Sexology, sexual development, and hormone treatments in Southern Europe and Latin America, c.1920-40.

Displacing the physiological model that had held sway in 19th-century medical thinking, early 20th-century medical scientists working on hormones promoted a new understanding of the body, psychological reactions, and the sexual instinct, arguing that each were fundamentally malleable. Hormones came to be understood as the chemical messengers that regulated an individual's growth and sexual development, and sexologists interested in this area focused primarily on children and adolescents. Hormone research also promoted a view of the body in which 'hermaphroditism', homosexuality, and 'sexual perversions' such as masochism and sadism were attributed to anomalies in the internal secretions produced by the testes or the ovaries. This article focuses on Spanish, Italian, Argentinian, and Brazilian sexology shaped by endocrinological research in the interwar period. First, it shows the key role hormone treatments played in the historical development of sexology in Southern Europe and Latin America. Second, it looks at how sexologists employed hormone research to study human sexual development in the early stages of life, and how they set about 'correcting' what they viewed as 'sexual anomalies'.

Sexology and development.

The history of sexology is a well-established field of scholarly investigation animated by ongoing contestations around the disciplinary boundaries, political outlook, and transnational dimensions of the sexological field. This special issue focuses on the multivalent concept of development to address some of the most pressing questions driving current historiographical conversations in this area. The five articles examine how sexology developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries and explore how sexologists deployed various developmental categories to understand sexuality in different national, geographical, and linguistic spaces, including India, Latin America, and Western and Southern Europe. They show how central tracing the relationship between sexuality and human development became to sexologists' understanding of their project and its value. By interrogating the intersecting individual, social, cultural, and evolutionary developmental frameworks at the heart of sexological knowledge production, the articles engage with sexology as a global and transnational project deeply shaped by ideologies of race, nation, and empire and motivated by a diverse range of political concerns and intellectual questions. In so doing, the special issue as a whole demonstrates the breadth of the sexological field in terms of its interdisciplinary scope, diverse political and intellectual agendas, and global dimensions.

Types, norms, and normalisation: Hormone research and treatments in Italy, Argentina, and Brazil, c. 1900-50.

Displacing the physiological model that had held sway in 19th-century medical thinking, early 20th-century hormone research promoted an understanding of the body and sexual desires in which variations in sex characteristics and non-reproductive sexual behaviours such as homosexuality were attributed to anomalies in the internal secretions produced by the testes or the ovaries. Biotypology, a new brand of medical science conceived and led by the Italian endocrinologist Nicola Pende, employed hormone research to study human types and hormone treatments to normalise individuals who did not conform to accepted medical norms. Latin American medical doctors, eugenicists, and sexologists took up biotypology with enthusiasm. This article considers the case studies of Italy, Argentina, and Brazil, and analyses the work of medical doctors who adopted a biotypological mode of reasoning and employed to various extents hormone therapies in their practice. By focusing on hormone therapies that aimed to normalise secondary sexual characteristics and the sexual instinct, the article suggests that while the existence of normality was contested to the point that a number of medical scientists argued that no such thing existed, the pursuit of normality was carried out in very practical terms through the new medical technologies hormone research had introduced.

Optimizing and normalizing the population through hormone therapies in Italian science, c.1926-1950.

This essay explores how hormone treatments were used to optimize and normalize individuals under Italian Fascism. It does so by taking the activities of the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute - an Italian eugenics and endocrinological centre founded by Nicola Pende in 1926 - as the prime example of a version of eugenics, biotypology, which was based on hormone therapies. This essay first demonstrates that Italian Fascist biopolitics was not only concerned with increasing the size of the Italian population, but also with improving its quality. It suggests that under the Italian Fascist regime hormone therapies became eugenic tools of intervention to improve the Italian race. Second, while Pende's institute purportedly enhanced men and women, its activities show the extent to which the 'techniques of normalization' pursued by the Fascist regime were both systematic and invasive.

Italian sexology, Nicola Pende's biotypology and hormone treatments in the 1920s.

This article analyses a selection of Nicola Pende's studies from the 1920s on 'endocrinological abnormalities' associated with impotence, a lack of virility in men, a lack of femininity in women, and homosexuality. By analysing endocrinological sexual theories and treatments, it aims to illustrate the ways in which hormone research pioneered an innovative approach to the study of sexual behaviour in Italian sexology, and to show how it was used to normalise individuals. It demonstrates how endocrinology promoted an understanding of the body and sexual desire in which the attributes of masculinity and femininity, and even of sexual orientation, were thought to be malleable and subject to deliberate engineering.

Female same-sex desires: conceptualizing a disease in competing medical fields in nineteenth-century Europe.

This article examines the ways in which female same-sex desires were represented across a range of nineteenth-century European medical writings. While recognizing the conceptual innovations of the late-nineteenth-century psychiatric idea of "sexual inversion," it argues that the category of "sexual invert" was positioned alongside other medical representations of same-sex desires, such as gynecological descriptions of women with hypertrophy of the clitoris and socio-cultural analyses of the tribade-prostitute. These representations complicate current historical accounts of sexual inversion, which emphasize conceptual ruptures within the history of medicine.