DDRIG: Intimate Crises: The history of notions of sexuality and gender in the 19th and 20th century

This research delves into the history of the legal and social regulation of, and the production of knowledge, around human bodies and sexuality. The goal is to uncover the ways in which modern state institutions, legal frameworks, shifting material relations, and the reception and translation of medical knowledge, transformed conceptions of sexuality during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hegemonic narratives have sought to obfuscate not only the contemporary existence of non-normative sexual experiences in certain national contexts, but also aimed to bury any historical traces of non-normative forms of gender and sexuality. This dissertation project documents the history and shifting perceptions of sexual diversity and explores how and why attitudes toward this diversity were historically transformed in different national contexts.By conducting archival research to examine the pre-colonial to post-colonial periods, the project aims to answer the following questions: (1) How did the historical ‘otherizing’ of non-normative sexuality take shape and contributed to the marginalization of those “others”? (2) How did the ‘otherizing’ depend (or not) on the widely accepted thesis surrounding the emergence and translation of ‘medicalized’ understandings of sexuality in the nineteenth century? (3) In a colonial and post-colonial context, how did certain forms of sexual expression become criminalized? (4) How did the structural marginalization of certain types of sexuality manifest itself and impact public health of e.g., populations impacted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic? Project findings will contribute toward a doctoral dissertation, a book manuscript, and the data generated will be archived to facilitate future research on these topics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.