Sex Research: The Emergence, Development, and Decline of an Epistemic Community

During the late 1950s, in the USA, sex research started to develop itself as an epistemic community comprising individual researchers, organizations, journals, symposia, and conferences, based on a scientific paradigm aimed at multidisciplinarity and the internationalization of research in the ill-defined field of sexuality. This article traces the history of sex research from its origins in Germany (late nineteenth century) and focuses on its revival in the USA in 1922 within the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex. It focuses mainly on its development as an autonomous field which took place at the end of the 1950s with the foundation of the first organizations entirely dedicated to scientific research on sexuality and the creation of specialized scientific journals. The "sex research" community developed some time before the mid-1990s, when new social demands emerged, particularly in response to the HIV epidemic, the development of struggles for the emancipation of LGBT communities, sexual rights concerns, and sexual medicine supported by the pharmaceutical industry. Sex research then branched off in different directions, with critical sexuality studies more oriented toward qualitative approaches and committed to struggles for emancipation, the development of sexual medicine more focused on health issues, sexual dysfunction, therapy, and sexual health toward education, counseling, and prevention. After having exercised a certain hegemony in the field of sexuality research for more than decades, "sex research," which still has its own autonomous organizations and journals of a high scientific level, now represents only one of the facets of scientific research in sexuality, which continues to exert a significant influence on research developments in these fields.