Sexology’s Childhood:

This essay shows how the child was crucial to the scientification of sexual knowledge in the twentieth century, and how the universalization of the child was, in turn, aided by a globalization of sexology. An understanding of childhood as a formative stage of life was key to the understanding of the homosexual as a personage with a past, narratable in a case history. While the analysis of the coemergence of the child and the sciences of (homo)sexuality is usually located within Europe’s borders, in recollecting these entwined histories through a close reading of a marginalized Hindi essay titled “Scientific Investigation into Unnatural Fornication” (1927), published in North India, this article examines the importance of an (anti)colonial politics of age in the constitution of the sexological deviant, the colonial and racial logics of sexological categorization, and the foundational place of epistemic erasures in the global history of the sexual sciences.