The Hirschfeld Archives : Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture

Bauer, Heike

doi:10.26530/oapen_628406

Cited by 65 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Equally, though, the authors looked to North American forerunners, outlined in more detail below. The way in which the Kinsey team’s research was simultaneously ‘haunted’ by, and subtly distanced from, that of an earlier generation banished by the Nazis may, as one scholar has recently suggested, have had partly homophobic overtones; in particular, Hirschfeld’s same-sex tendencies were well known within the scientific community (Bauer, 2012: 139–40; see also Bauer, 2017: 126–30). Although such a claim may seem surprising—particularly given the Kinsey’s Reports’ significance in normalizing same-sex behaviours, as well as indications of Kinsey’s own bisexual desires (Drucker, 2014: 2; Jones, 1997)—it aligns with what historians of the mid century emphasize was a clearly maintained split between researchers’ public and private lives: ‘The emerging liberalism in the science of homosexuality was founded on ways of keeping a safe distance between researchers and their subject’ (Wake, 2011: 123).…”

Section: Sexology and Psychoanalysis From The Old World To The Newmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kinsey and the psychoanalysts: Cross-disciplinary knowledge production in post-war US sex research

Sutton

2020

History of the Human Sciences

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The historical forces of war and migration impacted heavily on the disciplinary locations, practitioners, and structures of sexology and psychoanalysis that had developed in the first decades of the 20th century. By the late 1940s, the US was fast becoming the world centre of each of these prominent fields within the modern human sciences. During these years, the work of Alfred C. Kinsey and his team became synonymous with a distinctly North American brand of empirical sex research. This article offers the most nuanced account to date of the shifting relationship between these two fields in the late 1940s to mid 1950s. It argues that this was more collaborative and mutually influential than previous historians have assumed, even as, following the publication of the first ‘Kinsey report’, tensions grew between the Indiana team and the conservative brand of psychoanalysis that by this stage dominated 1950s North American psychiatry. A keen sense of professional competitiveness accelerated the growing split between these two fields, as Kinsey’s team developed a distinctly modern, technologized brand of statistically oriented sexology that contrasted with the older patient case history, and assumed a very different approach to conservative analysts on ideas of homosexuality and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour. Yet this story of divergence is also tempered through consideration of other aspects of ‘situated knowledge’ such as religion and gender identity, even as accounts of cross-disciplinary competitiveness are expanded by contrasting Kinsey’s positions on psychoanalysis with those of contemporaries such as Harry Benjamin.

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Section: Sexology and Psychoanalysis From The Old World To The Newmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kinsey and the psychoanalysts: Cross-disciplinary knowledge production in post-war US sex research

Sutton

2020

History of the Human Sciences

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“…44 Here, she also reacts against 'the need to turn the difficulties of gay, lesbian, and transgender history to good political use in the present' as 'redemptive narratives'. 48 By excluding negative affect, which is an undeniable fact of queer history and its subjection to violence, exclusion and denial, effective histories risk producing the very gap in the queer archive which queer history seeks to uncover. 46 Queer history's archive of feeling is filled with emotions such as 'nostalgia, regret, shame, despair, ressentiment, passivity, escapism, self-hatred, withdrawal, bitterness, defeatism', and 'shyness, ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heartbreak, antimodernism, immaturity'.…”

Section: 'An Endless Procession Of Them From All Times': Representinmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Bauer argues that in order to study modern queer culture, we must accept that 'silences, gaps, and omissions, as much as concrete evidence, tell a story about past lives and the norms and power relations that shaped them'. 48 By excluding negative affect, which is an undeniable fact of queer history and its subjection to violence, exclusion and denial, effective histories risk producing the very gap in the queer archive which queer history seeks to uncover.…”

Section: 'An Endless Procession Of Them From All Times': Representinmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sexology, Popular Science and Queer History in Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others)

Linge¹

2018

Gender & History

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“…Historians of sexuality have variously engaged with the German-speaking history of homosexuality (see, for instance, Bauer, 2017; Beachy, 2014; Eder, 2002, 2011; Hacker, 2015; Heinrich and Kirchkopf, 2018; Lybeck, 2014; Spector, 2016; Sutton, 2020). While much recent focus has been devoted to Germany’s most famous sexologist and homosexual rights activist, Magnus Hirschfeld, Krafft-Ebing’s and Freud’s contributions to the history of homosexuality in the German-speaking world are more implicit and ambiguous.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Normal enough? Krafft-Ebing, Freud, and homosexuality

Lang

2021

History of the Human Sciences

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This article analyses the slippery notions of the normal and normality in select works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and argues that homosexuality became a ‘boundary object’ between the normal and the abnormal in their works. Constructing homosexuality as ‘normal enough’ provided these two key thinkers of the fin de siècle with an opportunity to challenge societal and medical norms: Krafft-Ebing did this through mapping perversions; Freud, by challenging perceived norms about sexual development more broadly. The article submits that the scientific logic presented in Krafft-Ebing’s seminal case study compilation Psychopathia Sexualis and Freud’s early theoretical writings and cases, including Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), was itself haunted by notions of norms and the normal that were not always easy to resolve, and sometimes involved a certain amount of inspired conjecture on the part of both thinkers in order to develop and validate their differing tripartite models of normality. Krafft-Ebing imagined homosexuality as a variation of the normal by generalizing a gay male experience. He also recorded the obstreperous cases of homosexual women based largely inside the clinic but by and large ignored this evidence. Freud inextricably bound homosexuality to normality (and vice versa) by redefining homosexuals as a group to include individuals with unconscious same-sex desire. Doing so allowed him to conceptualize the fear of homosexuality as crucial in the formation of neurosis and psychosis, and at the same time put him at odds with relevant early identity politics.

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The Hirschfeld Archives : Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture

Cited by 65 publications

References 4 publications

Kinsey and the psychoanalysts: Cross-disciplinary knowledge production in post-war US sex research

Kinsey and the psychoanalysts: Cross-disciplinary knowledge production in post-war US sex research

Sexology, Popular Science and Queer History in Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others)

Normal enough? Krafft-Ebing, Freud, and homosexuality

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