Sexual science constitutes the empirical study of sexual function and behavior in living beings. It originated from natural philosophy and is now characterized by the methods and aims of modern science. This chapter treats the main story of sexual science, starting with conceptual concerns over the body and using examples from Chinese and Islamic medicine. Next, the analysis shifts to the foundations of sexual science in the Western world, examining philosophical and medical traditions that culminated in medieval scholasticism and institutions like universities and hospitals. The chapter then treats the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, in which contemporaries invented the “two-sex” model and pioneered new ideas of “biopolitics.” The analysis turns the nineteenth century’s complex “discovery” of sex and the powerful connections between global imperialism and sexual understanding. The chapter concludes with the dynamics surrounding the body and sexuality in the global twentieth century, as found in evolutionary biology, sexology, and psychoanalysis, and the relation between mass culture and ideals of the sexual revolution. Sexual science appears paradoxical: sometimes, it seemed an agent of discipline and power, supporting entrenched values, or it seemed to help emancipate individuals, debunking prejudices and superstitions and liberating attitudes and behaviors.

This chapter looks at the ways sf visions of the future published in the decades following World War II both challenge the dominant ideology of American exceptionalism – the notion that the United States is a single homogenous nation uniquely exempt from history – and the Program Era division between literary and genre fiction. Both Program Era realism and sf develop representations of the present. However, sf’s mirror is a distorting anamorphic one, presenting imaginary futures that help its readers cognize the contradictions, conflicts, and struggles that are always at work in any historical situation, and which naturalizing formulations such as American exceptionalism occlude. The chapter traces shifting practices of representing the future, beginning with 1950s dystopias, postapocalypses, and alternate histories through the radical visions of the New Wave and the new practices of postmodern cyberpunk and critical dystopia up to the recent wave of literary sf and climate change fiction.

This chapter reorients readings of Harriet Jacobs’s and Harriet Wilson’s (semi)autobiographies as narratives of disability. I underscore the inextricable links between girlhood, labor, and disability began in their self-authored texts, alongside Jean Fagan Yellin’s publication of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers and other documents which detail the life of Harriet Wilson. I argue that these life writings demonstrate each woman’s post-captivity labors as a challenge to nineteenth-century extractive economies of bondage. Studying the (semi)autobiographies, public and private correspondence, journal entries, and newspaper advertisements related to Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson not only makes legible their disabled lives, but also provides a complex understanding of the interrelation between labor, disability, capacity, and resistance.

This chapter charts sexual violence over time and place, showing substantial shifts in thinking about sex as violence, rape as an assault on property, emerging ideas of consent, and changing attitudes towards the victim and the offender. It traces how sexual violence was defined and understood, in both society and law, from the classical world to today, examining case studies that include rape, sodomy and offences against children. It examines the structural impediments to the prevention of sexual violence, and the social and legal barriers to justice when a crime did occur. It highlights the fact that responses to sexual violence vary between individuals and communities, though survivors reveal that many forms of sex might be experienced as violent or traumatic, regardless of whether the acts were normalised or criminalised. Ideas of sexual violence are read through intersectional lenses, highlighting the idea that normative ideas of gender, sexual identity, race and class heightened the potential for sexual exploitation of marginalised groups. Limited, fragmented or unrepresentative sources make it challenging to trace sexual violence in history, but it is imperative to do so, as sexual crimes have had a substantial impact on the life experiences of individuals and their families and communities.

This chapter meditates on how Black erotic bodies manifest in a white supremacist world. It contends that said bodies congeal through an amalgamation of fungible gender and material/discursive dispossession. These inheritances afford Black people the opportunity to conjure fugitive freedom practices, such as multiplicity, which enable Black people to harness erotic power in the pursuit of self-determined notions of pleasure and intimacy with themselves and within Black communities. To buttress my argument, I draw on the work of Akwaeke Emezi – namely, their debut novel Freshwater and an essay about their gender transition surgeries – and Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” to illustrate how multiplicity is a freedom practiced undergirded by erotic power such that practitioners need not minimize or eliminate contradictory or complex aspects of themselves in order to access pleasure and intimacy along personal and interpersonal registers.

This chapter focuses on the Black body in the narrative genre of passing literature, which combines issues of embodiment with those of visuality. It begins by arguing that, whereas recent literary culture habituates us to immediacy, access, and confession, the passing plot operates on different terms. At a moment when many artists and critics are arguing for the importance of opacity to relational frameworks, the passing plot comes into focus as a special testing ground for viewing racialized embodiment and ethical sociality in fresh ways. The chapter goes on to argue that just as the passing plot proves a rich container for considering the ethics of relation, dramatic literature offers a particularly productive platform for considering passing literature today. My case study for these claims is Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon (2014). A metatheatrical riff on a prominent nineteenth-century melodrama called The Octoroon (1859), the play avoids conveying some intimate truth about racial embodiment – the secret ostensibly kept by the passing figure – in order to offer new opportunities for Jacobs-Jenkins’s audience to become aware of their embodied participation in acts of racialization.

This chapter explores race and sexuality in three parts. After a preamble that explores uses and definitions of race both historically and by historians, the first part examines representations of race and sexuality in relation to the politics of race and sexuality, via such historical figures as Sarah Baartman, Josephine Baker, and Jane Nardal. The second part considers administrative and legal policies as well as forms of social control that were used to control sexuality along the colour line, with references to Cleopatra, legal codes such as the Code Noir, the Scottsboro affair, sex work, and sex talk in the Americas, West Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The third part considers a newer trend towards exploring the influences of love, family, community, and kinship networks upon discussions and experiences of sexuality and race, via examples such as the Signares of Senegal or the ballroom houses of Harlem. One of the points of this chapter is to show how histories of empires, and those of encounters between the Global North and the Global South, were also histories of sex and race.

Berlin is often described as the site of sexual innovation in both popular and scholarly accounts of the history of sexuality in the twentieth century. Particularly in the inter-war period, the metropolis became an iconic symbol of gender-bending nightlife, an organizational centre for myriad movements of sexual emancipation, and a nexus of scholarly efforts to catalogue and understand human sexual comportment and identity. This chapter argues, however, that while there was certainly an explosion of public, literary, and medical interest in sex, sexuality, and sexual identity in early twentieth-century Berlin, the terms ‘invention’ and ‘discovery’ can oversimplify what was actually a very complex and contentious historical process. Focusing on a few examples of the divisions within queer communities – particularly the conflicts between feminist, lesbian, and transgender activists and the arguments emanating from the masculinist branch of the gay rights movement – it tracks how discourses about the morality of prostitution, the social impact of same-sex love, and racialized biological knowledge shaped definitions of citizenship in ways that still resonate and are still debated. It is this debate, rather than some kind of definitive invention of sexual identity, that makes this period relevant for our present.

This chapter provides an overview of Buddhist sexualities ranging from monastic celibacy in India, China and Japan, to Buddhist lay sexualities, to altruistic sexuality in Indian Mahayana Buddhism. It then examines religious sexuality in tantra in India and Tibet, including transgressive discourses in Indian Buddhist liturgies and sexual yoga techniques in Tibetan Buddhist literature. The chapter argues that these diverse and contradictory discourses all represent a shared concern with regulating sexuality and harnessing it for soteriological purposes. Both the renunciation of sensual experience in Indian monastic literature and the embrace of sensual experience in Tibetan sexual yoga have been framed as means for relieving suffering and attaining soteriological success. With examples from Vinaya literature, yogini tantras, premodern and contemporary literature, this chapter highlights the rich diversity of Buddhist sexualities and gender constructs.

In this chapter, we examine the evolving definition of sex tourism. Through a comprehensive literature review focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean, we assess the long history of commodified sex and travel and the difficulties in defining the practice as exclusive to heterosexual men purchasing sex or as a phenomenon exclusive to the Global South. A case study of Havana, Cuba, contributes to a deeper understanding of how colonial cities benefitted from commodified sex connected to travellers and racialized bodies. In analyzing the scholarship on sex tourism, we appreciate the heterogeneity of arrangements, identities, ambiguity, and fluidity of relationships. Both hosts and guests are looking for opportunities to enhance their lives and to challenge the gender, sexual, and racial dictates of their society. Tourist-related intimacies, therefore, are used for personal and familial gains and mobility in the global political economy. The findings reveal that while some studies have adopted narrow definitions, a more comprehensive approach argues for understanding sex tourism as part of a spectrum of intimate encounters that combine sex and money, encompassing everything from marriage to sex work.

Although Spanish-speaking lands are often imagined as lands of sexual intolerance, Buenos Aires is better characterized by ineffectual repression and by its recent celebration of sexual diversity. In this chapter we analyze sexuality in Buenos Aires against the backdrop of economic, socio-demographic, cultural, and political transformations that often undermined the regulations of authorities. The decades between 1880, when Buenos Aires became the capital, and the overthrow of President Juan Perón in 1955 were crucial for the formation of modern Argentina and constitute its focus. We begin with some preceding historical trends in the colonial and early independent era, and end with a succinct analysis of a few salient trends after 1955, especially those leading to Buenos Aires becoming a leader of LGBTQ+ rights in the twenty-first century. We discuss immigration, class differences in sexual behaviours, commercialized sex, sexual diversity with marica and homosexual identities, the rise of family sociability, and the push for sexual ‘normalcy’.

“Black Ecological Insurgencies” charts the formation of an insurgent ecological tradition in the Tidewater of Virginia from slavery through the emergence of Jim Crow, underscoring the relationship between these formations and the re-grounding of Black subjectivity within the Black body in contrast to the latter’s abstraction and extraction in the service of expropriation and accumulation associated with plantation and post-emancipation transformations of the landscape. Engaging court documents, bills of sale, slave narratives, state records related to the consolidation of fisheries, as well as historical newspapers articles and related images, I excavate the dynamic relation between Black collective self-creation, fugitivity, resistance, land and aquacultural cultivation, and the rejoining of Black subjectivity and embodiment outside the premises of fungibility and disposability.

Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s famed Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (1929), indexes the relevance of interracial passing today. We explore Hall’s film to explain the contemporary appeal of Larsen’s narrative. Larsen’s Passing licenses interpretive possibilities that transcend its immediate moment, even as it seeks to criticize specific historical realities of modern intersectional identity. Hall’s neo-passing narrative of 1920s Black femininity employs cinema to highlight the enduring immobility of the color line and the erotic and social risk of crossing it.

We assess Hall’s adaptation of the two-protagonist structure as it personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality; consider Hall’s use of cinematography to adapt Larsen’s rhetorical sleight of hand regarding US racial discourses; and discuss the homoerotics of passing in both works. We then contemplate Hall’s casting choices. The final section takes up the conclusion of the two works. Hall resolves some of Larsen’s famous ambiguity, but poignantly showcases the essential instability of the gendered, racialized body in US literature and culture across a century.