Gentlemen's Disagreement

Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men

Peter Hegarty

Peter Hegarty

Cloth $75.00 ISBN: 9780226024448 Will Publish July 2013

Paper $25.00 ISBN: 9780226024585 Will Publish July 2013

E-book $25.00 ISBN: 9780226024615 Will Publish July 2013

What is the relationship between intelligence and sex? In recent decades, studies of the controversial histories of both intelligence testing and of human sexuality in the United States have been increasingly common—and hotly debated. But rarely have the intersections of these histories been examined. In Gentlemen’s Disagreement, Peter Hegarty enters this historical debate by recalling the debate between Lewis Terman—the intellect who championed the testing of intelligence— and pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and shows how intelligence and sexuality have interacted in American psychology.

Through a fluent discussion of intellectually gifted onanists, unhappily married men, queer geniuses, lonely frontiersmen, religious ascetics, and the two scholars themselves, Hegarty traces the origins of Terman’s complaints about Kinsey’s work to show how the intelligence testing movement was much more concerned with sexuality than we might remember. And, drawing on Foucault, Hegarty reconciles these legendary figures by showing how intelligence and sexuality in early American psychology and sexology were intertwined then and remain so to this day.

Review Quotes
Contents

Thomas A. Foster | editor of Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuali

“Peter Hegarty has crafted a fascinating history of the intersectionality of sexuality and intelligence in the social sciences. Hegarty masterfully weaves together queer theory, history, and psychology to examine how what many in the social science community have defined as normal is constructed and mutually constitutive. Gentlemen’s Disagreement sheds new light on Alfred Kinsey and Lewis Terman, but just as important, it offers insight into how these human science discourses of sexuality and intelligence developed and how they continue today to shape modern psychology’s understandings of (and assertions about) normality. ”

Robert A. Nye | editor of Sexuality

“Peter Hegarty’s highly original study of the relationship between sexuality and intelligence in the twentieth-century American human sciences focuses on their most celebrated students, Alfred Kinsey and Lewis Terman. By analyzing their personal biographies, training, disciplinary outlooks, and use of the conventions of contemporary science, Hegarty is able to construct a fascinating cautionary tale about unacknowledged subjectivity, misleading methodologies, and the politics of intelligence testing and human sexuality that will inform both practitioners and historians of the human sciences.”

John Carson | author of The Measure of Merit

“Peter Hegarty is the first scholar to examine seriously and systematically the connections between the discourses of intelligence and of sexuality, both of which were being refashioned in important ways in the United States. Hegarty’s use of Lewis Terman and Alfred Kinsey to build his analysis is original and compelling.”

Contents

Acknowledgments

1   A Gentlemen’s Disagreement?
2   Why the Gifted Boy Didn’t Masturbate
3   Less Than Ideal Husbands
4   Queer Individuals: Their Nature and Nurture
5   Gentlemen and Horse Traders
6   Ancient Ascetics and Modern Non-Americans
7   Frontier Living, by Figures Alone
8   Normalization Now

Notes
Works Cited
Index of Names
General Index

For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu

Gay and Lesbian Studies

History of Science

Psychology: General Psychology

Sociology: History of Sociology

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