Carney Landis and the psychosexual landscape of touch in mid-20th-century America.

Abstract

In the last quarter of the 1930s, Carney Landis, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University affiliated with the Psychiatric Institute of New York, headed a Committee for Research in Problems of Sex-funded research project in which he conducted interviews with 100 women between the ages of 18 and 35 who self-identified as physically disabled. Landis interviewed the women about their sex lives, their sexual identities, and their relationship to their bodies and published the results in 1942 under the title The Personality and Sexuality of the Physically Handicapped Woman. The book represents conventional psychosexual presumptions about disabled women's stunted personality and frustrated sexuality stemming from the absence of a Freudian "sexual moment." Yet, the original research notes, housed at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, reveal that many of these women engaged in acts of erotic touching that played a far more dynamic and complex role in the development of their sexual subjectivities than Landis or his researchers could recognize. This article examines how touch and tactility produced meanings for Landis' research subjects and thus illuminated forms of sexual subjectivity not regularly associated with either histories of disability or histories of sexuality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Guns, germs, and public history: A conversation with Jennifer Tucker

“…They meant it to be a picture postcard: a vision of a harmonious and multicultural planet to which, for Sagan and his team, humanity should aspire. framework and putting it back into some kind of social or cultural framework (Serlin, 2012). We know historically about warnings to parents against the developmental effects of too much physical affection on children by behaviorists like John Watson and, later, the ill-advised experiments by Harry Harlow who tried to understand the effects of little or no touching by alienating and torturing baby monkeys (Harris, 1984;Vicedo, 2013).…”

“…David Serlin: These questions of visual representation make me think about other forms of representation, namely the focus on social distancing that has emerged as the rem non grata of the pandemic. Part of my forthcoming book, Window Shopping with Helen Keller , deals with historicizing touch and tactility outside of its medical framework and putting it back into some kind of social or cultural framework (Serlin, 2012). We know historically about warnings to parents against the developmental effects of too much physical affection on children by behaviorists like John Watson and, later, the ill‐advised experiments by Harry Harlow who tried to understand the effects of little or no touching by alienating and torturing baby monkeys (Harris, 1984; Vicedo, 2013).…”

Histories of psychology after Stonewall: Introduction to the special issue.

“…It was the success of these movements that led psychologists to appreciate the early insights of scholars such as Kessler and McKenna into the logic of gender attribution (Kessler & McKenna, 1978; McKenna & Kessler, 2000). Only in the past 10–15 years have history of psychology journals begin to include publications on: GBTQI+ psychology (e.g., Chiang, 2008; Hammack & Windell, 2011; Hubbard, 2017; Pettit, 2011; Serlin, 2012; Weinstein, 2018).…”

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“…Considerable historical debate has occurred over the role that sexology has played in pathologizing sexual deviance. Some historians have emphasized the eugenic concerns of scientists who studied sexual variance in the hopes of eliminating it and who erased complicated sexual subjectivities in their scientific writing (Haraway, 1989;Rosario, 1997;Serlin, 2012;Terry, 1999). Other historians have suggested a more collaborative relationship between physicians and gay rights advocates.…”