WRITING THE PAST, CONSTRUCTING SEXUAL KNOWLEDGE, 1895-1939

Magnus Hirschfeld 1868 - 1935 German Sexologist

As part of the Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History project, Dr Jana Funke is working with Drs Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands to develop an innovative approach to the study of sexual history by asking how sexual knowledge was produced through an engagement with the past .

Focusing on the work of central figures in the history of sexuality like Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds in England, or Magnus Hirschfeld and Iwan Bloch in Germany, the book project investigates the uses of literary texts and artifacts from past cultures, and explores how ‘pastness' was narrated and constructed in writings about sexuality. Applying this original methodological approach to sexological writings, the project challenges limiting understandings of sexology as a clearly defined and self-consciously ‘scientific' discipline. Instead, it shows that examining how sexual knowledge was constructed through varied uses of the past can help us to discover the interrelationship between sexual science and other areas of knowledge, such as classicism, literary and art history, archaeology, anthropology and psychoanalysis. Through an exploration of these connections, the project also examines how sexology addressed topical questions concerning not only gender and sexuality, but also race, class and national identity. Considering both sexological interpretations of Western sexual history as well as the construction of non-Western sexualities as ‘primitive', the project makes possible a more nuanced understanding of sexual science, allowing us to position sexology and its preoccupation with the relation between present and past within the wider context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture.

Apollo Belvedere

Investigating uses of the past in sexological writings not only cuts across disciplinary boundaries, but also present-day binaries of homosexuality and heterosexuality. Research to-date has often focused on the history of non-normative sexualities, primarily homosexuality. This project challenges this bias by looking at the way in which sexologist's drew on the past to understand a range of normative and no-normative, homosexual and heterosexual practices. Finally, the project shows to what degree our present-day understanding of sexual history is inherited from and shaped by our sexological predecessors and their varied uses of the past.

Sigmund Freud's desk

Please direct any questions or queries at Jana Funke (j.funke@exeter.ac.uk).