Magnus Hirschfeld and the Violent Shaping of Queer Modernity

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Monument Building
Room: 
Popper Room
Wednesday, November 6, 2013 - 4:30pm
Add to Calendar
Date: 
Wednesday, November 6, 2013 - 4:30pm to 6:10pm

The Department of Gender Studies

2013-2014 Public Lecture Series

presents

Heike Bauer

 Magnus Hirschfeld and the Violent Shaping of Queer Modernity 

 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, 6 November 2013, Popper

This paper examines the work and reception of the prolific Jewish sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) for the insights it provides into how violence, death and persecution shaped the development modern queer identity and culture. Hirschfeld is best known today for his homosexual rights activism, foundational studies of transvestism and opening of the world's first Institute of Sexual Sciences in Berlin. But, as this paper will show, he was also a chronicler of the effects of hate and violence against lesbians and homosexual men and other groups of people. Publishing both in German and English and influenced by his literary as well as medical training, Hirschfeld wrote, for example, about the death of Oscar Wilde and how it affected homosexual men at the turn of the last century; he conducted the first statistical surveys of lesbian and homosexual suicide; and he published books on war, nationalism and racism in which he collated evidence of different forms of collective discrimination and their impact on individual lives. This paper asks what the narratives about lesbian and homosexual death, suicide and persecution recorded by Hirschfeld can tell us about queer suffering in the early twentieth century, and, more specifically, about how anti-homosexuality violence impacted not only on the individuals subjected to it but also on the broader shaping of a transnational modern queer culture. By tracing the evidence of queer suffering in Hirschfeld’s work, then, the paper also considers how 'identity' was experienced, transmitted, damaged and sustained in the transnational shaping of modernity. 

***

Heike Bauer is Senior Lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, and founding director of BiGS, Birkbeck’s forum for interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies. Her main publications include a monograph, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion 1860-1930 (Palgrave, 2009), a 3-volume anthology of texts on Women and Cross-Dressing 1800-1930 (Routledge, 2006), and, most recently, a collection of essay co-edited with the historian Matt Cook, Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality on the Postwar Years (Palgrave, 2012). She is currently working on a book about Magnus Hirschfeld, violence and modern sex research, and a related project on sexology and translation, 1860-1930. She is also writing about contemporary queer and feminist graphic comics and graphic memoirs.