Troubling Popularisation: On the Gendered Circuits of a ‘Scientific’ Knowledge of Sex

Doan, Laura

doi:10.1111/1468-0424.12430

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…11 As Laura Doan has argued, in such accounts, advice is usually only seen as the end point of a 'top-down' model, in which knowledge 'trickles down' from the work of a set of monolithic sexological figures. 12 But, as recent research around popular science has effectively shown, this model of elite, 'top down' science is problematic -ignoring as it does the complex ways scientific knowledge was produced and consumed at this time, and falling back on assumptions of 'a kind of downward or outward flow of knowledge from scientist to public'. 13 This article therefore aims to add new insights to our current understanding of 'popular' sexual science and early twentieth-century sex advice.…”

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confidence: 99%

Science, Sexual Difference and the Making of Modern Marriage in American Sex Advice, 1920–40

Jones

2022

Gender & History

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This article considers discussions of sexual difference in a range of popular prescriptive texts published between 1920 and 1940 in order to explore the relationship between science and American marital advice literature. It demonstrates the particular role science played in shaping, legitimising and enforcing changing discussions about what 'good sex' should look like in contemporary advice -supporting a hierarchy of sexual activities and desires that privileged a particular version of marital heterosexual expression. Through this, it also interrogates the 'popular' version of sexual science being consumed by the American public at this time. In addition to adding new perspectives to our understanding of contemporary advice and its relationship with science and medicine, it will also act as a provocation for further research into the ways the public engaged with sexual science in early twentieth-century America.

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confidence: 99%