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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.

This article analyses the relationship between the German discourse of ‘Sexualwissenschaft’ and the autobiography of N.O. Body (1907), which gives an account of the girlhood years of the male protagonist. The ideas and methods of sexology in Wilhelmine Germany, as expressed in particular in the works of Magnus Hirschfeld, will be rethought as prosthetic support for the construction of autobiographical writing of gender and sexual ‘deviants’ in the case of Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren and, as such, seen to open up a possibility to reconsider the relation between gender and agency. I suggest that N.O. Body's memoirs process and incorporate sexology's methodological and ideological impact through literary and linguistic craftsmanship that highlights the creative and idiosyncratic agency of the writing self. Der folgende Aufsatz untersucht die diskursive Wechselbeziehung zwischen der deutschen Sexualwissenschaft und der Autobiographie N.O. Bodys (1907), in denen der männliche Protagonist von seinen Kinder‐ und Jugendjahren als Mädchen berichtet. Die Ideen und methodischen Zugänge der Sexualwissenschaft zur Zeit des Deutschen Kaiserreichs, insbesondere die Schriften Magnus Hirschfelds, werden hier als diskursive Prothese für das autobiographische Schreiben über sexuelle und Gender‐‘Devianz’ neu positioniert und anhand der Fallstudie Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren exemplarisch aufgezeigt. Dadurch wird es möglich, einen Zusammenhang von Geschlecht und Handlungsmöglichkeit (agency) herauszuarbeiten. Dieser Aufsatz stellt fest, dass N.O. Bodys Memoiren die methodischen und ideologischen Einflüsse der Sexualwissenschaft mithilfe einer literarischen und sprachlichen Kunstfertigkeit ein‐ und verarbeiten, die die kreative und idiosynkratische Handlungsmöglichkeit des schreibenden Selbst zum Ausdruck bringt.

Dance orients the performer’s body toward both environment and pleasure, yet the intersection of environmental and sexual attunement in dance practice remains an underexplored area of research. This article considers how environmental and sexual readings of dance practice can be brought together by proposing a queer ecological approach to modernist dance. Drawing on research in dance studies, feminist and queer science studies, and sexology studies, the article examines the work of Loïe Fuller, an early pioneer of modernist dance, to show how Fuller’s work engages with themes of both sex and nature and consequently introduces environmentally attuned thinking to early twentieth century sexual knowledge production. By examining the parallels and divergences between Magnus Hirschfeld’s early twentieth-century sexological writing about “transvestitism” and Loïe Fuller’s modernist dance, via the copycat dancer Henry Cyril Paget, this article shows that both dance and sexology rethought the relationship between sex and nature by grappling, to different extents, with a queer vision of nature, where nature loses its explanatory force and moral authority. This reveals the importance of nature and the nonhuman in the production of modern concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality and the important role that dance can play in illuminating the intersection of sex and nature.

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