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In 1903, young Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger (1880–1903) published Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (literally: Sex and Character. A Principled Investigation), in which he maintained that the conception of "permanent bisexuality" he advanced was completely new. His claims were challenged in 1906 by physician Wilhelm Fließ (1858–1928), who referred to his elaborations on the issue in a treatise published in 1897. The accusation of plagiarism against the by then deceased Weininger were aggravated as Fließ blamed Sigmund Freud for having orchestrated an intrigue aiming at informing Weininger about the ideas on permanent bisexuality the physician had articulated. Despite the heated debate surrounding the primacy claims, none of those involved was prepared to admit that sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) had been the first to conceptualize permanent bisexuality in connection with his 1896 discussion of the sexual intermediariness of all human beings. Hirschfeld's Sappho und Sokrates—his first sexological treatise—aimed in the last resort at debunking closed distributional schemes of sexuality for the sake of a template of universal bisexuality modulated by the individual's unique sexual intermediariness. On these assumptions, it is not surprising that Hirschfeld's counterintuitive and profoundly deranging postulation of potentially infinite bisexual forms encompassing all existing sexed individuals was ignored by those partaking in the primacy debate. Irrespective of the disagreements the litigants may have had among themselves with respect to chronological or theoretical issues, they all sought to restore the full rights of the endangered phallicism subtending Western culture that Hirschfeld had set out to confute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between November 1930 and March 1932, German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) undertook a trip around the world, eventually visiting the United States (where he was greeted as the 'Dr. Einstein of sex'), Japan, China, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Egypt, and Palestine. The resulting travel report, entitled Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (1933), is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the then-emerging discipline of sexual ethnology, and comprises the irst non-Eurocentric, anti-colonialist critique of Asian cultures from a sexological perspective. Taking into account Hirschfeld's overarching design to dissolve close schemes of sexual, racial and cultural taxonomies, the study focuses on his assessment of China's religiously neutral, sober approach of sexual realities as 'a world-wide exception' intimately connected to its Confucian and Taoistic heritage, and resonating with the core premises of his Spinozian-inspired and Darwinian-based sexology. Notwithstanding his praise of Chinese sexual realism, however, Hirschfeld argued that China's sexual mores (Sitten) -- like all other sexual mores to date--fail to sufice the criteria of a universally valid sexual morality (Sittlichkeit). While the binary schemes of sexual distribution on which sexual mores are preponderantly grounded misconstrue the complexities of individual sexualities and foster, as compensation, the escapism into the non-constraints of other-worldly utopias, Hirschfeld's postulation of potentially ininite, uniquely nuanced sexualities leads to a radical blueprint of intra-historic sexual emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines anthropology's ongoing neglect of the theoretical challenges posed by Alfred Kinsey's (1894-1956) critique of binary sexuality and his re-definition of sexual difference. Focusing on the universal variability of life and the many-leveled continuities of the sexual, Kinsey propounded a deconstructive approach of sex research conducive to a paradigm shift at the core of sexology that allows grasping sexuality as a matter of individual differences within a continuous scheme of sexual distribution. While Kinsey's disruptive contentions have been mostly disregarded by anthropologists for decades, they continue to incite, on the one side, infuriated reactions from the proponents of a Bible-inspired re-instatement of the clear-cut male/female divide, and, on the other, enthusiastic recognition from post-modern advocates of a queer unsettling and rethinking of traditional conceptualizations of sexuality that operate with closed sets of sexual alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features German-Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld was the first to outline a non-Eurocentric, anti-colonialist critique of culture from a sexological perspective in his book Weltreise eines Sexualforschers. On November 15, 1930 Hirschfeld set out for the U.S. where he had planned a lecturing tour. Acknowledged at the time as one of the most eminent theorists in the history of sexology, he was saluted upon his arrival as "Doctor Einstein of Sex."