- Not Straight from Germany: Sexual Publics and Sexual Citizenship since Magnus Hirschfeld ed. by Michael Thomas Taylor, Annette Timm, and Rainer Herrn
In recent years, a number of creative-critical initiatives have reflected on the history of sexology and its legacies. The work of the Jewish sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) has featured prominently in [End Page 167] a number of them, most recently the 2017 exhibition Odarodle, curated by Ashkan Sepahvand at the Schwules Museum* (Gay Museum) Berlin, a long-overdue reckoning with the museum’s postcolonial entanglements. In 2014 the Wellcome Collection in London hosted The Institute of Sexology, an exhibition curated by Kate Forde that was inspired by Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin. Hirschfeld established the institute, which was the first of its kind, in 1919. Forde’s show featured a series of exhibition rooms—such as the library, the consulting room, and the laboratory—that represented different aspects of the institute’s work and the history of sex research more broadly. These recent shows follow in the wake of an innovative 2011 exhibition in Calgary, PopSex! Science, History, Culture, Art, which emerged from a collaboration between the historians of sexuality Michael Thomas Taylor, Annette Timm, and Rainer Herrn and artists from Europe and North America who were invited to respond to Hirschfeld’s archive. The resulting artwork was exhibited alongside archival materials. PopSex! made a creative contribution to the archival turn in the history of sexuality, not only examining Hirschfeld’s work but also asking, “What might he still be able to teach us about the role of sexual identity in public and political discourse?” (3).
Not Straight from Germany: Sexual Publics and Sexual Citizenship since Magnus Hirschfeld continues the creative critical dialogue. The book approaches Hirschfeld’s work from both historical and contemporary perspectives, including critical chapters and visual essays that address Hirschfeld’s own work and the artwork it inspired. Its aim is ambitious: to reveal the complex genealogies of twenty-first-century discussions about sexuality, specifically, the roots of these debates in intersecting histories of sexuality, sexology, and modern Western publics. Framed by a succinct introduction by Annette Timm and a concluding photo essay by Elizabeth Heineman on the influence of Hirschfeld’s institute in West German erotica, contributors explore the “visual rhetoric of sexual identities” (part 1) and key points of connection between Hirschfeld’s work and the twenty-first-century artists who engaged with it (part 2). Part 2 is further divided into three subsections that focus on “moral panics,” the use of visual materials in scientific sex research, and “the history of sex in print.” These subsections open with captivating albeit brief introductions that reflect on issues raised by the historical materials and the artistic responses to them. The individual contributions in turn bring to life Hirschfeld’s ideas and the work of the institute (particularly the contributions of Michael Thomas Taylor, Rainer Herrn, Kathrin Peters, Kevin S. Amidon, and the coauthored contribution of Rainer Herrn and Christine Brickmann), their legacies (work by Sabine Kriebel, Pamela E. Swett, and Elizabeth Heineman), and the historical contexts for sex debates (the pieces by Gary D. Stark, Lisa M. Todd, Tobias Becker, and Jason Crouthamel and the coauthored contribution of Mara Taylor and Michael Thomas Taylor). In addition to contributors’ [End Page 168] biographies, the book also includes notes on the art and artists included in PopSex!
Not Straight from Germany is a treasure trove full of historical artifacts and critical insights. While the format—a mixture of visual and written essays, some of them dissected into subheadings of several kinds—can be challenging, it effectively mirrors the complexities and irregularities of the materials gathered and produced at Hirschfeld’s institute, the critical and methodological challenges that surround an archive of “sex,” and the difficult encounters it might present to those looking to the past when trying to...