ABSTRACT
Today, the study of sexuality brings together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines – history, politics, literature, religion, the arts, psychology, anthropology, medicine, and biology. At its best, this interdisciplinary work promotes critical self-reflection on disciplinary assumptions about sexuality and the data used to test those assumptions: Is there such a thing as a fixed sexuality and how would one prove its existence? Such questions have arisen ever since the emergence of the concept of ‘sexuality’ at the end of the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, theorists regarded humanistic and literary sources as high quality evidence in analyses of sexuality. By the end of the nineteenth century, literary and humanistic sources seemingly took a back seat to biological data. A more nuanced analysis of this shift in the prioritization of evidence reveals, however, that it accompanied a changing emphasis: biological and medical investigations tended to focus on specific and immutable sexualities, understood as pathological, while humanistic studies tended to concentrate on universal and fluid sexualities, often understood as part of a healthy human experience.
