ABSTRACT
The shift from the one-sex to the two-sex models is instructive not only for its constructions of gender ideology. It is an index of the interlocking histories of sex, gender, and science more broadly, and especially for the ways in which scientific thinkers have scrutinized normative and non-normative bodies to make larger truth claims about society. The existence of the female orgasm, for but one example, has at times been challenged and even outright erased by medico-scientific discourse even while interest in women’s reproduction has been consistently debated and politicized. During the second half of the nineteenth century, scientific and social interest in sex was transformed into a multidisciplinary field known as sexology. Indeed, early sexology, which bridged the biological sciences, clinical medicine, and psychology, was often focused on deviant acts, behaviors, or bodies, through which sexologists indirectly defined the norm.
