The Crucible of Sexual Orientation: Sexual theories and identities in nineteenth-century Germany’

Pretsell, Douglas

Abstract

Late-nineteenth-century Germany was a powerhouse of modern sexual theorization. It was then and there that the various terminologies and parameters of the sexual categories we have today started to be negotiated and described. In the 1860s, the Hanoverian lawyer and activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Hungarian German journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny started a process of naming and defining human sexuality that would progress in the decades that followed. They articulated two alternative visions: one anchored around Ulrichs’s urning/dioning neologisms and the other around Kertbeny’s ideologically distinct homosexual/heterosexual terminology. The events described here were localized and language-specific, but the ramifications of what happened in the German-speaking world in the 1860s would go on to reshape the way the whole world thought about sex and sexuality.

Citation

Pretsell, D. (in press). The Crucible of Sexual Orientation: Sexual theories and identities in nineteenth-century Germany’. In The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869-1939. Phaidon Press

• Deposit Date: Jan 29, 2025
• Book Title: The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869-1939
• Chapter Number: 1
• ISBN: 9781580936934
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1052844
• Contract Date: Dec 8, 2024