The personal is scientific: Women, gender, and the production of sexological knowledge in Germany and Austria, 1900–1931.

Abstract

This article addresses the roles women and gender played in the production of sexological knowledge in the early 20th century, particularly in German-speaking Europe. Although existing scholarship focuses almost exclusively on the work of "founding fathers" such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld, women in fact made important contributions to the field. Based on analysis of texts written between 1900 and 1931, this article shows how women were able to successfully mobilize their gender as a privileged form of "situated knowledge," and thereby assert their authority over and superior insights into certain subject areas, namely, female sexualities and sexual difference. At the same time, however, this article also highlights the constraints upon women's gendered standpoint. It shows that women's sexological writing was not just informed by their gender but also by their class and race. Moreover, because gender threatened to cast their work as insufficiently objective and scientific, women cleaved to sexology's rules of evidence and argumentation, and adopted the field's ideological trappings in order to participate in discursive contestations over sexual truths. By interrogating gender, this article introduces much-needed nuance into existing understandings of sexology, and reframes sexology itself as a site wherein new sexual subjectivities were imagined, articulated, and debated. However, it also raises fundamental questions about women sexologists' capacity to create knowledge about women and female sexualities that was truer, more correct, and more authentic than that produced by men.

Feminism and/in/as psychology: The public sciences of sex and gender.

“…There has been considerable controversy and boundary work among these fields, and their practitioners have employed numerous methods ranging from experiments and surveys, to clinical observation and archival research. However, as Kirsten Leng (2015) demonstrates here, the psychology of women could be understood as exemplifying the interdisciplinary social sciences before their formal institutionalization in the postwar era (cf. Fontaine, 2015).…”

“…The contributors to this special issue offer a number of insights into the workings of sex and gender within psychology before the advent of a recognizable psychology of women in the early 1970s. Kirsten Leng (2015) explores women’s situated knowledges and feminisms in the production of sexological knowledge in Germany and Austria in the early 20th century. Teri Chettiar (2015) applies a gender analysis to recent interest in the midcentury psychologization of marital relations and family life.…”

“…Even before the rise of poststructuralism in the 1990s, language featured as the key site for feminist interventions, as activism often took the form of questioning the psy-disciplines’ labels, ethical codes, and diagnostic manuals. Leng (2015) questions whether such activity was a uniquely post-1970s phenomenon. She documents the feminist empiricist critiques and positive research programs articulated by early female sexologists of their own field and male peers.…”