Author: Magnus Hirschfeld
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783947325023
Category : Cross-dressers
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. Translated from the German by James J. Conway. Rough trade, drag kings, tea dances, sporty dykes, coded classified ads, campy nicknames, passing, outing, hustlers, beats and cruising at the YMCA--all accompanied by a wave of gay and lesbian activism. Eighties New York? No, Germany's imperial capital at the dawn of the 20th century. BERLIN'S THIRD SEX reveals an astonishingly diverse gay subculture years ahead of the Weimar era, with cross-dressing cabaret, all-night parties and erotic license at every level of society. Magnus Hirschfeld's 1904 report is a foundational text of modern gay identity, queer history captured by an insider, as it happened. Police, blackmailers and moral crusaders are never far, suicide is all too common, but Hirschfeld also invites us into the homes of same-sex couples to witness tranquil scenes of domesticity and devotion. BERLIN'S THIRD SEX formed part of the vast "Metropolis Documents" project, a visionary panorama of early 20th century urban life. This, the first part of the series to appear in English, is offered alongside an earlier Hirschfeld study of the "third sex" (the author's provisional term for gays and lesbians) as well as comprehensive notes and an informative afterword. "[BERLIN'S THIRD SEX] depicts a flourishing gay subculture populated by cross-dressers, drag queens, sporty dykes, blackmailers and prostitutes, who establish contact with one another via intricately coded classified ads, adopt droll nicknames such as 'Squeaky Lotte,' 'Rollmop Queen' and 'Hiddigeigei,' and generally live it up in bars and cabarets, in the Tiergarten, or at the Opera. The Rixdorf edition includes an informative afterword and helpful notes by the translator James. J. Conway."--Anna Katharina Schaffner "Hirschfeld's rhetorical strategy, which includes these appeals to sentiment, walks the line between emphasizing the similarities in behavior between homosexuals and heterosexuals (in other words, suggesting homosexuals are just like the [presumably heterosexual] reader), and relating anecdotes or characteristics that portray the former as uniquely, yet endearingly, different. That this approach has strong parallels with contemporary gay rights rhetoric suggests that there is a timeless appeal in finding reasons for empathy in order to demonstrate that 'the other' is just as human."--Tyler Langendorfer
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.
Author: Laurie Marhoefer
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442619570
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
Liberated, licentious, or merely liberal, the sexual freedoms of Germany’s Weimar Republic have become legendary. The home of the world’s first gay rights movement, the republic embodied a progressive, secular vision of sexual liberation. Immortalized – however misleadingly – in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and the musical Cabaret, Weimar’s freedoms have become a touchstone for the politics of sexual emancipation. Yet, as Laurie Marhoefer shows in Sex and Weimar Republic, those sexual freedoms were only obtained at the expense of a minority who were deemed sexually disordered. In Weimar Germany, the citizen’s right to sexual freedom came with a duty to keep sexuality private, non-commercial, and respectable. Sex and the Weimar Republic examines the rise of sexual tolerance through the debates which surrounded “immoral” sexuality: obscenity, male homosexuality, lesbianism, transgender identity, heterosexual promiscuity, and prostitution. It follows the sexual politics of a swath of Weimar society ranging from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to Nazi stormtrooper Ernst Röhm. Tracing the connections between toleration and regulation, Marhoefer’s observations remain relevant to the politics of sexuality today.
Author: Ralf Dose
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 158367439X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868 OCo1935) was one of the first great pioneers of the gay liberation movement. Revered by such gay icons as Christopher Isherwood and Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society, HirschfeldOCOs legacy resonates throughout he twentieth-century and around the world. Guided by his motto OC Through Science Toward Justice, OCO Hirschfeld helped found the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Germany to defend the rights of homosexuals and develop a scientific framework or sexual equality. He was also an early champion of womenOCOs rights, campaigning in the early 1900s for the decriminalization of abortion and the right of female teachers and civil servants to marry and have children. By 1933 HirschfeldOCOs commitment to sexual liberation made him a target for the Nazis, and they ransacked his Institute for Sexual Research and publicly burned his books. a This biography, first published to acclaim in Germany, follows Hirschfeld from his birth in Poland to the heights of his career during the Weimar Republic and the rise of German fascism. Ralf Dose illuminates HirschfeldOCOs ground-breaking role in the gay liberation movement and explains ome of his major theoretical concepts, which continue to influence our"
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.
Author: Lucia Berlin
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374712867
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 One of Jezebel's Favorite Books of 2016 A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place. "Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves." -Lydia Davis
Author: Michael Thomas Taylor
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472130358
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 423
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Book Description
Investigates the role of sex and sexuality in early 20th-century German culture, and how this past continues to shape the present
Author: Scott Spector
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022619678X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
The year 1900, fin de siecle, in Europe evokes polar thoughts: on the one hand, sensational slashers and femmes fatales, destitute and dangerous new urban districts, criminal violence and sexual excess; on the other, science and reason triumphant, a near arrogant confidence in progress, the emergence of new expert knowledge. The tensions between these poles take on the character of a single myth, a story of origins, essences, and destinies that Scott Spector tells through a focus on Vienna and Berlin. Together, these two cities stand for the New Metropolis, crucial sites in the development of modern conceptions of gender and sexuality, also of political emancipation movements these conceptions inspired. Vienna and Berlin witnessed the birth of the science of sexology, the earliest articulations of homosexuality as an identity, the concomitant movement to abolish persecution of sexual minorities, and the first-wave feminisms of the turn of the century. These cities also, and simultaneously became host to fantasies of violence associated with liminal figures: the pervasive image of the dangerous and erotic femme fatale, reports and fictions of sexual murder, along with the violent underworld of prostitution, and the surprising and forceful reemergence of the blood libel, representations of homosexual rings or secret associations. Spector shows how these prurient fantasies were given life in high culture (literature and philosophy), science (especially sexology, urban sociology, and criminology), and popular culture (including pulp novels as well as sensational court cases reported in the popular press). Among the characters populating Spector s account are Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (homosexual emancipation leader), Karl Kraus (playwright, poet, satirist), Otto Weininger (misogynist, anti-Semitic medical philosopher), Robert Musil (master novelist of violent fantasy), Rosa Mayreder, and other feminists, and Georg Simmel (sociologist of the city). As a contribution to modernist studies and European cultural history, Spector s book will win awards, and as a contribution to the history of sexuality, criminology, psychology, and ideas, it will find classroom use eventually. It s pathbreaking, and it s great reading."
Author: Heike Bauer
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439914338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
This work examines how death, suicide and violence shaped modern queer culture, arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, influenced the emergence of a collective sense of same-sex identity. Bauer looks for this history of violence in the work and reception of the influential sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), and through Hirschfeld's work examines the form and collective impact of anti-queer violence in the first half of the twentieth century. Hirschfeld's archive (his library at the Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin) was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933, so the archive of Bauer's title is one that she's built from over a hundred published and unpublished books, articles, films and photographs.
Author: Gilbert Herdt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 194213052X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
Most modern discussions of the relationship of biological sex to gender presuppose that there are two genders, male and female, founded on the two biological sexes. But not all cultures share this essentialist assumption, and even Western societies have not always embraced it. Bringing together historical and anthropological studies, Third Sex, Third Gender challenges the usual emphasis on sexual dimorphism and reproduction, providing a unique perspective on the various forms of socialization of people who are neither “male” nor “female.” The existence of a third sex or gender enables us to understand how Byzantine palace eunuchs and Indian hijras met the criteria of special social roles that necessitated practices such as self-castration, and how intimate and forbidden desires were expressed among the Dutch Sodomites in the early modern period, the Sapphists of eighteenth-century England, or the so-called hermaphrodite-homosexuals of nineteenth-century Europe and America. By contextualizing these practices and by allowing these bodies, meanings, and desires to emerge, Third Sex, Third Gender provides a new way to think about sex and gender systems that is crucial to contemporary debates within the social sciences.
