Ebook: Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933

Uses historical case studies to illuminate women’s
claims to emancipation and to sexual subjectivity during the tumultuous
Wilhelmine and Weimar periods in Germany.Desiring Emancipation
traces middle-class German women’s claims to gender emancipation and sexual
subjectivity in the pre-Nazi era. The emergence of homosexual identities and
concepts in this same time frame provided the context for expression of
individual struggles with self, femininity, and sex. The book asks how women
used new concepts and opportunities to construct selves in relationship to
family, society, state, and culture. Taking a queer approach, Desiring
Emancipation’s goal is not to find homosexuals in history, but to analyze
how women reworked categories of gender and sex. Marti M. Lybeck interrogates
their desires, demonstrating that emancipation was fraught with conflict,
anachronism, and disappointment.Each chapter is a microhistorical
recreation of the actions, writings, contexts, and conflicts of specific groups
of women. The topics include the experience of first-generation university
students, public debates about female homosexuality, and the stories of three
civil servants whose careers were ruined by workplace accusations of
homosexuality. The book concludes with a debate between the women who joined the
1920s homosexual movement on the meanings of their new identities.