Historicizing the Emergence of Sexual Freedom: The Medical Knowledge of Psychiatry and the Scientific Power of Sexology, 1880-1920

Abstract

This paper develops an historical analysis of the turn-of-the-twentieth- century discourse of sexology that accounts for its heterogeneity, attending to the complex interactions and distinctions between medicine and science. Between 1880 and 1920, I argue, the conceptual possibilities for the articulation of a modern notion of sexual freedom emerged from two stages of historical development: first, the psychiatric implantation of sexual psychopathology around the 1880s and 1890s that gave sexuality for the first time in history both a psychological and a pathological character under the name of medicine; and second, the subsequent sexological impulse in the 1900s and 1910s to deploy the existing vocabularies of perverse sexuality in a new system of normalizing and liberalizing scholarly endeavors under the name of science. It was not until this transition from the "psychiatrization" of sex to a more general "scientification" of sex around the turn of the twentieth century did people gradually adopt and participate in the making of a modern notion of sexual freedom that demarcated sexual desire from heterosexual obligations. This new sense of sexual self, positioned in a constant political struggle with its cultural legitimacy and intelligibility, would remain central to the concept of sexual freedom throughout the rest of the century.