Beyond Kinsey: The Committee for Research on Problems of Sex and American Psychology.

Abstract

Kinsey’s midcentury surveys of male and female sexual behaviour are unquestionably pivots in the ‘modernization of sex;’ that shift from religious to psycho-medical authority over norms of human sexual conduct. A quarter century later, sex became ‘postmodernized’ through mass consumption in late capitalist societies. In that later moment, scholars increasingly began to think about ‘sex’ as a historical category, to be understood as something produced in discourse rather than a natural or psychological drive battling repression for its liberated expression. Such histories have prompted further attention to the ways that accounts of the ‘naturalness’ of sex have been funded, organized, written and received in earlier modern moments.

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