Queer Identities and Politics in Germany

Queer Identities and Politics in Germany PDF Author: Clayton J. Whisnant
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 1939594103
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed key developments in LGBT history, including the growth of the world's first homosexual organizations and gay and lesbian magazines, as well as an influential community of German sexologists and psychoanalysts. Queer Identities and Politics in Germany describes these events in detail, from vibrant gay social scenes to the Nazi persecution that sent many LGBT people to concentration camps. Clayton J. Whisnant recounts the emergence of various queer identities in Germany from 1880 to 1945 and the political strategies pursued by early homosexual activists. Drawing on recent English and German-language scholarship, he enriches the debate over whether science contributed to social progress or persecution during this period, and he offers new information on the Nazis' preoccupation with homosexuality. The book's epilogue locates remnants of the pre-1945 era in Germany today.

Queer Identities and Politics in Germany

Queer Identities and Politics in Germany PDF Author: Clayton J. Whisnant
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 1939594103
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book

Book Description
Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed key developments in LGBT history, including the growth of the world's first homosexual organizations and gay and lesbian magazines, as well as an influential community of German sexologists and psychoanalysts. Queer Identities and Politics in Germany describes these events in detail, from vibrant gay social scenes to the Nazi persecution that sent many LGBT people to concentration camps. Clayton J. Whisnant recounts the emergence of various queer identities in Germany from 1880 to 1945 and the political strategies pursued by early homosexual activists. Drawing on recent English and German-language scholarship, he enriches the debate over whether science contributed to social progress or persecution during this period, and he offers new information on the Nazis' preoccupation with homosexuality. The book's epilogue locates remnants of the pre-1945 era in Germany today.

Haunted Bauhaus

Haunted Bauhaus PDF Author: Elizabeth Otto
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262381028
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories. The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis. With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.

Gay Berlin

Gay Berlin PDF Author: Robert Beachy
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307473139
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Winner of Randy Shilts Award In the half century before the Nazis rose to power, Berlin became the undisputed gay capital of the world. Activists and medical professionals made it a city of firsts—the first gay journal, the first homosexual rights organization, the first Institute for Sexual Science, the first sex reassignment surgeries—exploring and educating themselves and the rest of the world about new ways of understanding the human condition. In this fascinating examination of how the uninhibited urban culture of Berlin helped create our categories of sexual orientation and gender identity, Robert Beachy guides readers through the past events and developments that continue to shape and influence our thinking about sex and gender to this day.

Desiring Emancipation

Desiring Emancipation PDF Author: Marti M. Lybeck
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438452217
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Uses historical case studies to illuminate women’s claims to emancipation and to sexual subjectivity during the tumultuous Wilhelmine and Weimar periods in Germany. Desiring Emancipation traces middle-class German women’s claims to gender emancipation and sexual subjectivity in the pre-Nazi era. The emergence of homosexual identities and concepts in this same time frame provided the context for expression of individual struggles with self, femininity, and sex. The book asks how women used new concepts and opportunities to construct selves in relationship to family, society, state, and culture. Taking a queer approach, Desiring Emancipation’s goal is not to find homosexuals in history, but to analyze how women reworked categories of gender and sex. Marti M. Lybeck interrogates their desires, demonstrating that emancipation was fraught with conflict, anachronism, and disappointment. Each chapter is a microhistorical recreation of the actions, writings, contexts, and conflicts of specific groups of women. The topics include the experience of first-generation university students, public debates about female homosexuality, and the stories of three civil servants whose careers were ruined by workplace accusations of homosexuality. The book concludes with a debate between the women who joined the 1920s homosexual movement on the meanings of their new identities.

Queer Science

Queer Science PDF Author: Simon LeVay
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262121999
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
What makes people gay, lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual? And who cares? Written by one of the leading scientists in the research of sexual orientation, Queer Science looks at how scientific discoveries about homosexuality influence society's attitude toward gays and lesbians, beginning with the theories of the German sexologist and gay-rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and culminating with the latest discoveries in brain science, genetics, endocrinology, and cognitive psychology.

The International LGBT Rights Movement

The International LGBT Rights Movement PDF Author: Laura A. Belmonte
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472506952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
During the past four decades, the international lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movement has made significant advances, but millions of LGBT people continue to live in fear in nations where homosexuality remains illegal. The International LGBT Rights Movement offers a comprehensive account of this global force, from its origins in the mid-nineteenth century to its crucial place in world affairs today. Belmonte examines the movement's goals, the disputes about its mission, and its rise to international importance. The International LGBT Rights Movement provides a thorough introduction to the movement's history, highlighting key figures, controversies, and organizations. With a global scope that considers both state and non-state actors, the book explores transnational movements to challenge homophobia, while also assessing the successes and failures of these efforts along the way.

Stormtrooper Families

Stormtrooper Families PDF Author: Andrew Wackerfuss
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 1939594065
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Based on extensive archival work, Stormtrooper Families combines stormtrooper personnel records, Nazi Party autobiographies, published and unpublished memoirs, personal letters, court records, and police-surveillance records to paint a picture of the stormtrooper movement as an organic product of its local community, its web of interpersonal relationships, and its intensely emotional internal struggles. Extensive analysis of Nazi-era media across the political spectrum shows how the public debate over homosexuality proved just as important to political outcomes as did the actual presence of homosexuals in fascist and antifascist politics. As children in the late-imperial period, the stormtroopers witnessed the first German debates over homosexuality and political life. As young adults, they verbally and physically battled over these definitions, bringing conflicts over homosexuality and masculinity into the center of Weimar Germany's most important political debates. Stormtrooper Families chronicles the stormtroopers' personal, political, and sexual struggles to explain not only how individual gay men existed within the Nazi movement but also how the public meaning of homosexuality affected fascist and antifascist politics—a public controversy still alive today.

Queer in Europe during the Second World War

Queer in Europe during the Second World War PDF Author: Régis Schlagdenhauffen
Publisher: Council of Europe
ISBN: 9287188637
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
At the height of the Second World War, Switzerland decriminalised homosexuality. At the same time, France chose to introduce a law punishing homosexual relationships in certain circumstances. These two examples illustrate contradictory attitudes adopted by European states towards homosexuals during the Second World War. Going beyond the issue of the persecution of homosexuals and the central role played by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945, this book is the first to examine the daily lives of homosexual men and women in wartime. By bringing together European specialists on the subject, it relates a different history, one which was indeed marked by repression but also by enlistment in armies at war and resistance groups, not to mention collaboration. Chapter by chapter, it enables us to better understand why the Second World War was a turning point for gays and lesbians in Europe and why our continent is a leader in the fight against discrimination. For the Council of Europe, this book contributes to two separate programmes, the Passing on the Remembrance of the Holocaust and Prevention of Crimes against Humanity programme and the Promoting Human Rights and Equality for LGBT People programme, within the framework of Committee of Ministers Recommendation CM/Rec(2010)5 on combating discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity programme. It also continues work towards acknowledging all of the victims of the Nazi regime. Régis Schlagdenhauffen is a lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), head of the gender-based social history department, member of the Laboratory of Excellence “Writing a new history of Europe” (LabEx EHNE) and co-author of the Council of Europe pedagogical factsheets for teachers entitled “Victims of Nazism. A mosaic of fates” (2015).

Mobilizing Black Germany

Mobilizing Black Germany PDF Author: Tiffany N. Florvil
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052390
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
In the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora. Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism. Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism.

Difference Troubles

Difference Troubles PDF Author: Steven Seidman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521599702
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Difference Troubles, first published in 1997, examines the implications for social theory and sexual politics of taking difference seriously. It explores the trouble difference makes not only for the social sciences, but also for the people - feminists, queer theorists, postmodernists - who champion difference. Seidman asks how social thinkers should conceptualize differences such as gender, race, and sexuality, without reducing them to an inferior status. This is a wide-ranging and sophisticated discussion of contemporary social theory and sexual politics, presented with Seidman's familiar imagination and clarity. In addition, it argues persuasively for a pragmatic approach to difference troubles in theory and politics.