Preliminary Programme

This paper explores postcolonial “third world” aid initiatives led by British and American health professionals and social scientists in the 1950s and 60s that sought to transport Western marriage and family practices as the foundation for social and economic development. Focusing specifically on the export of marriage therapy practices, it investigates how new transcultural psychological knowledge about intimate relationships was put to use in reforming “traditional” non-Western approaches to marriage and family life in newly independent Asian, African, and Caribbean nations. Techniques for marriage therapy were developed in the 1930s and 40s in the industrialized West (particularly in the United States and Britain); however, by the early 1950s, British and American psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, and public health professionals collaborated in organizing programs to establish family and marital services in decolonizing and newly independent nations. This paper traces how an Anglo-American ideal of emotionally-fulfilled monogamy was exported as part of a post-WWII universalizing international development objective, and was ultimately (and in unexpected ways) transformed to suit local needs. Encounters with polygamous family forms among Muslim groups in Nigeria, common law partnerships in Jamaica, and large extended families in India presented serious challenges for family and marriage welfare initiatives. Efforts to “teach” newly independent peoples how to be modern gave way to ongoing revision in theory, approach, and method. This paper focuses on tensions that developed both within the growing community of postcolonial “experts,” as well as between indigenous and Western professional approaches to marital reform. Previous historical scholarship has focused on the eugenic (or population perfecting) aspects of family-oriented development programs in newly independent nations. This paper instead explores the importance of new psychosocial knowledge about monogamous marital relationships in supporting (even driving) Western efforts to ensure the creation of ideally democratic citizens, both at home and abroad, in the 1950s and 60s. (Show less)

During the 1920s, Germany and Austria constituted sites of flourishing sexual scientific inquiry. Both states boasted numerous institutions and professional societies dedicated to the production and dissemination of diverse sexual knowledges. This dynamic environment was destroyed by the Nazi seizure of power in Germany (1933) and Austria (1938). The Nazis’ intertwined racial and sexual ideologies were violently hostile to open sexual scientific inquiry; moreover, the Nazis loathed the fact that many of the leaders within both sexual science and sexual politics were often both Jewish and politically left-wing.
Within the new climate of repression and persecution, many scientists emigrated, largely to North America and Western Europe but also to places such as Russia and North Africa. But did émigré scientists cease to conduct sexual scientific research, or participate in political work? If they continued to practice sexual science, how were they helped or hindered by their new national and cultural environments, and how was their new work shaped by their memories and previous experiences? Moreover, how was émigré sexual knowledge production shaped by the gender and sexuality of the researcher? This paper will examine these questions through the lives and careers of two German ex-patriots, Max Marcuse and Charlotte Wolff, who were forced to flee Berlin following Hitler’s seizure of power, who ended up in Palestine/Israel and Britain, respectively. Marcuse and Wolff’s experiences provide fruitful opportunities for comparison, as Marcuse was never really able to successfully resurrect his career in Palestine, whereas Wolff went on to become a pathbreaking researcher on lesbianism and bisexuality later in her life, after settling in Britain. Intriguingly, in contravention of understandable expectations, it was the queer woman sexual scientist whose career ended up flourishing.
This paper aims not only to consider the afterlife of the incredible sexual scientific and political ferment that unfolded in Central Europe in the 1920s, or to think about the relationships between sexual science and “world historical events.” More broadly, by investigating the contingent nature of sexual scientific knowledge production, the difficulties of translating previous scientific and cultural knowledge and expertise, and the dynamics of cross-cultural reception, my project provokes fundamental epistemological questions about sexual knowledge. That is, it asks: what about sexuality can be studied, when, how, and by whom?


(Show less)

My research focuses on the (scientific) emergence of today’s ultimate sexual other: the paedophile. Towards the end of the so called sexual revolution in the West (mid 1970s), paedophile factions within the gay movements progressively began to identify the child lover as a distinct category of sexual deviant who required its own battle for sexual freedom (Hekma, 2004). With the emancipation of homosexuality from the catalogue of psychiatric illnesses (1975) and the growing focus on consent as a basic criterium for acceptable sex, it became clear that paedophiles had to wage a different war. This fight would not only aim to remove the stigma of sexual attraction to children, but –in what is now mainly regarded as a cynical twist- also to bring about a radical societal change in which the child would be granted the right of sexual self determination. Paedophile groups like Kinderbefreiungsfront (Germany), Paedofil Gruppe (Denmark), Pedophile Information Exchange (UK), Childhood Sensuality Circle (USA) and others formed international alliances, spread pamphlets and organised conferences. These exchanges could be regarded as a first step in the construction of a somewhat collective paedophile identity, but the glory days of the paedophile movement were very short-lived.
Interestingly, the embryonic apparition of the paedophile as a political figure
seems to coincide with what has been described as a backlash to the sexual freedom discourse in Western society. Apart from the AIDS crisis, great social awareness on Child Sexual Abuse marked debates on sexuality in the 1980s (Angelides, 2008).
I propose a discursive analysis of publications (mid-1970s to mid-1980s) by the paedophile wing of the leading Dutch movement for sexual reform, the NVSH, advocates for social acceptance of sexual interactions between adults and children and their Belgian counterparts: the work and study groups on paedophilia, who were active in Ghent and Antwerp. How did these activists and scientists construct the adult in their discussion of sexual interactions with children in a time where child sexual abuse was not a major issue? How did they articulate their own counter-discourse with other activism by sexual minorities on sexuality at large and childhood sexuality and paedophilia in particular? Which scientific theories did they mobilise to back their calls for decriminalisation and destigmatisation of paedophilia? While envisioning a future wherein children and adults would be freely engaging in sexual interactions, how did they propose to change legislation and mentality in matters of consent, children’s and parental rights? (Show less)