Abstract

Scientific Sexology--lagging behind the rest of the 'human' sciences for curious political and metaphysical reasons--has only recently undergone a paradigmatic shift from biological functionalism to cybernetic systems theory. The University of Chicago's 1994 National Health and Social Life Survey was the first major sexological survey of sexual behavior in The United States since 1950's Kinsey Institute research. The argument of The Critique of Sexual Reason concerns not only the transformation of sexual norms during the period of sexual research that spans from Kinsey to the NHSLS--but examines as well, the contributions of sexual science to the cultural experience of sexual norms. The dissertation reviews the rhetoric of post-World War II American sexology in order to interrogate how the body has been given to understanding as an empirical given for historical sociology, cultural anthropology, and the philosophy of 'sexual difference' during this period. ;The late-twentieth century shift from physiological to cybernetic sexology is deeply embedded in a number of transformations regarding how the the sexual category is understood and experienced. To trace mediation between the cognitive construction of sexual reasoning and popular sexual culture, the dissertation locates the rhetoric of late-twentieth century sexology within philosophical and social-theoretical constructions of the concept of sexual 'autonomy'. Initially, I consult Frederic Jameson's framework for historiographical work on the 1960's to review the sexual articulation of the Althusserian analytic category of cultural "autonomy". Then, I compare Luce Irigaray's post-structuralist philosophy of sexual difference to the corporeal rhetoric of The Hite Report to index the emerging thematic of female sexual 'autonomy' during this period. This resonance in the intellectual trope of "autonomy" during the American 1960's and 1970's reveals a significant degree of co-implication with those social conditions that most served to isolate and formalize sexual reasoning during the period. ;Rejecting the possibility that either biological instincts or market-mechanisms can explain the well documented existence of sexual norms, The Critique of Sexual Reason uses the habitus/field construct of Pierre Bourdieu to explain how late-modern cultural institutions of intimacy--of sexology, domestic education, anti-abortion advocacy, feminism, philosophies of sexual 'difference', contraceptive technology, marriage and workplace law--have contributed to the 'autonomy' of late-twentieth century sexual judgment. Rather than locate the nexus of deliberation and negotiation within the selfish proclivities of the biophysical individual, the analytic rubric of the sexual field reveals how institutions of intimacy have culled popular sensibilities in order to codify them; so that, in turn, these institutionally coordinated sexual norms could be reabsorbed as tacit structuration within quotidian events and behaviors