Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online

Extract

Research on sexuality began as a complex and interdisciplinary endeavor. Although it was, like so many of today's fields, a product of the nineteenth-century belief in the power of rational scientific investigation, it was very much a latecomer. F. H. A. Marshall commented in his 1910 synthesis, The Physiology of Reproduction, that physiologists had made comprehensive studies of all other bodily functions, but reproduction had not been the object of sustained research. Marshall was thus obliged to bring together scraps of evidence from diverse sources, from anthropology via medicine to animal husbandry. Research on sexuality was similarly affected by a scarcity of materials and taboos against investigation, and the threat of prosecution for publication.The lack of institutional and financial support, and the general unacceptability of the subject, meant that large projects using the research protocols emerging in medicine and the social sciences were an impossibility. Thus research into sexuality initially tended to be based in the analysis of phenomena brought to the investigator's attention (cases encountered by doctors, legal trials, self-observation, reports from friends and colleagues, letters from readers), and the collation of evidence gleaned from a wide variety of fields – history, literature, medicine, and the growing field of anthropology and ethnography. Theories might ... log in or subscribe to read full text