Diss.--Med. dent.--Breisgau--Universität Freiburg, 1998. / Notes bibliogr. Index.

My dissertation explains how the scientific study of sexuality became laden with emotions and the unforeseen results of this process. It begins with a scholarly tradition, forged during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which privileged sentimental articulations of feelings. This tradition helped inspire the late nineteenth-century foundation of sexology, or sexual science. Sexologists, as their discipline developed alongside the modern rational bureaucratic nation-state, maintained attention to emotive expressions. Sexologists also helped shape the interpretation and enforcement of laws against same-sex acts. While they built authority, however, sexologists lacked consensus. During the first third of the twentieth century, sexologists helped compile defendants' detailed sexual histories, replete with affective articulations of sexual desires, which led to calamitous consequences under National Socialism. Nazi technocrats utilized these same sexual histories, offered by same-sex attracted persons describing their feelings and actions before 1933, to prosecute them after a 1935 legal revision, which expanded the law's reach from specific acts to general expressions of feelings. My dissertation provides a genealogy of sexual research and the unexpected uses of its findings. It also revises the biography of sexology as an interdisciplinary field, braided with a history of emotions, tracing its previously underappreciated origins, tumultuous apex, and contested legacy.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the different words and theories that were used todescribe sexuality, sex and gender deviations during the late 1800s to early 1900s through theworks of Dr Magnus Hirschfeld. Magnus Hirschfeld was a self-identified homosexual manand medical doctor who during this time was active in the discourses surrounding the namingand explaining of sexual and gender minorities. Hirschfelds main contribution to thesediscourses was the coining of two different concepts, first the sexual intermediary and secondthe transvestite and transsexual. Sexual intermediaries was Hirschfelds term for everyone whodid not fit into the normative biological categories of either “male” or “female”. Hirschfeldsdescription of these people changed markedly throughout his career. In his early careerHirschfeld mainly saw sexual intermediaries as biological variations from the ideal types ofmen and women. But towards the end of his career, he started to question the categories ofmen and women, instead saying that everyone is actually an intermediary type because allhumans have both male and female aspects. He also coined the terms transvestite andtranssexual to describe those people who, regardless of their sexual preferences, has aninclination towards the behaviors and appearance of the other sex. In doing so he was one ofthe first people to differentiate between biological sex, psychological sex (or gender) andsexuality. In doing so the writings of Magnus Hirschfeld were essential in laying thefoundations for the future development of our modern understanding of gender and sexuality.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xii, 151 p.; also includes graphics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 147-151). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

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Over the course of history, many cross-cultural efforts have been made to understand better the form and function of male same-sex behaviour. Initial naming exercises evaluated the sexual actions taken, and categorized these behaviours as expressions of crime, sin and disease. Various historical accounts note that it was in fin-de-siècle Germany and England, however, that several concepts were developed for the first time to encapsulate male same-sex behaviour, and to identify the type of men engaging in such conduct, in a more tolerant way. Operating within the taxonomic impulse of the eighteenth century, sexology — the scientific study of sexualities and sexual preferences that were considered to be unusual, rare, or marginalized — spurred the development of these new concepts. In the aim of better understanding humans through scientifically evaluating, quantifying, and labelling their sexual form and function, sexology moved male same-sex behaviour beyond the notions of crime, sin and disease. This thesis argues that the key works of sexologists Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895), Károly Mária Kertbeny (1824-1882), Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) and Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) were instrumental to the theoretical endeavour of reclassifying male same-sex behaviour. These four sexologists operated within the parameters of what Foucault calls scientia sexualis: the machinery needed for producing the truth of sex via confessional testimony. Through their own confessional testimony, and testimony collected from other men with same-sex behaviour, Ulrichs, Kertbeny, Ellis and Hirschfeld deemed same-sex behaviour to be a phenomenon based on congenital conditions and one which manifested itself in the form of an inherent sex/gender misalignment. While this behaviour was uncommon, it was not abnormal due to its biological origin. Same-sex behaviour was simply an anomaly of sorts — one specific and rare form of attraction on a spectrum of possibilities. This rationalization of same-sex behaviour differed greatly from the work of other sexologists of the time who evaluated same-sex behaviour to be symptomatic of crime, sin and disease like degeneration theorist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In arguing that same-sex behaviour developed naturally prior to birth, Ulrichs, Kertbeny, Ellis and Hirschfeld empowered men with same-sex behaviour to negotiate new identities for themselves outside of crime, sin and disease. This discursive rebranding of same-sex behaviour is an example of what feminist postructuralism labels as reverse discourse. In order to negotiate new identities for themselves and others with congenital same-sex behaviour, Ulrichs, Kertbeny, Ellis and Hirschfeld developed four specific concepts. These terms are: Urning (1865), homosexualität (1869), sexual inversion (1897), and third sex (1914). While these examples of reverse discourse were operationalized within restrictive conceptualizations of gender expression, they moved away from classifying same-sex behaviour as temporary acts to classifying those engaging in this behaviour as a specific species of people. This transition from sexual act to personage has been elaborated upon most famously by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1978/1990).

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This dissertation examines how transgender feelings and gender variation emerged as a vital motivator for scientific and aesthetic explorations of human personhood and social experiences of marginality in German-speaking culture in the early twentieth century. My research illustrates how concepts of gender variation served as a generative problem for modernist practitioners of sexual science and as a creative impulse and figural resource for modernist literary and artistic innovations. The feedback between these fields allowed for novel social categories to develop in a period where designations like “transgender” or “transsexual” were not yet in use as stable public identities or diagnoses, but nevertheless circulated in response to experiences of embodied difference and social alienation. By reading for “transgender feeling” as a heuristic that unites multiple historical categories of gender and sexual variation, I argue that transgender phenomena were instrumental for the development of German modernist movements at large. Building on affect studies, trans and queer studies, and German literary and cultural studies, my project intervenes in limited contemporary understandings of transgender history and identity as a minority political and diagnostic discourse. Instead, I argue for a more expansive, “democratized” notion of transgender feeling that encompasses diverse historical forms of gender variation, some of which have disappeared or become “obsolete,” and show how narratives of gender intermediacy and incongruence are essential to modernist aesthetic practices. Chapter One examines theories of sexual intermediacy in the sexological work of Magnus Hirschfeld and Otto Weininger, who both suggested that a transgender condition underlies “normal” human sexual development. I show that trans feelings cut across Hirschfeld’s sexological categories and, in particular, his deployment of the case genre, troubling stable taxonomies of sexual affect and allowing for promising forms of coauthorship and “trans genre writing” to emerge in sexology. Chapter Two takes up Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Das Stunden-Buch, as well as his early childhood experience, to argue that dysphoria and intermediacy are key to understanding the social alienation that Rilke expressed in his modernist work alongside personal attachments to femininity and a feminine poetic voice. Chapter Three on Else Lasker-Schüler illustrates how trans feelings, the masculine persona of Jussuf and appropriations of racial and ethnic difference significantly frame the novel Mein Herz and become enduring features of Lasker-Schüler’s literary and artistic production. I highlight how scholarly reception of Rilke and Lasker-Schüler’s work have intentionally disavowed these expressions as transgender and argue for a reassessment of trans feeling as a creative impulse in German modernism through their texts and images. My last chapter explores how modernist periodical media served as a vital tool for crafting trans intimate publics in the Weimar period and for negotiating the shared norms of gender and social participation for a novel class of gender-variant people under the category of transvestism. In my conclusion, I turn to the unfinished business of sexual and gender definition that continues to frame LGBTQ politics in Germany and abroad today, and I link contemporary questions of trans aesthetics to modernist dynamics of gender and sexual multiplicity.