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Desiderata for a History of Austrian Sexualities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2010

Matti Bunzl
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Extract

The history of sexuality is a recent field. As a domain of scholarly inquiry, it emerged in the late 1970s, partially the outgrowth of women's history and partially the product of the lesbian/gay movement. Its foundational text is the first volume of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, published in French in 1976 and translated into English two years later. This is among the rare books that are truly pathbreaking, taking what was regarded as a “natural” phenomenon and showing its deep historicity.

Type
Forum: Writing the History of Sexuality in Fin-de-Siècle Cisleithania
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 38 , January 2007 , pp. 48 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2007

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References

1 Foucault, Michael, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York, 1978)Google Scholar. The German translation was published as Sexualität und Wahrheit, vol. 1, Der Wille zum Wissen (Frankfurt, 1983).

2 See, for example, Müller, Klaus, Aber in meinem Herzen sprach eine Stimme so laut: Homosexuelle Autobiographien und medizinische Pathographien im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1991)Google Scholar; Herzer, Manfred, Magnus Hirschfeld: Leben und Werk eines jüdischen, schwulen und sozialistischen Sexologen (Frankfurt, 1992)Google Scholar; Rosario, Vernon, ed., Science and Homosexualities (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Terry, Jennifer, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 The pioneering works in the political history of sexuality include Weeks, Jeffrey, Homosexual Politics in Britain: From the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, 1979)Google Scholar; and D'Emilio, John, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago, 1983).Google Scholar One important book, Steakley, James, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (New York, 1975)Google Scholar, actually preceded Foucault. It was a direct product of the emerging lesbian/gay movement.

4 Among the most influential books in this respect are Walkowitz, Judith, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walkowitz, , City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mosse, George, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison, 1985)Google Scholar; Engelstein, Laura, Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, 1992)Google Scholar; Cohen, Ed, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Geneaology of Discourse on Male Homosexuality (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Chauncey, George, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; and Hull, Isabel, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, 1996).Google Scholar

5 Boyarin, Daniel, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkely, 1997)Google Scholar; Gilman, Sander, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton, 1993)Google Scholar; Gilman, , The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Baltimore, 1993)Google Scholar; Pellegrini, Ann, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York, 1997).Google Scholar

6 On Krafft-Ebing, see Oosterhuis, Harry, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago, 2000).Google Scholar On Weininger, see Harrowitz, Nancy and Hyams, Barbara, eds., Jews & Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger (Philadelphia, 1995)Google Scholar; Sengoopta, Chandak, Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna (Chicago, 2000)Google Scholar; and Luft, David, Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (Chicago, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Hacker, Hanna, Frauen und Freundinnen: Studien zur “weiblichen Sexualität” am Beispiel Österreich (Weinheim, 1987)Google Scholar; Jusek, Karin, Auf der Suche nach der Verlorenen: Die Prostitutionsdebatten im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Vienna, 1994)Google Scholar. Th ree other suggestive books, all of them the product of the lesbian/gay movement rather than the academy, are Bei, Neda et al. , eds., Das Lila Wien um 1900: Zur Ästhetik der Homosexualitäten (Vienna, 1986)Google Scholar; Handl, Michael et al. , eds., Homosexualität in Österreich (Vienna, 1989)Google Scholar; and Förster, Wolfgang, Natter, Tobias, and Rieder, Ines, eds., Der andere Blick. Lesbischwules Leben in Österreich: Eine Kulturgeschichte (Vienna, 2001)Google Scholar.

8 Eder, Franz X., ed., “Sexualiät,” Special issue, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (hereaft er cited as ÖZG) 5, no. 3 (1994)Google Scholar; Eder, , ed., “Homosexualitäten,” Special issue, ÖZG 9, no. 3 (1998)Google Scholar; Eder, , ed., “Im Inneren der Männlichkeit,” Special issue, ÖZG 11, no. 3 (2000)Google Scholar. The scholarship on the history of European sexualities by Franz X. Eder, professor at the Institute for Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna, is extensive. Good starting points are his monograph Kultur der Begierde: Eine Geschichte der Sexualität (München, 2002)Google Scholar and his co-edited volumes, Eder, Franz X., Hall, Lesley, and Hekma, Gert, eds., Sexual Cultures in Europe, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1999)Google Scholar. For the work of another University of Vienna scholar with an interest in the history of European sexualities, see Schmale, Wolfgang, Geschichte der Männlichkeit in Europa (1450–2000) (Vienna, 2003)Google Scholar.

9 Chauncey, Gay New York; Kennedy, Elizabeth and Davis, Madline, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Newton, Esther, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town (Boston, 1993)Google Scholar. See also Ullman, Sharon, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley, 1997)Google Scholar.

10 Bunzl, Matti, Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (Berkeley, 2004)Google Scholar.

11 Schorske, Carl, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981)Google Scholar.

12 Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature.

13 Boswell, John, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980)Google Scholar; Boswell, , Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. See also Brown, Judith, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

14 The main exception to this situation is the available work on the history of prostitution in France. See, for example, Corbin, Alain, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, MA, 1990)Google Scholar; Bernheimer, Charles, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Durham, 1989)Google Scholar. Foucault's own work, of course, reflects the French scene. And while he devoted considerable attention to the role of Catholicism in the medieval and early modern period, famously focusing on the practice of confession, Catholicism disappears from his analytic framework in the modern era. For an important early book on a very different Catholic context, see Martinez-Alier, Verena (Verena Stolcke), Marriage, Class, and Color in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (Ann Arbor, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 In addition to the works cited in previous endnotes, other central texts on Protestant contexts include D'Emilio, John and Friedman, Estelle, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Bech, Henning, When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar, which deals with Denmark; and Rydström, Jens, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950 (Chicago, 2003)Google Scholar.

16 Bunzl, Symptoms of Modernity, 19, 64.

17 Jusek, Auf der Suche nach der Verlorenen.

18 On these scandals, see Pieter Judson, “A Scandal in the Seminary,” in Contemporary Austrian Studies, ed. Dagmar Herzog and Günter Bischof, vol. 15 (New Brunswick, forthcoming); Bunzl, Matti, “Outing as Performance/Outing as Resistance: A Queer Reading of Austrian (Homo)Sexualities,” Cultural Anthropology 12 (1997): 129–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 See, for example, der Freunde, Verein eines Schwulen Museums in Berlin e.V., ed., Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin, 1850–1950 (Berlin, 1984)Google Scholar; Tatar, Maria, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar; Schader, Heike, Virile, Vamps und wilde Veilchen: Sexualität, Begehren und Erotik in den Zeitschrift en homosexueller Frauen im Berlin der 1920er Jahre (Königstein, 2004)Google Scholar. It is worth noting that both Austrian and German histories of sexuality focus on the respective urban centers of Vienna and Berlin. The provinces, by contrast, are severely understudied, only partly a function of an even more diffi cult source situation. Stauter-Halsted and Wingfield are doing absolutely crucial work in this regard.

20 John, Michael and Lichtblau, Albert, Schmelztiegel Vienna, einst und jetzt: Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart von Zuwanderung und Minderheiten (Vienna, 1990)Google Scholar; Cohen, Gary B., The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, 1981; 2nd ed., W. Lafayette, 2006)Google Scholar; Glettler, Monika, Die Wiener Tschechen um 1900: Strukturanalyse einer nationalen Minderheit in der Großstadt (Munich, 1972)Google Scholar; Nemes, Robert, The Once and Future Budapest (DeKalb, 2005)Google Scholar.

21 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality.

22 See, for example, Bunzl, Matti, “The Prague Experience: Gay Male Sex Tourism and the Neo-Colonial Invention of an Embodied Border,” in Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, eds. Berdahl, Daphne, Bunzl, Matti, and Lampland, Martha (Ann Arbor, 2000), 70–95Google Scholar.

23 Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna.

24 Beller, Steven, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar.

25 See, for example, the previously cited Harrowitz and Hyams, Jews & Gender; Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender; Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud.

26 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct.