Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science

From the Editors

2024-06-29T12:20:39-03:00

From the Editors

Introduction

2024-06-29T12:31:40-03:00

Introduction

Aldo Mieli, Italian Historian of Sciences and Gay Rights Activist

2024-06-27T16:10:59-03:00

The Italian historian of science Aldo Mieli is one of the key figures in the new “sexual science”, which emerged in several European countries at the beginning of the twentieth century. Founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Rassegna di studi sessuali (1921-1928), his role in Italy can be compared to that of Magnus Hirschfeld in Weimar Germany. This paper has three aims, two historical and one philosophical. First, we present the complex life of Mieli, drawing on published and unpublished sources. Second, we present the attempt to create in Italy also a community of young researchers who would reflect on sexuality and homosexuality without prejudice – interrupted by an early arrival of fascism. Finally, we claim that for many of those who do not recognize themselves in the dominant heterosexual norms, the new “sexual science” brought a hope one of suppressing arbitrary prejudices and of bringing a richer and more diverse knowledge of human sexuality, and thus of human condition.

Paradisiacal Sex

2024-06-29T12:00:11-03:00

Towards the end of his life, Michel Foucault proposed an interpretation of the sexual revolution in terms of “desexualisation”. The purpose of this essay is to outline the relationships between homosexual and queer experiences and those in late antiquity and Christianity. Through an analysis of the Foucauldian interpretation of Augustine of Hippo –specifically of his doctrine on paradisiacal sex and chastity– the aim is to demonstrate that asceticism may be conceived as a different exercise of sexuality that do not solely consists of abstinence, abstention, self-control or abnegation but, rather, libido is the very foundation of the subject’s being. Such a spiritual and sexual experience – that for Augustine tears subject from his will – for Foucault is very akin to the principle that should govern every devenir-homosexuels. Somehow, both Augustine’s Confessiones and Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh are testament of different but parallel lives.

Hysteria at Intervals

2024-06-28T20:07:55-03:00

Despite the increasing interest in the history of sexuality, there remains a significant risk in the history of science, namely, skepticism as an adverse reaction to the critical reconstruction of the contingent emergence of any scientific theory. It is important to understand how an excessive critical spirit might lead to an anti-scientific attitude to find alternative ways of historizing the scientia sexualis. I explore such alternative paths through the history of hysteria, a highly polemical phenomenon that intertwined neurology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, feminism, literature and, of course, sexuality. After highlighting some of the controversies around the topic, I discuss the ontological status of hysteria and how to conduct historical research on it without falling into the Scylla of naturalism or the Charybdis of constructivism.

Scientia Sexualis and Gender Bias in the History of Psychiatry

2024-06-27T15:34:38-03:00

Phyllis Chesler’s (2018) book Women and Madness, originally published in 1972, marks a pivotal moment in the discussion of gender bias in psychiatry. This paper examines how psychiatry has historically pathologized women’s behavior through a gender-biased lens, perpetuating power dynamics and societal norms. By analyzing both historical and contemporary texts, including works by Foucault and Krafft-Ebing, this study highlights the persistent gender bias in psychiatric diagnoses and treatments. The paper argues for the necessity of adopting a gender perspective in psychiatric practice to mitigate these biases.

“The Solitary Vice”

2024-06-27T16:21:18-03:00

Abstract: This article analyzes Brazilian doctor Álvaro Vieira’s understanding of the problem of masturbation. More than just for his profession, Vieira was known for his column in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Jornal, clarifying his readers’ doubts and questions, acting, in reality, as a cultural mediator. When dealing with the subject of masturbation, we can see that he was committed to addressing what he considered to be mystifications, prejudices and remnants of ignorance about the practice, proposing it as something normal and natural under certain circumstances. However, in his interpretation, even though he sought to distance himself from the foundations of onanism, the way masturbation has been pathologized since the 18th century, in his speeches this same pathologization is still present in some way, making his thinking more complex and less linear in the history of this sexual activity.

Histories and Narratives of the First Generation of Travestis in Rio de Janeiro

2024-06-27T15:17:00-03:00

This article investigates and problematizes the emergence of friendship networks that empowered trans experiences, specifically among those historically identified as travestis, in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s. Based on the narratives of Aloma Divina, Suzy Parker, and Yeda Brown, we analyze how friendship, with its fractures, dilemmas, and affections, potentiated subjectivation, ways of life, exchanges, and resignifications of self among gender-sex dissidents of cisheteronormativity

The Physiology of a Lake as a Whole

2024-06-27T14:56:15-03:00

Analogies between ecological systems and organisms are a common trope in early ecology, but discussions of these analogies tend to focus on the particular version of them found in the works of pioneer plant ecologist Frederic E. Clements (1874-1945). This paper partly fills this gap by analyzing the relatively well-developed version of the analogy between lake ecological systems and organisms found in the works of founding American limnologist Edward Asahel Birge (1851-1950). I argue that although, for Birge, the lake-to-organism parallel did not imply that lakes were literally organisms, it reflected his commitment to a holistic view of lakes, which anticipated the distinctive holological perspective on ecological systems of later ecosystem ecology.

Examining the Social Philosophy of Opium History

2024-06-27T14:33:05-03:00

This historiographical paper focuses on the social philosophy of opiate history to foreground the integration of Latour’s ANT in the analysis of drug memories as a methodological novelty. Specifically, this paper has three tasks to undertake. First, it is conveyed that a complete understanding of opium’s past requires a Latourian ontology orienting around the dissolution of nonhuman objects in human subjects. Second, through the accentuation of how factuality becomes the self-disappearing backbone of narcotic history by translation and inscription, this paper attempts to show an appropriate epistemology which intellectually corresponds to the said Latourian ontology of opium’s social recollections. Third, an ANT-based method is devised so that the drug’s sociohistorical realities can be reconstructed with the pharmaceutical and scientific information being textually invisible. Taken together, the take-home message is that social historiographers need to treat the narcotic’s past as an opportunity for broader interpretations of human souls.