Queer Camp against Franco: Zulueta’s Un dos tres
“Queer Camp against Franco: Zulueta’s Un dos tres,” accepted for The Eurovision Song Contest: From Concert Halls to the Halls of Academia, ed. by Adam Dubin, Antonio Obregon, and Dean Vuletic.
Author: rtobin
The Enlightenment Origins of Sexual Human Rights
“The Enlightenment Origins of Sexual Human Rights,” German Quarterly 93.3 (Summer 2020), pp. 394-396.
Eine Geschichte, die Geschichte verändert
“Eine Geschichte, die Geschichte verändert,” introduction to Niki Trauthwein, Peter Pan in Hamburg. Gert Christian Südel: Transpioneer, Aktivist und Überlebenskünstler (Berlin: LitVerlag, 2020), pp. 7-20.
LGBTQ+ Rights after the Report on Unalienable Rights
“LGBTQ+ Rights after the Report on Unalienable Rights,” Telos 193 (Winter 2020): 127-133.
Winckelmann und die Menschenrechte
“Winckelmann und die Menschenrechte,” forthcoming in Winckelmann and His Passionate Followers, ed. Wolfgang Cortjaens and Christian Loebs.
The Evolian Imagination: Gender, Race, and Class from Fascism to the New Right
“The Evolian Imagination: Gender, Race, and Class from Fascism to the New Right,” The Journal of Holocaust Research 35.2 (2021): 75-90.
“Zweimal James Steakley”
“Zweimal James Steakley: Ein Beitrag zur Entsehung der Queer German Studies,” forthcoming in Festschrift für James Steakley, ed. by Florian Mildenberger.
For the Record: LGBTQ+ Worcester
For the Record: LGBTQ+ Worcester, co-authored with Joseph Cullon of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Stephanie Yuhl of the College of the Holy Cross, is the first comprehensive history of the local LGBTQ+ scene in central Massachusetts. It documents the …
“Im übrigen liegt mir wenig an das was man in Deutschland über diesen Punct von mir denken möchte: Winckelmanns Briefe und die mannmännliche Liebe”
This essay looks at the astonishingly open way Winckelmann discussed his sexuality in letters that were published soon after his death. It will appear in the catalog of The Divine Sex, the comprehensive exhibit on Winckelmann’s sexuality opening at the …
An Incomplete Rainbow
An Incomplete Rainbow. Discussion of liberalism, nationalism, sexuality and the Eurovision Song Contest in Ukraine. German version here.
Not in Tune: Ukraine, Eurovision and Gay Rights
Interview with The Day with Brent Goff (Deutsche Welle TV): on Eurovision, Ukraine, Gay Rights and Europe, May 16, 2017.
“Gays for Trump? Homonationalism Has Deep Roots”
“Gays for Trump? Homonationalism Has Deep Roots,” The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 24.3 (May-June 2017), 5-7.
Interviewed in “Freud’s Therapy Dog” for Mysteries at the Monument
“Freud’s Therapy Dog,” Mysteries at the Monument, July 10, 2015, with 510,000 viewers, according to ShowBuzzDaily.
What to Expect from Eurovision
Quoted by Alexandra Gibbs for CNBC, 13 May 2016, “America, Here’s What to Expect from Your First Eurovision Song Contest!”
Discovering Sexuality: The Status of Literature as Evidence
This essay traces the move away from the use of literary texts as evidence in scientific discussions of sexuality. Whereas in the 1830s an author like Heinrich Hössli would rely almost exclusively on literary texts to discuss same-sex desire, 50 …
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Die Quellen der Innovation: Heinrich Hössli und sein Zeitalter
This essay studies the sources that might have inspired the Swiss businessman Heinrich Hössli to write his monumental two-volume defense of male-male love in the 1830s. “Die Quellen der Innovation: Heinrich Hössli und sein Zeitalter,” in “Keine Liebe ist an sich …
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Widernaturliche Unzucht! Paragraph 175 in Deutsch-Südwestafrika
This paper examines the multiple prosecutions and appeals of Victor van Alten, who was accused of “indecent conduct contrary to nature” (Paragraph 175) with men in German Southwest Africa. The essay examines the complicated interpretations surrounding the vague law, clarifying …
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Sexology in the Southwest
This essay looks at the case of Victor van Alten, who was tried multiple times for violating Paragraph 175 in German Southwest Africa. It shows how the emergent discourses of sexuality were intertwined with those of colonialism. “Sexology in the …
“Winckelmann: Homosexualität, schwule Kultur, Queer Theory,”
This essay, written in German, looks at the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the eighteenth-century founder of art history, in light of his desire for men. It focuses on four parts: (1) Winckelmann’s desire for men, well documented in his …
“Winckelmann: Homosexualität, schwule Kultur, Queer Theory,” Read more »
Quoted by Frances Robinson, “Sweden Feels the ‘Euphoria’ of Another Eurovision Crown”
Quoted by Frances Robinson, “Sweden Feels the ‘Europhoria’ of another Eurovision Crown,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2012
Quoted by Frances Robinson – Azerbaijan Wins Eurovision
Quoted by Frances Robinson, “Azerbaijan Wins Eurovision,” The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2011.
Quoted by Frances Robinson – Western Europe Seeks Eurovision Comeback
Quoted by Frances Robinson, “Western Europe Seeks Eurovision Comeback,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2011.
Quoted by Daniel Michaels – Scholars Sing the Praises of Eurovision
Quoted by Daniel Michaels, “Scholars Sing the Praises of Eurovision,” The Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2011.
Interview on Freud Centennial – Psychiatric News
Interview on Freud Centennial for Psychiatric News 44.17 (September 14, 2009), p. 4.
Interview on Freud Centennial with Ross Reynolds of KUOW
Interview on Freud Centennial with Ross Reynolds of KUOW (Seattle Public Radio), for “The Conversation” (September 4, 2009).
Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex.
This book studies the emergence of modern categories of sexuality in German-speaking central Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It connects these emergent discourses of sexuality with Romanticism, the German embrace of the classical tradition, Jewish assimilation, nationalism …
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Sexuality and Human Rights.
This book will study how literary texts have treated the relationship of sexuality and human rights from the Enlightenment to the present day. The first part focuses on the Enlightenment, showing that sexuality was already a concern as human rights …
Doctor’s Orders: Goethe and Enlightenment Thought
“Doctor’s Orders” places Goethe’s writings—in particular, “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre” [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship] in the context of eighteenth-century medicine, focusing on concepts such as hypochondria, hysteria, melancholia and mania. The analysis helps the reader understand aspects of the characters that might …
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Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe
The seminal study of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature from the perspective of queer theory, “Warm Brothers” searches out the traces of male-male desire in the cultural productions of the Age of Goethe, offering queer readings of texts written …
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A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest
One of the first English-language academic studies of the Eurovision Song Contest, this collection of essays provides analyses of the televised pop music competition in Finland, Germany, Holland, Israel, Lithuania, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, and the former Yugoslavia, as well as …
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Global Freud
This special issue of “Psychoanalysis and History” brings together important recent research on the early reception of Sigmund Freud’s work in countries as varied as Argentina, China, Mexico, the United States of America, as well as the Francophone Caribbean. …
Queering Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig
This essay rethinks my earlier “gay” readings of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, trying to understand the queerness of the text “Queering Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig,” in Thomas Mann: Neue kulturwissenschaftliche Lektüren, edited by Stefan Börnchen, Georg Mein and Gary Schmidt …
World without Evil: Goethe’s Faust and the Faust Tradition
This essay looks at the three most famous works of literature in the Faust tradition (by Marlowe, Goethe, and Thomas Mann), discussing how Goethe’s Faust seems not to credit the very notion of evil that stands behind both Marlowe’s and …
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Early Nineteenth-Century Sexual Radicalism: Heinrich Hössli and the Liberals of His Day
This essay argues that Hössli’s 1836/8 apology for male-male love, Eros, grows out of early nineteenth-century liberal and radical thought. He is able to connect demands for the separation of church and state, the emancipation of the Jews, and the …
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Constructing the Nation: Faust and Faust
This essay looks at the nation in Goethe’s Faust, arguing that both the völkisch nation of Faust I and the Holy Roman Empire as Kulturnation in Faust II fail because of their inability to accommodate eros. Whether Faust’s own nation …
Pathology, Poetry and Pleasure: HIV/AIDS, Confessional Writing and S/M in Un año sin amor
In the Argentine film, Un año sin amor, the protagonist Juan Perez discovers he is HIV-positive, immerses himself into the S/M scene, and publishes a memoir (with the same title as the film). This essay shows how the director of the …
Bildung and Sexuality in the Age of Goethe
“Bildung and Sexuality in the Age of Goethe,” in The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature, ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 254-71
Twins! Homosexuality and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Germany
This essay traces the development of ideas about male-male desire in nineteenth-century German-speaking central Europe, from a model based on ancient Greece, whereby all men might occasionally have sexual desires for a beautiful youth, through medical models that naturalized, but …
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Global Freud: An Introduction
This short piece regards Freud’s trip to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, as the moment when Freud went global, and then discusses how the pieces in the special issue of Psychoanalysis and History help us think about psychoanalysis today. “Global Freud: …
Fixing Freud: The Oedipus Complex in Early Twenty-First Century US-American Novels
Three recent American novels—Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006), Selden Edwards’s The Little Book (2008), and Brend Webster’s Vienna Triangle (2009)—feature Freud as a fictional character. This essay locates the image of Freud in these novels in the specifically …
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Introduction
This essay introduces readers to basic principles of the Eurovision Song Contest, arguing that the competition offers a vision of Europe as “democratic, capitalist, peace-loving, multicultural, sexually liberated and technologically advanced.” With Ivan Raykoff, “Introduction,” in A Song for …
Eurovision at 50: Post-Wall and Post-Stonewall
This essay looks at the popularity of the Eurovision Song Contest in the gay community, attempting to move beyond quick generalizations about the camp appeal of the trashy clothes and the diva-like behavior of the singers. Instead, it argues that …
Faust’s Transgressions: Male-Male Desire in Early Modern Germany
This essay provides something of a survey of the evidence of same-sex desire in the early modern German-speaking world, with references to the historical Faust, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Johannes Müller, Friedrich II of Prussia, Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, …
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Politics, Tragedy, and ‘Six Feet Under’: Camp Aesthetics and Mourning in Post-AIDS America
This essay argues that the HBO television series Six Feet Under is so powerful because it draws on a rich and sophisticated tradition of mourning developed in the gay community in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. It links the series to Tony …
Kertbeny’s ‘Homosexuality’ and the Language of Nationalism
This essay provides one of the few close readings of Karl Maria Kertbeny’s open letter of 1869, in which he for the first time in any language combines the prefix “homo-“ with the root “sex” in order to create a …
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The Emancipation of the Flesh: The Legacy of Romanticism in the Homosexual Rights Movement
Using the work of Friedrich Schlegel, Karl Gutzkow and Heinrich Hössli, this essay argues that Romantiism, with its glorification of love, desire and sexuality—and also with its endorsement of female love, desire and sexuality—helped pave the way for the emergence …
Semiotik der Sexualität. Zur Entstehung eines deutschen Diskurses der Homosexualität im 19. Jahrhundert
Written in German, this essay provides an outline of the emergence of modern discourses of sexuality in Europe, focusing on questions of the mind-body problem, gender, identity, and the nineteenth-century homosexual community’s acceptance or rejection of these discourses of sexuality. …
Postmoderne Männlichkeit: Michael Roes und Matthias Politycki
Written in German, this essay explores the representation of masculinity in the works of two contemporary German novelists, Michael Roes and Matthias Politycki. “Postmoderne Männlichkeit: Michael Roes und Matthias Politycki.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik Neue Folge 2 (2002) 324-333.
Making Way for the Third Sex: Male-Male Desire in Thomas Mann’s Early Short Fiction
This essay looks at the “queer” characters in Mann’s early fiction, prior to Death in Venice—characters such as Paolo Hofmann in “The Will to Happiness,” Johannes Friedemann in “Little Mr. Friedemann,” Christian Jacoby in “Little Louise,” Detlev Spinell in “Tristan,” and …
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Venus von Samoa: Rasse und Sexualität im deutschen Südpazifik
The German Empire embarked upon its colonial project just as sexological research was becoming ever more prominent in German culture and scholarship.This essay, written in German, focuses on the German colonization of Samoa as it looks for an overlap between …
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