Sexual Politics and Feminist Science

In Sexual Politics and Feminist Science, Kirsten Leng restores the work of female sexologists to the forefront of the history of sexology. While male researchers who led the practice of early-twentieth-century sexology viewed women and their sexuality as objects to be studied, not as collaborators in scientific investigation, Leng pinpoints nine German and Austrian "women sexologists" and "female sexual theorists" to reveal how sex, gender, and sexuality influenced the field of sexology itself. Leng's book makes it plain that women not only played active roles in the creation of sexual scientific knowledge but also made significant and influential interventions in the field. Sexual Politics and Feminist Science provides readers with an opportunity to rediscover and engage with the work of these pioneers.

Leng highlights sexology's empowering potential for women, but also contends that in its intersection with eugenics, the narrative is not wholly celebratory. By detailing gendered efforts to understand and theorize sex through science, she reveals the cognitive biases and sociological prejudices that ultimately circumscribed the transformative potential of their ideas. Ultimately, Sexual Politics and Feminist Science helps readers to understand these women's ideas in all their complexity in order to appreciate their unique place in the history of sexology.

Kirsten Leng is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Leng's book saves many fascinating thinkers and activists from oblivion [...]. Leng's detailed and nuanced analysis of their writings shows how their viewpoints challenged the gender-biased perceptions of male sexologists, who considered women merely as object rather than as subject of scientific rationality, and largely excluded them from their professional organizations, editorial boards, and conferences

Leng pioneers a more inclusive and richly contextualised understanding of sexology that allows her to examine, for the first time, how women sexologists shaped German sexual science and that invites future scholars to investigate what other actors and ideas have been left out of existing histories of sexology

Kirsten Leng has done historians an enormous service by carefully retracing and interpreting the writings of [nine German and Austrian] women sex reformers... [who] tend to be marginalized or entirely missing in many accounts of German sexology. What Leng offers here has never been attempted before,... both a group portrait and a close textual reading, in her own excellent translation and in clear and concise prose, of all their main works.... A wonderful book that manages to let its protagonists shine as dazzling innovators, even if they were also afflicted by contemporary prejudices and short-sightedness.

Leng's book is an extremely valuable contribution to the scholarship on the history of sexology and its reception, and no academic working in the area can afford to ignore it.

Jennifer V. Evans, Carleton University:

"By viewing sexology through the lens of contemporary gender politics, Kirsten Leng has provided an important corrective to the historical register. In Sexual Politics and Feminist Science, Leng makes important new claims about the right to pleasure and desire in the creation of modern personhood. Leng’s book sets a high standard methodologically, reading texts critically and in conversation with existing discourses of the time. Not only is it written in clean and crisp prose, with flawless structure and organization, but it is a model of interdisciplinarity, marrying close textual reading with persuasive historical reconstruction."

Dagmar Herzog, Distinguished professor of history and Daniel Rose Faculty scholar, Graduate Center, City University of New York:

"Sexual Politics and Feminist Science is a highly original, exceedingly well-researched, historically significant, and beautifully written book. Kirsten Leng has made a signal contribution to: feminist science (and social science) studies; the history of theorizing about and producing what we think sexuality is; and to the history of feminism in all its stubborn paradoxes and revealing incoherencies. This book challenges all accounts of the origins and exponential flourishing of the sexological enterprise at the turn of the twentieth century that leave out women, and in its fine-grained analysis of the complexities of the female-authored works shows up the appallingly restricted grasp we have had of the field so far. But the book does far more than that, for it is also continually mining the rich lode of texts in its source base for evocative remarks that capture the intensity and contradictoriness of long-ago people’s physical and emotional experiences and longings."