilization that caused sexual chaos. Although northern Sumatra is not a city, the study of this region by Ann Stoler offers a useful local example to understand a global rise in "sin" at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. I will later show that the phenomenon she describes for northern Sumatra was a landscape more commonly found in cities, even though it also existed in other geographical spaces.
At the turn of the century, sexuality was reorganized in northern Sumatra to the extent that men and women were more likely to have sexual intercourse through commercial sex rather than through marriage. The prominence of commercial sex was part and parcel of a wider social and cultural transformation that was global in nature. As Europe, the United States, and Japan became industrialized and demanded a larger amount of raw materials, Sumatra experienced an export boom comparable to that of other regions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In the case of Sumatra, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 led to an intensification of commerce. In the Sultanate of Deli, northern Sumatra, the Dutch invested in commercial plantations supplying rubber and palm oil to industries in other parts of the world. In order to make the new plantations profitable by lowering wages, these agricultural enterprises sought to bring in men without their families, to the point that "many companies maintained strict rules prohibiting accompaniment by wives and children." As a result of this, pioneering in these new plantations "was considered a 'man's job.'" At the turn of the century women were not more than 10 to 12 percent of the population. By 1912, of the nearly one hundred thousand who were ethnic Chinese, nearly ninety-three thousand were men. This high ratio of men to women transformed sexuality in Sumatra. Stoler argues that, living among a majority of single men away from their homes and making meager wages, most women in northern Sumatra ended up selling sex for money. Even married women were frequently involved in commercial sex.
Many other historians describe similar situations, mostly between 1850 and 1950, where regions affected by an export boom of raw materials demanded male labor, creating a gender demographic imbalance and other conditions that facilitated the rise of commercial sex. The history of the El Teniente copper mine in Chile, written by social historian Thomas Miller Klubock, illustrates this global trend. In early-twentieth-century Chile, the "ebb and flow of [mostly] male workers to the mine was accompanied by a parallel movement of women who migrated to the camps," although in fewer numbers. These women "engaged in illicit, and oft en commercial sexual relationships with" the miners. For decades, the mining company failed to foster family bonds, even though managers wanted to do so.
Analyzing radically different cultures like Chile and Sumatra undergoing comparable socioeconomic and cultural transformations illustrates the impact of the transportation revolution and the new international division of labor. By demanding a larger workforce, and in some cases also imperial navies, many sites where exports boomed intensified the circulation of people, created an imbalanced demography, and provided a number of other crucial conditions for female prostitution to thrive. This was especially the case in cities emerging as imperial and commercial hubs, since migration to urban areas was more intense. In Hong Kong, for instance, "sailors from both the navy and the merchant marine constantly docked in ..., swelling the male population and providing a rich resource for the brothel industry." Historian Philippa Levine argues that this was the case throughout many other parts of the British Empire in the turn from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. In Queensland, among "Pacific Islanders, men outnumbered women ten to one." In Singapore and Malacca the migrant population was "overwhelmingly made up of young single men," to the extent that "there were ... ten men for every woman in 1900." In fact, this is why historian James Francis Warren in his detailed study of the topic concluded that "demography is the vital clue to the importance of prostitution in the history of Singapore." Other historians have made a similar argument for Alaska and Yukon, Kalgorlie (Australia), Malaysia, Witwatersrand (South Africa), Cuba, Río Negro (Argentina), Guatemala City, Paris, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Rosario (Argentina), London, Montevideo, New York, and so forth. Most of these places were cities, since migration to urban areas was more significant and the higher ratio of men to women was more likely to happen in urban contexts; but there were also other spaces where prostitution thrived. In all these examples, imbalanced demography stemmed from local integration to the world economy, especially after the construction of means of transportation allowing mass migration.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Toward a Global History of Sexual Science: Movements, Networks, and Deployments Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan M. Jones
PART ONE: EVOLUTION, SEXUAL SCIENCE, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE OTHER
1 • Global Modernity and Sexual Science: The Case of Male Homosexuality and Female Prostitution, 1880–1950 Pablo Ben
2 • “Let Us Leave the Hospital; Let Us Go on a Journey around the World”: British and German Sexual Science and the Global Search for Sexual Variation Kate Fisher and Jana Funke
3 • Westermarck’s Morocco: The Epistemic Politics of Cultural Anthropology and Sexual Science Ralph Leck
4 • Monogamy’s Nature: Global Sexual Science and the Secularization of Christian Marriage Angela Willey
5 • The “Hottentot Apron”: Genital Aberration in the History of Sexual Science Rebecca Hodes
PART TWO: SCIENCE BY THE BOOK AND UNRULY APPROPRIATIONS
6 • Sexology in the Southwest: Law, Medicine, and Sexuality in Germany and Its Colonies Robert Deam Tobin
7 • Understanding R. D. Karve: Brahmacharya, Modernity, and the Appropriation of Global Sexual Science in Western India, 1927–1953 Shrikant Botre and Douglas E. Haynes
8 • The “Ellis Effect”: Translating Sexual Science in Republican China, 1911–1949 Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu
9 • Takahashi Tetsu and Popular Sexology in Early Postwar Japan, 1945–1970 Mark McLelland
10 • Mexican Sexology and Male Homosexuality: Genealogies and Global Contexts, 1860–1957 Ryan M. Jones
11 • The Science of Sexual Difference: Ogura Seizaburo, Hiratsuka Raicho, and the Intersection of Sexology and Feminism in Early-Twentieth-Century Japan Michiko Suzuki
12 • Time for Sex: The Education of Desire and the Conduct of Childhood in Global/Hindu Sexology Ishita Pande
PART THREE: MOBILITY, TRAVEL, EXILE, AND THE CIRCUITS OF SEXOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE
13 • Latin Eugenics and Sexual Knowledge in Italy, Spain, and Argentina: International Networks across the Atlantic Chiara Beccalossi
14 • “Forms So Attenuated That They Merge into Normality Itself”: Alexander Lipschütz, Gregorio Marañón, and Theories of Intersexuality in Chile, circa 1930 Kurt MacMillan
15 • “Tyranny of Orgasm”: Global Governance of Sexuality from Bombay, 1930s–1950s Sanjam Ahluwalia
16 • Magnus Hirschfeld’s Onnagata Rainer Herrn
17 • Agnes Smedley between Berlin, Bombay, and Beijing: Sexology, Communism, and National Independence Veronika Fuechtner
18 • The Limits of Transnationalism: The Case of Max Marcuse Kirsten Leng
Afterword: In the Shadow of Empire: The Words and Worlds of Sexual Science Howard Chiang
List of Contributors
Index