Disciplining Sex and Subject: Translation, Biography and the Emergence of Sexology in Germany

Abstract

In what context did the sexual taxonomies emerge, and how were they modified when they were translated across linguistic, disciplinary, and broader cultural boundaries? If we shift our focus from the reception to the transferral of the new ideas, then what can the translations of same-sex sexuality tell us about the sexual and social bodies they aimed to classify? This chapter outlines the theoretical approach of the book by examining the emergence of sexology in Germany and the migration of the sexual taxonomies in Europe, specifically in Britain, from the new discipline’s inception to its first significant disruption by the beginning of World War II. It explores how in the German states the theorisation of the sexual body was linked closely to discourses surrounding an emerging modern national body. As Angela Taeger has argued, ‘neither advocates nor opponents of [homosexuality] could deal with sexuality and morality without simultaneously bringing in one of the most exciting novelties of their times: the development of the nation state’.1 Here the ‘nation’ was typically conceptualised in terms of its social body, a constantly shifting classification of the population in terms of ideologies of health, strength, and deviancy. Sexologists were part of the project of analyzing society-in-process, embedding into their theories and empirical research assumptions derived from their specific national and cultural backgrounds.