This contribution proposes a reading of the social and political questions that characterize the sciences of female desire in the long time of their history. Some recurrent themes discussed in the 19th century about women's sexuality by science and medicine are evoked. The second part is devoted to the so-called "modernization" of knowledge about sex (end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century) and to the evocation of what the Freudian approach does, takes up and modifies in the history of knowledge and therapeutics about sexuality. The third step is to point out the contributions of the feminist critique of psychoanalysis to the social study of knowledge about sexuality. This tradition, which has remained in a sense autonomous, is connected to contemporary approaches to the social study of science, marked by a historical and anthropological perspective that privileges material contexts and statements of knowledge, which inspires some of the contributions in the volume as a whole. The last section of the contribution is devoted to the orientations taken and pursued by the authors of the present work. The volume as a whole outlines a historical reading of the transformation of the medical and biomedical regimes of knowledge about sex in the 20th and 21st centuries, evokes the main issues and questions dealt with in the volume, and points out the contributions to the understanding of what the contempo-rare sciences of desire are, their objects, their instruments and their actors