Dissertation Information for Britta Isabelle McEwanNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: Viennese sexual knowledge as science and social reform movement, 1900--1934 Abstract: This dissertation argues that the production and distribution of sexual knowledge in Vienna, Austria, underwent a dramatic shift during the years 1900-1934: from a form of scientific inquiry largely practiced by medical specialists to a social reform movement engaged by and intended for a wider audience that included workers, women, and children. Whereas fin-de-siècle sexology, as practiced in Vienna, sought to classify and heal individuals as a medical science, sexual knowledge was employed during the interwar years to heal the social body: the truncated, diseased, and impoverished population of the newly created Republic of Austria. This shift refocused scholarship and popular attention away from sexological taxonomies of aberrant sexual behaviors and towards heterosexual, reproductive couples whom numerous social reform movements targeted as central to the regeneration of society. Simultaneously, the discourse of sexual danger intensified in Vienna during the first third of the twentieth century. Sexological and popular literature de-emphasized the threat of individual sexual predators and focused instead on venereal disease and dysgenic breeding as enemies of social health. This dissertation highlights the employment of emotional testimonies and melodrama by those Viennese authorities and laypeople that wished to illustrate sexual danger in disease, reproduction, or scientific ignorance. It focuses on the changing purpose of sexual knowledge in Vienna, as understood by those who created and disseminated it. |
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