Kinsey's Biographers: A Historiographical Reconnaissance

Relocating the History of Science

“…The scientist's life as his scientific experiments and ideas often has been preferred by scientists, as reflected in the comment by biologist and sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey that it is nonsense to write a scientist's biography because "The progress of science depends upon knowledge. It has nothing to do with personality" (Capshew et al 2003, 465, quoting Pomeroy 1972.…”

Sexuality, normality and intelligence. What is queer theory up against?

“…As Alan Stewart (2003) notes, the hope of finding more famous 'great homosexuals in history' continues to incite essentialist histories. However, historians of psychology now have available a wider range of studies of the ways that the lives of bisexual, gay or lesbian human scientists such as Alfred Kinsey (Capshew, Adamson, Buchanan, Murray, & Wake, 2003), Harry Stack Sullivan (Hegarty, 2005), Charlotte Wolff and Magnus Hirschfeld (Brennan & Hegarty, 2009) or Jan Gay and Thomas Painter (Minton, 2003) have been written in different periods of psychology's histories. The conditions under which writing about psychologists' same-sex intimacies could be reconciled with narratives about their intellectual achievements have been, to say the least, unstable.…”

Magnus Hirschfeld, his biographies and the possibilities and boundaries of ‘biography’ as ‘doing history’

“…The four existing biographies of that other pioneer in sexology, Alfred Kinsey, were examined by Capshew et al (2003), who divided them into two 'waves', with two biographies (Christenson, 1971;Pomeroy, 1972) belonging to an early, hagiographic, 'official' wave, while the two most recent biographies (Jones, 1997 andGathorneHardy, 1998) took on the exposé and scrutiny of Kinsey's personal life. The 'second wave' biographies were published within months of each other and were based on similar archival sources and witness accounts, yet they were worlds apart in their interpret-ation of this material.…”

“…For Gathorne-Hardy, the overlap of private and research life yielded interesting possibilities, rather than being something to be condemned or even dichotomized. Capshew et al (2003) contextualized this disparity of accounts by 'examining the connections between Kinsey's biographers and the histories they have produced', thereby calling for the 'storyteller's tale' to be considered one of the focuses in the investigation of 'the processes that underlie the construction of history ' (2003: 486).…”