The Enlightenment Origins of Sexual Human Rights
“The Enlightenment Origins of Sexual Human Rights,” German Quarterly 93.3 (Summer 2020), pp. 394-396.
Category: Articles
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.
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.
“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 …
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 …
Discovering Sexuality: The Status of Literature as Evidence Read more »
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 …
Die Quellen der Innovation: Heinrich Hössli und sein Zeitalter Read more »
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 …
Widernaturliche Unzucht! Paragraph 175 in Deutsch-Südwestafrika Read more »
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 »
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 …
World without Evil: Goethe’s Faust and the Faust Tradition Read more »
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 …
Early Nineteenth-Century Sexual Radicalism: Heinrich Hössli and the Liberals of His Day Read more »
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 …
Twins! Homosexuality and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Germany Read more »
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 …
Fixing Freud: The Oedipus Complex in Early Twenty-First Century US-American Novels Read more »
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, …
Faust’s Transgressions: Male-Male Desire in Early Modern Germany Read more »
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 …
Kertbeny’s ‘Homosexuality’ and the Language of Nationalism Read more »
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 …
Making Way for the Third Sex: Male-Male Desire in Thomas Mann’s Early Short Fiction Read more »
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 …
Venus von Samoa: Rasse und Sexualität im deutschen Südpazifik Read more »
The Love that is Called Friendship and the Rise of Sexual Identity
This essay tracks the increasing desexualization of the category of “friend” in German culture from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Whereas eighteenth-century depictions of friendship were full of sexual ambiguity that was noted at the time, nineteenth-century depictions of …
The Love that is Called Friendship and the Rise of Sexual Identity Read more »
Okzidentalismus: der verquerte Orientalismus im schwul-lesbischen deutschen Film
Written in German, this essay investigates how Orientalism and the distinction between the West and its Others play out in such queer German films as Jochen Hick’s Via Appia (1990), Wieland Speck’s Westler (1985), Monika Treut’s My Father Is Coming …
Okzidentalismus: der verquerte Orientalismus im schwul-lesbischen deutschen Film Read more »
Masochism and Identity
While “homosexuality” and “masochism” both emerge in sexological discourses around the same time, homosexual identity has taken a more concrete and politically potent form than masochistic identity. Beginning with examples of female masochists who go to physicians precisely in order …
Morality and German Film
This brief review essay reports on the offerings of the 2000 Berlin Film Festival, including Wim Wenders’s Million Dollar Hotel, Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss’s Zurück auf Los, and Jochen Hick’s No One Sleeps. “Morality and German Film: The Berlinale 2000.” Film and …
Prescriptions: Medicine and Literature
This essay studies two important theoretical terms that relate both to medicine and literature: (1) Derrida’s pharmakon, which is both a poison and a cure, and which also stands in for writing itself; (2) semiotics, which is now typically understood …
Freundschaftsdämmerung: Johannes Müller, Sigismund Wiese, Friedrich Ramdohr und Heinrich Hössli
This essay examines the decline of the sexually ambiguous category of “friendship.” In the eighteenth century, a friendship discourse flourished in German literature. A male author could publicly declare that he wanted to be another man’s wife. Contrary to quick …
The Life and Work of Thomas Mann: A Gay Perspective
Slightly shorter than the piece on Death in Venice in the 1994 Norton anthology, this essay develops my thinking on the role of male-male desire in Thomas Mann’s famous novella. It concludes that the novella “may in fact achieve some insights into …
The Life and Work of Thomas Mann: A Gay Perspective Read more »
Thomas Mann’s Queer Schiller
Starting with an entry in Klaus Mann’s diaries about a discussion with his father at the dinner table about Schiller’s possible homosexuality, this essay delves into a queer reading of Schiller’s Don Carlos. Ultimately the essay concludes: “Arguing that this creative …
In and Against Nature: Goethe on Homosexuality and Heterotextuality
This seminal essay applies queer theory and deconstructive thought to Goethe’s thinking on male-male desire, concluding that “like pederasty, the text should be a pharmakon, both natural and unnatural, meaning both itself and the Other–in a word, heterotextual.” It appeared …
In and Against Nature: Goethe on Homosexuality and Heterotextuality Read more »
Why is Tadzio a Boy? Perspectives on Homoeroticism in Death in Venice
This essay was probably first essay focusing on same-sex desire in Mann’s Death in Venice to be in a collection aimed at student audiences. It provides background information about the homosexual emancipation movement in Germany during Mann’s lifetime and biographical …
Why is Tadzio a Boy? Perspectives on Homoeroticism in Death in Venice Read more »
Faust’s Membership in Male Society
Beginning with two of Goethe’s most famous poems, “Ganymed” and “Prometheus,” this essay argues that Faust unites the receptive, submissive, self-dissolving masculinity of “Ganymed” with the defiant, dominant, ego-centric masculinity of “Prometheus.” As the essay asserts, “Faust’s masculine desire for the eternal …
Two Medicinalizations of Androgyny in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
“Two Medicinalizations of Androgyny in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” Semiotics 1990, ed. Karen Haworth, John Deely, and Terry Prewitt (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1993) 294-301.
Das offene Geheimnis der Sexualität: Verhüllung und Enthüllung von Krankheit und Faschismus in den Schriften Thomas Manns
The first essay that I ever published in German was part of a guerrilla Festschrift in honor of Wolfram Mauser. We young research assistants, teaching assistants, assistant professors and scholars being supported by Mauser’s research projects were not eminent enough …
The Medicinalization of Mignon
This essay looks at the character of Mignon from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in light of eighteenth-century medical discourses. It looks both at how the medicine of the time would have regarded her as pathological, but also at how the …
Healthy Families: Medicine, Patriarchy, and Heterosexuality in 18th-Century German Novels
This essay provides a brief overview of eighteenth-century German medical thought on family, gender and sexuality before looking at the ways in which medical discourses are used to bolster heterosexual discourses in three important bildungsromane: Wieland’s Agathon, Moritz’s Anton Reiser, and Goethe’s Wilhelm …
Promethean Renunciation: On the Relationship of Artistry, Creativity, and Masochism in Goethe
Joachim Pfeiffer, “Promethean Renunciation: On the Relationship of Artistry, Creativity, and Masochism in Goethe,” One Hundred Years of Masochism: Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts, Psychoanalysis and Culture 10, ed. Michael Finke and Carl Niekerk (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) 109-17.
Friendship and Gender: The Aesthetic Construction of Subjectivity in Kleist’s Letters and Literature
Joachim Pfeiffer, “Friendship and Gender: The Aesthetic Construction of Subjectivity in Kleist’s Letters and Literature,” Outing Goethe and His Age, ed. Alice Kuzniar (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 215-27.
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, ed. Charles E. Winquist and Victor Taylor (London: Routledge, 2001): “queer theory” (326-28).
Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia
Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, ed. George Haggerty (New York: Garland, 2000): German Literature (396-97), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (407-08), Heinrich Hössli (456-57), Thomas Mann (559-60).