Description
Book SynopsisIn Sexual Politics and Feminist Science, Kirsten Leng restores the work of female sexologists to the forefront of the history of sexology. While male researchers who led the practice of early-twentieth-century sexology viewed women and their sexuality as objects to be studied, not as collaborators in scientific investigation, Leng pinpoints nine German and Austrian women sexologists and female sexual theorists to reveal how sex, gender, and sexuality influenced the field of sexology itself. Leng''s book makes it plain that women not only played active roles in the creation of sexual scientific knowledge but also made significant and influential interventions in the field. Sexual Politics and Feminist Science provides readers with an opportunity to rediscover and engage with the work of these pioneers.
Leng highlights sexology''s empowering potential for women, but also contends that in its intersection with eugenics, the narrative is not whol
Trade Review
Leng's book is an extremely valuable contribution to the scholarship on the history of sexology and its reception, and no academic working in the area can afford to ignore it.
* Journal of the History of Sexuality *
Leng pioneers a more inclusive and richly contextualised understanding of sexology that allows her to examine, for the first time, how women sexologists shaped German sexual science and that invites future scholars to investigate what other actors and ideas have been left out of existing histories of sexology
* Women's History Review *
Kirsten Leng has done historians an enormous service by carefully retracing and interpreting the writings of [nine German and Austrian] women sex reformers... [who] tend to be marginalized or entirely missing in many accounts of German sexology. What Leng offers here has never been attempted before,... both a group portrait and a close textual reading, in her own excellent translation and in clear and concise prose, of all their main works.... A wonderful book that manages to let its protagonists shine as dazzling innovators, even if they were also afflicted by contemporary prejudices and short-sightedness.
* AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW *
Leng's book saves many fascinating thinkers and activists from oblivion [...]. Leng's detailed and nuanced analysis of their writings shows how their viewpoints challenged the gender-biased perceptions of male sexologists, who considered women merely as object rather than as subject of scientific rationality, and largely excluded them from their professional organizations, editorial boards, and conferences
* Centaurus *
