Hide and Seek: Elmer Belt, Agnes, and the Battle over Castration in Transsexual Surgery, 1953-1962.

In the 1950s, the idea of sex change increasingly assumed the mainstay of public interest. As psychiatrists and psychologists developed new understandings of gender, the role of surgeons is often overlooked in the early history of sex reassignment. This article explores the work of one such doctor, Elmer Belt, a urologist based in Los Angeles.

Contested Minds Across Time: Perspectives from Chinese History and Culture.

This essay provides an overview of the contributions by Emily Baum, Chengyang Jiang, and Sandra Teresa Hyde. Chinese history and culture provide a useful resource for thinking beyond the limits of the contemporary human sciences, such as the way that the mind operates as a contested object of knowledge across time, place, and disciplines.

Castration fever: On trans, China, and psychoanalysis.

This essay considers the evolution of the author's research over the last 15 years in which the treatment of castration as a historical problem holds promise for bridging disparate scholarly fields and paradigms. In particular, by tracing the shift in the author's intellectual focus from the science of sex change to the history of transcultural psychoanalysis, some insights are offered in regard to the intertwined politics of transness, Chineseness, and the unconscious. Though psychoanalysis may appear as a subject far removed from the eunuchs of ancient China, this essay highlights some of the methodological stakes that have saturated the historical study of both topics.

Magnetoelectric Spin Wave Modulator Based On Synthetic Multiferroic Structure.

We describe a spin wave modulator - spintronic device aimed to control spin wave propagation by an electric field. The modulator consists of a ferromagnetic film serving as a spin wave bus combined with a synthetic multiferroic comprising piezoelectric and magnetostrictive materials. Its operation is based on the stress-mediated coupling between the piezoelectric and magnetostrictive materials.

Liberating sex, knowing desire: "scientia sexualis"and epistemic turning points in the history of sexuality.

This study considers the role of epistemic turning points in the historiography of sexuality. Disentangling the historical complexity of "scientia sexualis," I argue that the late 19th century and the mid-20th century constitute two critical epistemic junctures in the genealogy of sexual liberation, as the notion of free love slowly gave way to the idea of sexual freedom in modern western society. I also explore the value of the Foucauldian approach for the study of the history of sexuality in non-western contexts.

The laboratory technology of discrete molecular separation: the historical development of gel electrophoresis and the material epistemology of biomolecular science, 1945-1970.

Preparative and analytical methods developed by separation scientists have played an important role in the history of molecular biology. One such early method is gel electrophoresis, a technique that uses various types of gel as its supporting medium to separate charged molecules based on size and other properties. Historians of science, however, have only recently begun to pay closer attention to this material epistemological dimension of biomolecular science.

Rethinking 'style' for historians and philosophers of science: converging lessons from sexuality, translation, and East Asian studies.

Historians and philosophers of science have furnished a wide array of theoretical-historiographical terms to emphasize the discontinuities among different systems of knowledge. Some of the most famous include Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm", Michel Foucault's "episteme", and the notion of "styles of reasoning" more recently developed by Ian Hacking and Arnold Davidson. This paper takes up this theoretical-historiographical thread by assessing the values and limitations of the notion of "style" for the historical and philosophical study of science.

Effecting science, affecting medicine: homosexuality, the Kinsey reports, and the contested boundaries of psychopathology in the United States, 1948-1965.

Despite the well-documented intensive battle between Alfred Kinsey and American psychiatrists around the mid-twentieth century, this paper argues that Kinsey's work, in fact, played a significant role in transforming mental health experts' view of homosexuality starting as far back as the late 1940s and extending all the way through the mid-1960s. After analyzing the way in which Kinsey's work pushed American psychiatrists to re-evaluate their understanding of homosexuality indirectly through the effort of clinical psychologists, I then focus to a greater extent on examples that illustrate how the Kinsey reports directly influenced members of the psychiatric community. In the conclusion, using a Foucauldian conception of "discourse," I propose that in order to approach the struggle around the pathological status of homosexuality in the 1950s and the 1960s, thinking in terms of a "politics of knowledge" is more promising than simply in terms of a "politics of diagnosis.