Cover
Titel
Jahrbuch Sexualitäten 2016.


Herausgeber
Queer Nations; Im Auftrag der Initiative Queer Nations herausgegeben von Maria Borowski, Jan Feddersen, Benno Gammerl, Rainer Nicolaysen und Christian Schmelzer
Erschienen
Göttingen 2016: Wallstein Verlag
Anzahl Seiten
229 S.
Preis
€ 34,90
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Erik N. Jensen, History Department, Miami University

This volume marks the debut of “Jahrbuch Sexualitäten,” an interdisciplinary journal of sexuality that represents one of several projects launched by Initiative Queer Nations (IQN), a group founded in Berlin in 2005 to reanimate the inquisitive spirit and intellectual tradition of Magnus Hirschfeld’s and Johanna Elberskirchen’s early-20th-century engagement for sex reform and the study of human sexuality. The volume’s first essay summarized the IQN’s plans for an Elberskirchen-Hirschfeld-Haus, in fact, to serve as a gathering place for scholars and activists and as the centralized archive in Berlin for collections currently scattered throughout the city. The organizers hope to lay the cornerstone in 2019, the centenary of the opening of Magnus Hirschfeld’s pathbreaking Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. The rest of the volume brings together writings of various lengths and genres, all of which explore some facet of sexuality, from the four article-length “Queer Lectures” to an interview with one of the curators of a blockbuster exhibition on gay history to shorter pieces and book reviews.

The first of the “Queer Lectures,” by Konstanze Plett, argues that the 2013 German law requiring Standesämter to register intersex children without a sex created as many problems as it solved. Emerging from a desire to eliminate discrimination, the law allows a person to remain without a registered sex for one’s entire life, to add a biological sex later, or to correct a mistakenly entered biological sex. Although German citizens can navigate much of their bureaucratic lives without designating their sex in the first place, Plett focuses on areas where one’s registered sex (Papiergeschlecht) still matters. Current German law governing the Lebenspartnerschaft, for instance, explicitly restricts such a union to same-sex couples, meaning that someone registered as geschlechtslos could only enter into a partnership with a person similarly registered, a remarkably narrow constraint. The gender-neutral formulation of present German marriage law, on the other hand, opens broader possibilities in theory, but not, so far, in practice. Moreover, the prison system, organized sports, security screenings, and public toilets still differentiate between sexes, whether by tradition or by law. Plett praised the much more flexible Argentinian variant of this law, and she questioned the need a sex designation at birth in the first place, but she nevertheless appreciated the new law’s recognition of biological sex as a social construction.

In the second lecture, Michael Schwartz contends that the media helped to normalize the presence of gay men in West German society during the decade of liberalization that followed Paragraph 175’s initial reform in 1969. In doing so, however, the media increasingly distinguished between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” same-sex behavior, which eventually stalled the movement for the paragraph’s complete repeal and fueled the discrimination that emerged during the AIDS epidemic. Schwartz highlights two notable nationwide broadcasts of gay-themed films in the mid-1970s, as well as the increasingly favorable coverage in mainstream newspapers and magazines, but he also acknowledges that the Boulevard press continued to peddle in crude headlines about gay promiscuity and violence, including the Springer-Verlag’s targeting of lesbians, about which Schwartz, disappointingly, declines to elaborate (s. 79). At the same time, conservative newspapers and politicians began voicing fears that gay men habitually seduced minors, a fear the loomed large during the 1980 federal elections, when a leading CSU official accused the FDP of promoting the expansion of “perversity” and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt publicly dismissed calls for more reforms. Gay organizations sought to distance themselves from pedophile groups, but the public’s correlation of the two sets of desires had effectively halted the previous decade’s growing momentum for complete abolition of Paragraph 175.

Ulrike Heider similarly explores the demise of the post-68 sexual revolution in her third lecture, arguing that Michel Foucault’s late 1970s writings, along with his personal quest for a de-sexualized erotic, fueled a larger critique of sexual liberation in the 1980s. In a fascinating analysis, Heider traces Foucault’s peripatetic intellectual journey to the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, who shared Foucault’s fascination with violence and death. To Foucault, the S/M scene nobly resisted the humanist pipe dream of sex as rationally nurtured and pleasurable, probing instead the boundaries of love, death, and the irrational, in which sexual lust did not always arise from physical lust. Within this mystical imaginary, Foucault framed his own terminal affliction with AIDS as an element of the divine, asking in 1984, just before his death: “What could be more beautiful than to die for the love of boys?” Heider concludes her bracing examination by suggesting the relatively short steps from Foucault’s vision to the rise of the punk scene, with its own pain culture, to the sexual conservatism of today.

In the volume’s fourth lecture, Hans Hütt opens with an example of that conservatism – the 2013 French protests against legalized same-sex marriage – before delving into a deeper analysis of the “dissonant resonance” that defines the relationship of gay men and women to their social surroundings and necessitates continuous decoding. Hütt illustrates this process with reference to the 2012 novel “Brandhagen”1 and the 1950 “Turing-Test,” developed by gay cryptanalyst Alan Turing, in which test subjects try to determine whether they’ve been conversing, virtually, with another human or with a machine. Just as the novel’s narrator must decode the bourgeois world of the north-German marshlands, Turing’s subjects try to discern the subject behind the messages, much as Turing himself felt compelled to decipher the heteronormative code. Humans are conditioned to see difference, Hütt concludes, and he warns that the pendulum could swing back against gay rights and prompt a return of the “masquerade” that so many men and women have at least partially shed over the past several decades, unless gay men and women can convincingly justify their call for equality before the law.

The remainder of this thought-provoking and insightful volume includes an interview with Birgit Bosold, curator of the Schwules Museum, on the challenges of mounting the 2015 exhibition “Homosexualität_en,” a joint undertaking with the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM)2 that has been the most popular exhibition on a queer topic in a German museum to date. Bosold highlighted not only the general lack of awareness on the part of the DHM as to the potential richness of their holdings on queer history, when properly framed, but also the longstanding marginalization of women within the queer community’s own historical narrative, as evidenced by women’s complete absence from the Schwules Museum’s 1997 exhibit “Goodbye to Berlin – 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung.”3 Following this interview, a section labeled “Miniaturen” gathered together short pieces on queer archival work and inclusive acronyms, as well as a fascinating exploration by Jan Feddersen of the role of professional men’s football’s Mittelblock – administrators, agents, physiotherapists, and the media – in perpetuating that sport’s homophobia, something that he acknowledges as far less of an issue in the women’s sport. A final section of seven uniformly comprehensive and thoughtful book reviews closed out the volume. This inaugural edition of “Jahrbuch Sexualitäten” brings together scholarly discussions on an admirably broad range of topics related to human sexuality in the true spirit of Magnus Hirschfeld and Johanna Elberskirchen. My only suggestion for future volumes would be the inclusion of a Sachregister to help navigate this rich resource.

Notes:
1 Hinrich von Haaren, Brandhagen: Panorama einer kleinen Gesellschaft, Wien 2012.
2 See HOMOSEXUALITÄT_EN, 26. Juni bis 1. Dezember 2015, https://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/archiv/2015/homosexualitaet-en.html (21.03.2017) and Norman Domeier: Review on: Homosexualität_en, 26.06.2015 – 01.12.2015 Berlin, in: H-Soz-Kult, 01.08.2015, http://www.hsozkult.de/exhibitionreview/id/rezausstellungen-224 (21.03.2017).
3 See Goodbye to Berlin? 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung, http://www.schwulesmuseum.de/ausstellungen/archives/1997/view/goodbye-to-berlin-100-jahre-schwulenbewegung/ (21.03.2017).

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