Sexuality in Modern German History offers both a detailed survey of this key subject and a new intervention in the history of sexuality in modern Germany. It investigates the diverse and often contradictory ways in which individuals, activists, doctors, politicians, artists, church leaders, reform movements and cultural commentators have defined 'normal' or 'natural' sexuality in Germany over the past two centuries. Katie Sutton explores how these definitions have been used to shape identities, behaviours, bodies and practices, from norms of heterosexual, marital, reproductive sex to ideas around the policing and categorisation of 'unnatural' or 'deviant' bodies and practices. Covering a range of crucial themes, including birth control, prostitution, queer and trans rights and heterosexual intimacy, this important text comes with 30 illustrations and a wealth of primary source extracts and secondary literature, helpfully integrated to enable further insight and analysis. This is a vital volume for all students and scholars with an interested in modern Germany or the history of sexuality in modern Europe.

Sexuality in Modern German History offers both a detailed survey of this key subject and a new intervention in the history of sexuality in modern Germany. It investigates the diverse and often contradictory ways in which individuals, activists, doctors, politicians, artists, church leaders, reform movements and cultural commentators have defined 'normal' or 'natural' sexuality in Germany over the past two centuries. Katie Sutton explores how these definitions have been used to shape identities, behaviours, bodies and practices, from norms of heterosexual, marital, reproductive sex to ideas around the policing and categorisation of 'unnatural' or 'deviant' bodies and practices. Covering a range of crucial themes, including birth control, prostitution, queer and trans rights and heterosexual intimacy, this important text comes with 30 illustrations and a wealth of primary source extracts and secondary literature, helpfully integrated to enable further insight and analysis. This is a vital volume for all students and scholars with an interested in modern Germany or the history of sexuality in modern Europe.

A range of startling case-studies from German society between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

To provide a critical overview in a comparative German-American perspective is the main aim of this volume, which brings together experts from both sides of the Atlantic. Through case studies, it demonstrates the extraordinary power of the gender perspective to challenge existing interpretations and rewrite mainstream arguments.

Michel Foucault’s seminal The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality—a field in which the German case has been traditionally central. In many diverse ways, the Foucauldian intervention has governed the formation of questions in the field as well as the assumptions about how some of these questions should be answered. It can be argued, however, that some of these revolutionary insights have ossified into dogmas or truisms within the field. Yet, as these contributions meticulously reveal, those very truisms, when revisited with a fresh eye, can lead to new, unexpected insights into the history of sexuality, necessitating a return to and reinterpretation of Foucault’s richly complex work. This volume will be necessary reading for students of historical sexuality as well as for those readers in German history and German studies generally who have an interest in the history of sexuality.

Although “entanglement” has become a keyword in recent German history scholarship, entangled studies of the postwar era have largely limited their scope to politics and economics across the two Germanys while giving short shrift to social and cultural phenomena like gender. At the same time, historians of gender in Germany have tended to treat East and West Germany in isolation, with little attention paid to intersections and interrelationships between the two countries. This groundbreaking collection synthesizes the perspectives of entangled history and gender studies, bringing together established as well as upcoming scholars to investigate the ways in which East and West German gender relations were culturally, socially, and politically intertwined.

This collection of essays examines the construction of gender norms in early modern and modern Germany.; The modes of reinforcement by the state, the church, the law and marriage, and the resistance to these norms by individuals, are central to each of the contributions.; It examines discourses of the body and sexuality and the relations between gender and power. Similarly, the usefulness of the "public/private paradigm" familiar to gender historians is further challenged.

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.

National Politics and Sexuality in Transregional Perspective explores how modern identity politics around the world are gendered and sexualized in multiple ways. Constructions of the imagined collective "self" often contain references to a heteronormative order, whereas relevant internal or external "others" are often felt to deviate from this order through their gendered or sexual practices. By contrast, some Western countries have witnessed the evolution of LGBTQI-friendly discourses by certain political actors in recent years, often in the context of the post-9/11 culture wars. This pathbreaking book focuses on perceptions of "self" and "other" in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa from a gendered perspective. It deals with anti-LGBTQI as well as LGBTQI-friendly aspects of modern culture and politics in countries within these regions, focusing on the functions such discursive markers play in nationalist and racist imageries, in discourses legitimizing class differences from the nineteenth century to the present day, including globalized discourses in the context of 9/11 and its aftermath. It shows that discourses on sexuality and gendered performances in everyday life often undermine the stability of such binary constructions, as they point to the multiplicity, ambivalence and the indeterminate character of individual and collective identities under conditions of modernity. Addressing contemporary identity politics both in a wider historical context and within a transregional comparative framework thus helps to discern differences and similarities between different world regions and serves to dislocate essentialized notions of cultural differences based on gender and sex. This book will appeal to those with an interest in Political Sociology, Gender Studies, and Globalisation.

Covering the early eighteenth century through the present, Histories of French Sexuality reveals how attention to the history of sexuality deepens, changes, challenges, supports, and otherwise complicates the major narratives of French history.