‘Now—for a breath I tarry’: Breath, Desire, and Queer Materialism at the fin de siècle

Riddell explores how tropes of breath and breathlessness articulate the relationship between materiality, desire, and loss for queer subjects in Victorian literature. The essay presents readings of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, John Addington Symonds’s Memoirs, and Walter Pater’s ‘Sebastian van Storck’ (from Imaginary Portraits). It also examines nineteenth-century sexology (including writings by Magnus Hirschfeld) to demonstrate how certain modes of breathing were directly associated with non-normative sexuality in the period. Riddell draws upon insights from contemporary queer theory, in its turns toward negative affect and phenomenology, to examine precarious forms of embodied subjectivity in the history of homosexuality. By doing so, he demonstrates how experiences of embodiment are never universal but closely bound up with individual subject positions (such as sexuality and gender).

A Tale of Two Terms

The introduction situates this book’s contribution to the field of literary, theoretical, and cultural studies of masochism. The introduction contextualizes previous critical and historical methodologies by examining case studies by sexologists including Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Albert Eulenburg, and Magnus Hirschfeld; psychoanalytical approaches to masochism from Sigmund Freud, Marie Bonaparte, Jessica Benjamin, and Juliet Mitchell; more modern theoretical texts including works by Gilles Deleuze, Anita Phillips, Slavoj Žižek; and specifically intersectional approaches that consider queerness and gender by Leo Bersani, Paula Caplan, Jack Halberstam, and Amber Jamilla Musser. This chapter sets up the core conflict at the center of Ordinary Masochisms: a pseudo-scientific, roundly negative consideration of masochism countered by a collection of unexpected, active, and empowering literary representations of masochism.

100 Jahre – Von Magnus Hirschfeld zur S3-Leitlinie und darüber hinaus: Körperorientierte Behandlungsverfahren als eine Option der Zukunft?

ZusammenfassungIn diesem Beitrag werden zentrale Inhalte der 2018 veröffentlichten S3-Leitlinie „Geschlechtsinkongruenz, Geschlechtsdysphorie und Trans-Gesundheit“, die sich dem Wissen vonMagnus Hirschfeld vor 100 Jahren wieder annähert, vorgestellt und diskutiert. Der zweite Teil widmet sich körper- und emotionsfokussierten Verfahren in der Versorgung von geschlechtlich nonkonformen Menschen, die bislang nur randständig im therapeutisch-pädagogischen und beraterischen Bereich angewandt werden. Es wird dafür plädiert, körper- und emotionsfokussierte Verfahren in die Regelversorgung zu integrieren; insbesondere – wie in den AWMF-Kriterien vorgeschrieben – mit Blick auf die bevorstehende Überarbeitung der S3-Leitlinie nach fünf Jahren in 2023. Dieser Zeitpunkt gibt auch die Chance, die in der aktuellen Leitlinie verwendete Sprache weiter zu ent-gendern, um mit einer geschlechtsinklusiven Nomenklatur nicht-binärem Geschlechtererleben gerecht zu werden.

The potency of the butterfly: The reception of Richard B. Goldschmidt’s animal experiments in German sexology around 1920

This article considers the sexual politics of animal evidence in the context of German sexology around 1920. In the 1910s, the German-Jewish geneticist Richard B. Goldschmidt conducted experiments on the moth Lymantria dispar, and discovered individuals that were no longer clearly identifiable as male or female. When he published an article tentatively arguing that his research on ‘intersex butterflies’ could be used to inform concurrent debates about human homosexuality, he triggered a flurry of responses from Berlin-based sexologists. In this article, I examine how a number of well-known sexologists affiliated with Magnus Hirschfeld, his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, and later his Institute of Sexology attempted to incorporate Goldschmidt’s experiments into their sexological work between 1917 and 1923. Intersex butterflies were used to discuss issues at the heart of German sexology: the legal debate about the criminalisation of homosexuality under paragraph 175; the scientific methodology of sexology, caught between psychiatric, biological, and sociological approaches to the study of sexual and gender diversity; and the status of sexology as natural science, able to contribute knowledge about the sexual Konstitution of the organism. This article thus shows that butterfly experiments function as important and politically charged evidence for a discussion at the heart of the sexological project of those involved in the founding of the Institute of Sexology: the question of the nature and naturalness of homosexuality (and sexual intermediacy more broadly) and its political consequences. In doing so, this article makes a case for paying attention to non-human actors in the history of sexology.

Správa z konferencie ALMS Conference Berlin 2019: ,Queering Memory - Archives - Arts - Audiences’

The conference, organised by the Berlin-based Institute of Magnus Hirschfeld, was focused on the position of queer memory in the contemporary memory institutions such as museums, archives and specialized collections as well as the expression of queer-related topics in art.

Fetishist disorder

Fetishism, as a technical descriptor of atypical sexual behaviour, was noted in the writings of the well-known nineteenth century French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911) (Binet, 1887) as well as prominent European sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) (Krafft-Ebing, 1886), Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) (Ellis, 1906), and Magnus Hirschfeld (1868– 1935) (Hirschfeld, 1956). In their seminal writings, all of the afore mentioned sexologists used the terms “fetish” and “fetishism” to specifically describe an intense eroticization of either non-living objects and/or specific body parts that were symbolically associated with a person. Fetishes could be non clinical manifestations of a normal spectrum of eroticization or clinical disorders causing significant interpersonal difficulties. Ellis (1906) observed that body secretions or body products could also become fetishist expressions of “erotic symbolism”. Freud (1928) considered both body parts (e.g., the foot) or objects associated with the body (e.g., shoes) as fetish objects. For the purposes of this review, a “broader” historically based core definition for Fetishism will include intense and recurrent sexual arousal to: non-living objects, an exclusive focus on body parts or body products. Keywords: fetishism, Paraphilia, Partialism, DSM-V.