Heike Bauer

Theorizing Female Inversion: Sexology, Discipline, and Gender at the Fin de Siècle

Th e q u e s t i o n o f h o w t o t h e o r i z e historical discourses of sex has received much critical attention since Foucault first developed his influential model of sexuality as the product of historical and socioeconomic contingency. Foucault’s approach has rightly been criticized for marginalizing issues of gender, as queer and feminist critics have turned attention to the complex intersections between concepts of sexual behavior and ideas of gender. Investigations of female sexuality in particular, ranging from the reconstructive lesbian histories of Martha Vicinus and others to the queer cultural histories of female gender advanced by Judith Halberstam, have complicated our understanding of how to theorize the experiential realities of historical sexual subjects whose words and thoughts have not always been preserved. These distinct, frequently opposing studies typically approach the theorization of sexological taxonomies in relation to ideas of modern sexual identity formation, importantly scrutinizing the impact and validity of identity labels and identifying gaps in existing histories of sexuality. but how can we understand the meanings of sexual concepts at the point

Vital lines drawn from books: difficult feelings in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

This article examines the representation of a transnational archive of queer books in Alison Bechdels graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? for the insights it provides into the role of reading in making sense of the often difficult “felt experiences” of lesbian life. In both memoirs, books serve an important narrative function in the portrayal of Alisons lesbian identification and its complex emotional entanglements with the lives of parents who are trapped—killed even, in the case of the father—in the wastelands of patriarchy and heterosexual expectation. The article argues that in this complex family dynamic in which “sexual identity” itself is a problem and emotions remain largely unspoken, books act as fragile conduits of feelings, shaping familial relationships even as they allow Alison to contextualize her life in relation to historical events and social norms. Reading books allows her to understand the apparently U.S.-specific history of her family in relation to a wider queer history in the West.

‘Race’, normativity and the history of sexuality: Magnus Hirschfeld's racism and the early-twentieth-century sexology

This article explores intersections between ‘race’ and sexuality in the work of Magnus Hirschfeld and its racialised reception. Hirschfeld, a Jewish German homosexual physician and activist, was instrumental in establishing sexology in Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century, until his lifework was destroyed by the Nazi regime. He is best known today for his theorisations of sexuality. However, following the events of 1933, he turned his attention from sexuality to an analysis of racism, which became one of the first studies of this kind. The article retraces key moments in the formation and destruction of Hirschfelds sexology, and his own critique of racism, in a bid to address broader questions about the politics of biological and cultural normativity. It argues that while for Hirschfeld the ‘natural human’ was sexualised, he considered his or her racialisation an invention of normative discourses that aimed to naturalise scientific ideas as universal ‘truths’.

Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity

The 1847 Report of the Commission of the Inquiry of the State of Education in Wales was a pivotal moment in the development of Welsh national identity. Conducted by non-Welsh-speaking English commissioners, their ‘‘findings’’ associated Welshness with an exhaustive list of traits and attributes of the kind that have become more familiarly identified with the notorious degeneration debates of the later nineteenth century. ‘‘Petty thefts, lying, cozening, every species of chicanery, drunkenness (where the means exists), and idleness’’ were just some of the characteristic misdeeds ascribed to the Welsh (74). Most worryingly for commissioner Jelinger C. Symons, Wales seemed to exhibit a collective ‘‘want of chastity’’, evident in the conduct of Welsh women, whose alleged sexual immorality Symons declared ‘‘sufficient to account for all other immoralities’’ (75). Twentieth-century historians have examined the impact of the three-volume Report on somewhat defensive self-definitions of Welsh identity. However, the first lengthy contemporary response was written by 42-year-old Jane Williams, a protégée of the influential Lady Llanover and, like her, an ardent advocate for the preservation of the Welsh language. Setting the tone for ensuing debates, Williams sidestepped the inherent misogyny of the Report and focused on the affirmation of Welsh national identity in terms of a politics of language. Williams ridiculed the ignorant and prejudiced position of English commissioners, who, unable to speak or understand the subject of their study, ‘‘fictitiously theorize a national character out of the refuse dregs that have filtered through from its higher and better state’’ (76). Jane Aaron’s important new book, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity, shows that gender matters in the emergence of Welsh nationality. Building on and considerably expanding her previous study of writing by and about women in nineteenth-century Wales, Pur fel y Dur: Y Gymraes yn Llên Menywod y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg (1998), Aaron provides a compelling account of the development of nineteenth-century Welsh women’s writing and its contributions to a growing sense of Welsh

Introduction: Queer 1950s: rethinking sexuality in the postwar years

Book synopsis: This collection brings together scholars from across the humanities in a fresh examination of queer lives, cultures and thought in the first full post-war decade. Through explorations of sexology, literature, film, oral testimony, newspapers and court records it nuances understandings of the period, and makes a case for the particularity of queer lives in different national contexts – from Finland to New Zealand, the UK to the USA - whilst also marking the transnational movement of people and ideas. The collection rethinks perceptions of the 1950s, traces genealogies of sexual thought in that decade, and pinpoints some of its legacies. In so doing, it explores the utility of queer theoretical approaches and asks how far they can help us to unpick queer lives, relationships and networks in the past.

Burning Sexual Subjects: Books, Homophobia and the Nazi Destruction of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin

The Nazi book burnings are one of the defining moments both in the modern history of the book and twentieth-century history more broadly. Historians of Nazism have paid considerable attention to their role in the escalation of Nazi terror and its Anglo-American reception.1 Other critiques of violence and hatred have similarly turned to the events of 1933 to ask what it is, to borrow the words of Rebecca Knuth, ‘about texts and libraries that puts them in the line of fire during social conflict?’2 Knuth answers her own question by pointing to the crucial role of books in collective identity formation and its sustenance. ‘As the voice and memory of the targeted group’, she argues, ‘books and libraries are central to culture and identity [and] vital in sustaining a group’s uniqueness’.3 For Knuth and many other critics, books are the material correlative of an established cultural identity, and book burnings constitute the attempt to eradicate it. This line of investigation, which has productively examined the symbolism of burning books — including the fact that it has a limited function as an act of censorship — tends to focus on the losses incurred in the act of destruction. In contrast, I want to turn attention to the remains: the documents and objects which survived the Nazi attack on books in the raid on Magnus Hirschfeld’s (1868–1935) Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin.

Introduction: Transnational Lesbian Cultures

This special issue examines the transnational shape and shaping of lesbian lives and cultures in and across China, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It uses the expression “transnational lesbian cultures” to suggest that despite sometimes radically different sociopolitical and cultural contexts, the lived experiences of same-sex desire and their emotional attachments create particular affinities between women who love women, affinities that reach across the distinct cultural and social contexts that shape them. The articles brought together explore lesbian subcultures, film, graphic novels, music, and online intimacies. They show that as a cultural and political signifier and as an analytical tool, lesbian troubles and complicates contemporary sexual politics, not least by revealing some of the gendered structures that shape debates about sexuality in a range of critical, cultural and political contexts. While the individual pieces cover a wide range of issues and concerns—which are often highly specific to the historical, cultural, and political contexts they discuss—together they tell a story about contemporary transnational lesbian culture: one that is marked by intricate links between norms and their effects and shaped by the efforts to resist denial, discrimination, and sometimes even active persecution.

Sexology Backward: Hirschfeld, Kinsey and the Reshaping of Sex Research in the 1950s

In histories of modern sexology, the 1950s commonly figure as a point of rupture. The decade is seen to mark a shift in sexological research from the medico-forensic and gay rights debates of turn-of-the-century Europe, which had culminated in Magnus Hirschfeld’s founding of the world’s first Institute of Sexual Sciences in Berlin in 1919, to the large-scale studies of ‘American’ sexual behaviour conducted by Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues at Indiana University.1 Critical histories of different national sexological traditions have productively examined the pre-war German and postwar American sexologies separately,2 reflecting the fact that where Hirschfeld was concerned with the subcultural and the transgressive in studies such as Die Transvestiten [The Transvestites] (1910) and Die Homosexualitat des Mannes und des Weibes (1914) [Homosexuality of Man and Woman], Kinsey, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), popularised and mainstreamed sex research by focusing on issues of the ‘normal’ and the average.3 But if the postwar period is indeed the moment in which the centre of sexological knowledge production changed direction as it shifted across time and space, then this process is marked as much by its continuities with the immediate past as it is by our retrospective reading of sex research in the 1950s in terms of newness, change and anticipation.