Rosa Zeiten? Eine Geschichte der Subjektivierung männlicher Homosexualität in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren der BRD

Abstract

If we look at the material and the method independently of each other, Magdalena Beljan’s project already seems quite familiar to us. She is reading gay men’s history in the West German context with Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. I , in particular his critique of the repression hypothesis. But although Foucault’s work certainly belongs to the foundational texts of Queer Theory and although we already have several historical accounts of postwar German sexual history, no one has yet combined the two and approached this material from a Foucauldian perspective. Her book therefore promises to make an important contribution to both the history of sexuality in the German context and in the field of Queer Studies more generally. Beljan starts her investigation in 1969, the year when homosexuality was decriminalized in West Germany, and ends it in 1989, the year of German reunification. Beyond the well-known legal issues—the several ways of reforming Paragraph 175—the material of her investigation consists primarily of media representation of gay men, in both the gay and the mainstream press. She pays particular attention to Der Spiegel’s coverage of gay topics and to the gay magazine Du und Ich . The latter’s importance for her study is justified by the fact that it is the only German gay magazine that appeared over the whole period of her investigation and can therefore function as a privileged tool for observing the development of gay discourse in West Germany after 1969. Additionally, she looks at sexological and sociological studies from that period and reads the construction of gay male subjectivities in self-help books such as Schwul, na und?