Sexuality and Technology

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Europe and North America, medical researchers began to study variations in sexual behavior and desire, identifying people considered

‘deviant’ from the heterosexual norm of given times and places (Irvine 1990). Michel Foucault (1976) described how in the nineteenth century scientists started defining sex as something core to our identity, and so began to establish sexual standards and measure individuals and groups. Sexology as a discipline is conventionally traced to the publication of Krafft-Ebbing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis (2011 [1886]), but this is simply a place marker in the development of the ‘science’ of sex in the Western academy.