Magnus Hirschfeld’s Meanings: Analysing Biography and the Politics of Representation

Leng, Kirsten

doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghw142

Cited by 21 publications

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“…Doctors should be realistic and could not always expect "a perfect effect" or any cure at all. 81 In his memoirs he disclosed that his mode of association therapy found little resonance because it required a rare degree of strength and persistence. 82 He had discovered that even perversions acquired through habit and psychosocial factors were resistant to treatment, particularly in older clients already past the more pliable stage of undifferentiated sexuality.…”

Section: The Entanglement Of Nature and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…84 age dispariTy Despite these views, after the 1890s the relatively sympathetic perspective on homosexuality that Moll had developed through exposure to the individual life stories of his clients was replaced with a more distant and stereotyped view of homosexuals as a group that was influenced by his growing aversion to their activism and subculture. He began to maintain that particularly those who were effeminate often exhibited "the most despicable characteristics," such as fickleness, petulance, coquetry, vanity, 81 Moll, Ein Leben, 58, 149-51. See also Moll, "Die Behandlung der Homosexualität," 20, 29; Moll, Behandlung der Homosexualität, 45-63.…”

Section: The Entanglement Of Nature and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

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Albert Moll’s Ambivalence about Homosexuality and His Marginalization as a Sexual Pioneer

Oosterhuis¹

2019

Journal of the History of Sexuality

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who carved out sexology as a new scientific field, are well-known. However, others whose thought was crucial to the field have largely been neglected. The German neurologist Albert Moll (1862Moll ( -1939 is certainly one of them. His name, to be sure, appears frequently in historical works about sexuality, but his life and work warrant more attention than they have received so far. If in the early twentieth century Moll was one of the best-known experts in sexology in Central Europe, his fame had waned by the time he died on 23 September 1939, on the very same day as Freud. His reputation was eclipsed by the widespread adoption of Freud's psychoanalytic theory and by Hirschfeld's prominence as an epoch-making protagonist of sexual reform and the homosexual rights movement. Unlike Freud and Hirschfeld, with whom Moll was engaged in bitter conflicts, he did not establish a school or activist movement. Nor did he ever hold a university position, meaning that he lacked the opportunity to have students and followers who might have taken up and popularized his work.By the 1890s, before Freud, Ellis, and Hirschfeld became influential, Moll had already elaborated the most comprehensive and sophisticated sexual theory to date. But his innovative and ingenious reflections on sexuality, including biological as well as psychological and sociocultural factors, have received far less attention from historians of sexuality and in lesbian and gay studies than those of his contemporaries. When his contributions to sexology are mentioned at all, it is often only in passing and in a one-sided and judgmental way. His antagonism toward the putatively enlightened and progressive views of Freud and Hirschfeld have led many commentators to highlight his political conservatism and regressive views of homosexuality and to therefore overlook his more innovative thinking about sexuality. 1 I am indebted to Gert Hekma, Annette Timm, and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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Section: The Entanglement Of Nature and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Entanglement Of Nature and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Albert Moll’s Ambivalence about Homosexuality and His Marginalization as a Sexual Pioneer

Oosterhuis¹

2019

Journal of the History of Sexuality

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“…Increasingly, Hirschfeld is held up in Germany and elsewhere as a pioneer of gay rights. 151 But if we have to pick a gay hero from the past to symbolise gay liberation in the present, Hirschfeld is a fraught choice. 152 To conclude: for white Europeans, the empire was romantic and erotic.…”

Section: Sex Conquers Race: Imperialism and The Creation Of Homosexuamentioning

confidence: 99%

Was the Homosexual Made White? Race, Empire, and Analogy in Gay and Trans Thought in Twentieth‐Century Germany

Marhoefer¹

2019

Gender & History

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Sexuality, Science, and Technology

Drucker¹

2020

Companion to Sexuality Studies

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Magnus Hirschfeld’s Meanings: Analysing Biography and the Politics of Representation

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Albert Moll’s Ambivalence about Homosexuality and His Marginalization as a Sexual Pioneer

Albert Moll’s Ambivalence about Homosexuality and His Marginalization as a Sexual Pioneer

Was the Homosexual Made White? Race, Empire, and Analogy in Gay and Trans Thought in Twentieth‐Century Germany

Sexuality, Science, and Technology

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