New publication: Sexology and Translation
Heike Bauer, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Gender Studies, has edited a groundbreaking collection of essays looking at sexology and modernity as they emerged together in different contexts.
Heike Bauer, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Gender Studies, has edited a groundbreaking collection of essays looking at sexology and modernity as they emerged together in different contexts.
Sexology and Translation is the first study of the contemporaneous emergence of sexology in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Heike Bauer and her contributors—historians, literary and cultural critics, and translation scholars—address the intersections between sexuality and modernity in a range of contexts during the period from the 1880s to the 1930s.
From feminist sexualities in modern Japan to Magnus Hirschfeld’s affective sexology, this book offers compelling new insights into how sexual ideas were formed in different contexts via a complex process of cultural negotiation. By focusing on issues of translation—the dynamic process by which ideas are produced and transmitted—the essays in Sexology and Translation provide an important corrective to the pervasive idea that sexuality is a “Western” construct that was transmitted around the world.
This volume deepens understanding of how the intersections between national and transnational contexts, between science and culture, and between discourse and experience, shaped modern sexuality.
"A valuable and nuanced analysis of sexology and modernity as intertwined transactional processes of dissemination, adaptation, and recirculation: conversations rather than the laying down of authoritative truths. Through the examination of a wide array of texts, including hitherto neglected popular genres, within which these ideas were being discussed, and extending the geographical range well beyond Western Europe and North America to Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, the rise of modern sexuality is demonstrated to have been a global phenomenon, with effects nonetheless specifically situated within particular cultural contexts."
—Dr. Lesley A. Hall, Wellcome Library