Berlin S Third Sex

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

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.

Starting in the nineteenth century in Germany, colourful military uniforms became a locus for various queer male fantasies, fostering an underground sexual economy of male prostitution as well as a political project to exploit the army’s prestige for queer emancipation. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, a series of scandals derailed this emancipatory project. Simultaneously, public debates began to invoke homosexuality, sadism, transvestism, and other sexological concepts to criticize military policies and practices. In pursuing the threads with which queer authors and activists stitched their fantasies about uniforms, Jeffrey Schneider offers fresh perspectives on key debates over military secrecy, disciplinary abuses in the army, and German militarism. Drawing on a vast trove of materials ranging from sexological case studies, trial transcripts, and parliamentary debates to queer activist tracts, autobiographies, and literary texts, Uniform Fantasies uncovers a particularly modern set of concerns about such topics as outing closeted homosexuals, the presence of gay men in the military, and whether men in uniform are more masculine or more insecure about their sexual identity.

Berlin, city of Bertolt Brecht, Marlene Dietrich, cabaret and German Expressionism, a city identified with a female sexuality - at first alluring but then dangerous. In this fascinating study, Dorothy Rowe turns our attention to Berlin as a sexual landscape. She investigates the processes by which women and femininity played a prominent role in depictions of the city at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. She explores how in the aftermath of the horrors of World War I, increasing anxieties about the liberation of women and the supposed increase of female prostitution contributed to the demonization of the city not as a focus of desire and pleasure but rather as one of alienation and anxiety.

This volume is the first full-length study on pioneering sexologist and sexual rights activist, Magnus Hirschfeld, that examines his impact on the politics and culture of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Germany and the value of his rationalist humanist approach for contemporary debates on sexual rights.

This edited collection explores the important connections between sexualities, geographies and leisure studies. Chapters consider aspects of sport, leisure and tourism and show how sexualities are produced and reproduced within these spatial realms. The critical and interdisciplinary analyses—which are evident in the collection—focus on sexuality and the socio-cultural power relations produced through and in the spaces of leisure. These theoretical discussions are all informed by recent research findings and, importantly, extend existing debates within the fields of geography and leisure studies. A range of appropriate and relevant topics are covered, including critical debate on sexism, homophobic, heterosexism and heteronormativity as well as specific LGBT experiences of sport spectatorship, socialising, Mardi Gras and skiing. This book offers a unique collection and it is the first of its kind. This book was published as a special issue of Leisure Studies.

This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was a prolific writer, historian, art critic, translator and publisher; the quintissential Bohemian fin-de-siecle artist. In the turbulent years that followed the end of the First World War, he became politically active as the leader of the young conservative revolutionaries in Weimar Germany. Moeller van den Bruck expressed his ideas for a German authoritarian state in his major work Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich), first published in 1923. Adolf Hitler was profoundly influenced by the ideas that Das Dritte Reich and regarded himself as the activist who could implement them. As Moeller van den Bruck watched Hitler become the personification of the violent dynamism he had recommended in his book, he anticipated the horrors to come and saw no way out by to commit suicide. This remarkable biography gives a compelling insight into the tragic life of Moeller van den Bruck and uses personal interviews with contemporaries such as Kafka, Munch and Dietrich to explore the political and artistic whirlpools of Weirmar Germany in which he lived.