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Something a Bit Peculiar? Sex, the Germans and the History of Sexuality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2014

VICTORIA HARRIS
VICTORIA HARRIS*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham: School of History and Cultures, Arts Building, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT; [email protected]
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Extract

Historians of sexuality are uniquely placed to act the flâneur. Loitering in an archive's seedier or more obscure files, they tour the marginal landscapes of the past. They can vicariously experience deviant activity while maintaining historical detachment, writing histories which titillate as much as educate. Fun though this may be, there is the danger that producing such texts benefits only the writers themselves. Michel Foucault famously suggested that writing about the history of sexuality occurs purely for the ‘speaker's benefit’. Historians have thus sought to prove that ‘marginal’ histories are of true academic, not just voyeuristic, significance. This quest has been particularly fruitful for histories of sexuality – stories which are fascinating not least because they are simultaneously marginal, or unspeakable, and utterly central to human life.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 283 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Charles Baudelaire described the flâneur as a person who walks the city in order to experience it, who at once partakes in its experiences and is separate from it: Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964)Google Scholar. The original essay appeared in Le Figaro in 1863. For an example in his poetry: ‘À une passante’, Fleurs du mal (Paris: Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 1857). See also: Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: NLB, 1973) [Ger. orig., Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (1955)]Google Scholar.

2 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, I: The Will to Knowledge (London, 1976), 7Google Scholar.

3 For a larger discussion on the theme of marginality in the history of sexuality, as well as the discipline's attempt to find academic acceptance, see: Harris, Victoria, ‘Sex on the Margins: New Directions in the Historiography of Sexuality and Gender, The Historical Journal, 53, 4 (2010), 1085–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For more on these issues, see: Harris, ‘Sex on the Margins’.

5 As such they all look to concepts of ‘everyday history’ whether implicitly or explicitly, starting their analyses with low-level social histories. For more on the idea of social history, see: Lüdtke, Alf, ed., ‘Introduction: What is the History of Everyday Life and Who are its Practitioners?’, in The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, tr. William Temple (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1995)Google Scholar; Davis, Belinda, Lindenberger, Thomas and Wildt, Michael, eds, Alltag, Erfahrung, Eigensinn: Historisch-anthropologische Erkundungen (Frankfurt: Campus, 2008)Google Scholar; Eley, Geoff, ‘Labor History, Social History, “Alltagsgeschichte”: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday—a New Direction for German Social History?’, The Journal of Modern History, 61, 2 (1989), 297–343CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Heineman, Before Porn was Legal, 1.

7 ‘LGBT housing project unites generations out in Berlin. Gay pensioners persecuted by Nazis live alongside young workers in pioneering community’, The Guardian, 28 Oct. 2012.

8 McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism, 211.

9 Timm, The Politics of Fertility, esp. 80–117.

10 ‘LGBT housing project unites generations’, The Guardian, 28 Oct. 2012.

11 For more on this see: Harris, Victoria, Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.