ANU Gender Institute - Gender and History node 2015 seminar series

Abstract: The sexual life of the child often appears as little more than a footnote in the history of sexuality. Yet even before Sigmund Freud published his groundbreaking Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905, articulating such key psychoanalytic concepts as the Oedipal complex and the "pregenital" phases of infancy, a push towards studying child sexuality as part of "normal" sexual development had begun among European and North American sexologists. Consequently, child sexuality constituted one of the first areas of explicit debate between the emerging disciplines of sexology and psychoanalysis at the turn of the century. This paper argues that such interdisciplinary debates contributed to the active shaping of the modern sexual subject against the backdrop of an increasing prioritization of the "normal" within sex research.

Contact: Hyaeweol Choi