Sexual science constitutes the empirical study of sexual function and behavior in living beings. It originated from natural philosophy and is now characterized by the methods and aims of modern science. This chapter treats the main story of sexual science, starting with conceptual concerns over the body and using examples from Chinese and Islamic medicine. Next, the analysis shifts to the foundations of sexual science in the Western world, examining philosophical and medical traditions that culminated in medieval scholasticism and institutions like universities and hospitals. The chapter then treats the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, in which contemporaries invented the “two-sex” model and pioneered new ideas of “biopolitics.” The analysis turns the nineteenth century’s complex “discovery” of sex and the powerful connections between global imperialism and sexual understanding. The chapter concludes with the dynamics surrounding the body and sexuality in the global twentieth century, as found in evolutionary biology, sexology, and psychoanalysis, and the relation between mass culture and ideals of the sexual revolution. Sexual science appears paradoxical: sometimes, it seemed an agent of discipline and power, supporting entrenched values, or it seemed to help emancipate individuals, debunking prejudices and superstitions and liberating attitudes and behaviors.

Locating Wagner’s views about sexuality and social mores in the context of his time, this chapter moves from the opposing arguments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft towards the end of the eighteenth century, through the idealisation of women in the Biedermeier era and the coterminous radical tendencies critical of such moral codes, to nineteenth-century representations in literature (notably the Bürgerliches Trauerspiel or Bourgeois Tragedy) and, at the end of the century, visual art (women as devils, vampires, castrators, or killers).

Documented sexual experience of the time is discussed, as are the grossly exaggerated aspects of Wagner’s own sexual career. Criticism of Wagner for failing, in his works, to abandon the phallocentric matrix of his time is unhistorical, it is argued. And indeed many of Wagner’s heroines exhibit elements of autonomy, agency, or self-determination with the potential for radical change.