Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: Historians of sexuality credit marital advice with disseminating a modern discourse of the sexual, as developed by sexologists who understood sex as normal or abnormal. Marie Stopes did not reproduce their findings but drew on the methods of biometricians in attempting to normalize the natural. Thinking about Stopes's methods in discerning a naturally occurring curve of normal female sex-impulses in relation to Havelock Ellis points to constraints in his production of the normal. The article traces the impact of Stopes's attempt to measure desire by analyzing letters from her readers who became partners in the great scientific project of normalization.
Source: Journal of the History of Ideas
Author: Laura Doan
Institutions: University of Manchester, University College London
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2603398825