Trans photography in German sexology and Weimar sexual subcultures
Scholars have identified the central importance of patient case histories in the professionalization of medicine in modernity, but directed relatively little attention towards the role of visual technologies, whether in shaping relationships between sexologists and their patients, providing embodied illustrations of new medical categories, or mediating between sexologists and their multiple audiences. This paper examines the use of photographic cases of “transvestism” in the work of early 20th-century German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, and compares these with photographs published in the interwar subcultural magazine Das 3. Geschlecht (The 3rd Sex). Framing the paper is a concern with how such sources might contribute to a “queer critical history” that seeks to understand how historical subjects negotiated the “limits of naming and self-naming” (Doan 2013). First, I argue that photographic evidence played a crucial role in sexologists’ attempts to establish their discipline as “legitimate knowledge” (Foucault 1998), and explore some of the ethical and power relations surrounding images in sexological texts. I then examine the role played by sexological photography in the emergence of new forms of subcultural subjectivity in the interwar period, and contrast such images with the representational codes that were beginning to emerge in non-clinical settings.

About the presenter
Katie Sutton is associate professor of German and Gender, Sexuality and Cultural Studies at the Australian National University. She is the author of Sex between Body and Mind: Encounters between Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-Speaking World, 1890s-1930s (University of Michigan Press, 2019), The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (Berghahn Books, 2011), and has published widely on early 20th-century German trans and queer histories, sexual science and psychoanalysis, including in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, German History, and German Studies Review.

Chair: Professor Helen Keane (ANU Sociology)
Venue: Room 4.69, RSSS Building