Reviewed by: Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex by Robert Deam Tobin Liesl Allingham Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex. By Robert Deam Tobin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. xix + 306. Cloth $69.95. ISBN 978-0812247428. In the impressive Peripheral Desires, Robert Deam Tobin significantly extends the scope of his previous two monographs; the first, an argument for an emergent "queer proto-identity" in the Goethezeit (Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe, 2000) and the second, an investigation of the relationship between medicine and literature in the texts from the nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, ending before the onset of National Socialism. In the detailed preface, Tobin makes clear that this volume is neither a history of sexual practices, nor does it engage in queer readings; it is instead a textual-based "history of sexual ideas" (xv). Accordingly, he is careful to maintain the nomenclature of the authors he discusses, such as Urning, invert, and homosexual. Tobin also is upfront about the limitations of the study; his sources necessarily come almost exclusively from the bourgeoisie or the upper class with little representation from the working class. Similarly, female subjects are largely absent, with the exception of in the sixth chapter, which he devotes to a discussion [End Page 646] of the third sex and the women's movement in Switzerland. Nonetheless, gender is fundamental to Tobin's analysis and Tobin draws attention both to the presence and, perhaps more importantly, the absence of theoretical discussions of lesbianism and female-female desire throughout the volume. Any history of sexuality must reckon with Foucault. Tobin acknowledges his debt to Foucault, including the use of "peripheral sexualities" in the title, but also seeks to provide a corrective to what he believes to be Foucault's overemphasis on power and on the larger institutional and discursive constructions of sexuality, particularly the importance of medical institutions. Tobin turns instead to the geographic periphery of Western Europe, looking beyond the German-speaking cultural centers of Berlin and Vienna to Hungary (chapter 4), German colonial Samoa (chapter 5), Switzerland (chapter 6), as well as to novelized discussions of Italy (chapter 7) and Palestine (chapter 8). Reading literary, medical, and political texts with and against each other, he highlights the individual voices and emancipatory movements that he believes Foucault neglects, situating them within the two competing paradigms of same-sex desire that he argues still frame contemporary thinking on sexualities, the liberal-minded emancipationist minoritizing tradition and the antiliberal masculinist tradition. Equally peripheral are some of the literary writers he discusses. In addition to the canonical authors Albert Stifter, Robert Musil, and Thomas Mann, and the popular Karl May, Tobin discusses texts by lesser-known novelists such as the Swiss authors Heinrich Zschokke, Ernst von Wolzogen, and Aimée Duc, and the Silesian-born Arnold Zweig. Tobin lays out the foundations of the emancipationist minoritizing position in his introduction with close readings of seminal publications on the construction of sexuality from 1869 by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Karl-Maria Kertbeny, and Carl Westphal. These authors shared a belief that same-sex desire is inborn, occurs only in a discrete minority, and displays identifiable biological characteristics such as gender inversion. The competing masculinist tradition is the subject of the second chapter. While physicians' and activists' use of ancient Greece as a source of evidence for the biological fixity of homosexuality decreased, the masculinists continued to claim it as proof of the inherent bisexuality of most men and as evidence that male-male desire was the epitome of masculinity. Thus they vehemently rejected the idea of gender inversion with its assumption of effeminacy. Unlike the liberal, emancipatory tradition of the minoritizing position, the masculinists were antibourgeois, antiliberal, antimodernist, and antifeminist. In subsequent chapters, Tobin broadens his investigation both geographically and topically and looks at how these approaches to same-sex desire intersect with, and are duplicated in discussions of race, gender and the women's movement, German colonialism, and nationalism and national identities. One of the more intriguing sections is Tobin's third chapter—an exploration of the increasingly ubiquitous analogy [End Page 647] of Jewishness and homosexuality in the nineteenth century. Originally...
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Jan 3, 2019
Gitana Vanagaitė 
Open Access
