Preliminary Programme

During the first half of the twentieth century, there was a circuit of sexual knowledge joining Southern Europe and Latin America. Institutes were set up across the “Latin Atlantic” to practise biotypology, a new brand of medical science conceived and led by the Italian Nicola Pende. Well known to historians as a eugenicist and as one of the most important representatives of so-called Latin eugenics, Pende was a pioneer in hormone research, recognised as such in his own time by the international medical community, even though this aspect of his career has regularly been overlooked by historians. Displacing the physiological model that had held sway in nineteenth-century medical thinking, hormone research promoted an understanding of the body in which hermaphroditism, homosexuality, and other “sexual perversions” such as masochism and sadism were attributed to anomalies in the internal secretions produced by the testes or the ovaries. And while biotypology provided a scientific foundation for judging that a person did not match the ideal or normal type, endocrinological research provided the practical tools for normalising individuals who did not match the standard. Biotypology also focussed on broader groups. It studied human types within a given ethnic group, identifying for each type its morphological and functional characteristics, its morbid predispositions and attitudes. Exponents of biotypology in Southern Europe and Latin America could then set about “correcting” anomalies and “organic hereditary weaknesses,” rectifying “sexual anomalies” and preventing “moral deviations,” especially in adolescents. Their hormonal treatments would not only correct the unbalanced functioning of the endocrinal glands, but also transmit such corrections to future generations, thereby functioning as eugenic tools of intervention. While some other eugenic practices were at odds with the fundamental tenets of the Catholic religion, these post-natal interventions did not encounter the same difficulties. (Show less)

Homosexual aversion therapy enjoyed two brief but intense periods of experimentation among some psychiatrists and psychologists: between 1950-1962 in Czechoslovakia, and between 1962-1975 in the British anglophone world, including Australia. Its lifespan overlapped almost exactly with the period in which same-sex desire was listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1952 to 1973), but the specific context of its emergence was the geopolitical polarisation of the Cold War and a parallel theoretical polarisation within psychological medicine. This paper will outline how the influence of Pavlovian behaviourist ideas in postwar Australian sexology the can only be understood in the context of transnational sexological knowledge exchange.

During the Cold War, homosexuality, homosexuals and homosexual networks became a crucial area for expert research by intelligence organisations, and some even engaged the services of psychiatrists to understand what they saw as either a threat or asset. This phenomenon transcended the East/West border but was most noticeable in secondary belligerent states. Technologies of homosexual detection, diagnosis and treatment in the spheres of security, psychiatry and sexology – including emotional observation, visual surveillance, and physiological erotic measurement – were primarily shaped by behaviourism. This reflected a new ambivalence about the precise aetiological origins of sexual deviation that contradicted the hitherto dominant Freudian framework, especially outside the United States.

Aversion therapy, a form of behaviour therapy, was part of a therapeutic paradigm based on the ideas of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov which arose in contradistinction to Freudian psychoanalysis to treat a range of addictions and compulsions. Elevated to unofficial doctrine in the Communist Bloc in 1949, the Pavlovian psychophysiological paradigm was also taken up by psychiatrists and psychologists in Western countries who were either Communist sympathisers or simply sought a more empirical and scientific approach to clinical practice.

One of these was the Sydney-based psychiatrist and sexologist Dr. Neil McConaghy, an orthodox Pavlovian and self-declared bisexual ‘Marxist’, who was directly inspired by the work of Czechoslovakian psychiatrist, Dr Kurt Freund, a world pioneer in the method, both of whom advocated liberalisation of laws and social norms. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s McConaghy built around him a network of researchers who produced some of the earliest Australian work on gender identity, ‘transvestism’, and sexual orientation. By highlighting the East-to-West direction of this transfer of knowledge during the Cold War, I hope to contribute to the project not only of ‘decentring Western sexualities’ (Mizlielinska & Kulpa, 2011), but also of decentring Western sexological knowledge paradigms. (Show less)

This joint paper will investigate the ethical implications of the shift from the narrative case studies of early sexual science and criminology (a field which at the time saw itself as a contributor to sexological knowledge), with their reliance on the voices of patients, victims, or witnesses, to photographic and other seemingly more ‘objective’ forms of evidence in the decades following 1900. Drawing on recent theories of the normal and normality (e.g. Cryle/Stephens 2017), it will focus on methodological questions surrounding the ways in which images came to illustrate an increasing solidification of typologies of perversion and crime. With a focus on German-language sources it will consider, for instance, how sex researchers negotiated the selection, framing, and publication of images that often depicted their subjects in intimate or vulnerable ways, and how some of these representations eventually became iconographic images for early queer history and crime scene photography, taking on very different associations in these contexts to the clinics, crime scenes, and police stations in which they were originally produced. In line with recent explorations of affect and image (e.g. Brown/Phu 2014), we also ask how emotions such as desire and shame may have reshaped the relationship between subject and sex researcher/criminologist on the one hand, and the relationships between the subjects and viewers of sex research, on the other, developing a methodological framework for further inquiry into European sexology’s “visual turn” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Show less)

Since year 1971, attitudes towards sexuality and sexual experiences in Finland have been studied with regularly repeated surveys. During the following decades, this series of studies later named as FINSEX became the single most influential source in understanding Finnish sexuality. Especially during its heyday in the 1990s, the FINSEX studies were extensively discussed in the media, and the researchers conducting the studies, Osmo Kontula and Elina Haavio-Mannila, were regularly interviewed as experts on Finnish sex lives.

This presentation analyses the FINSEX studies within the transnational field of sex research. While the FINSEX studies have produced a national understanding of Finnish sexuality, the studies have never been limited only to Finland. The first study in the early 1970s followed the model set by a Swedish predecessor conducted in 1967 and was influenced by the earlier Kinsey studies. In the 1990s, FINSEX study produced a historical continuum with the earlier studies as well as comparisons especially with Finland’s neighbouring countries.

The presentation suggests that the FINSEX studies have constructed Finnish sexuality as liberated and equal and emphasised the similarity between men and women. This has been achieved with international comparisons where Finland has been perceived as a Western and Nordic country and contrasted with the different developments in especially post-socialist Estonia and Russia. The studies have produced a trajectory of the gradual liberation of sexuality where the historical development observed in Finland has worked as a model which the other countries were expected to follow. (Show less)