Uniform Fantasies
Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany
Author: Jeffrey Schneider Series: German and European Studies
Uniform Fantasies explores the intimate entanglements between military politics and queer sexual politics in Germany during the decades leading up to the First World War.
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PRODUCT INFORMATION
Summary
Uniform Fantasies explores the intimate entanglements between military politics and queer sexual politics in Germany during the decades leading up to the First World War.
Description
Starting in the nineteenth century in Germany, colourful military uniforms became a locus for various queer male fantasies, fostering an underground sexual economy of male prostitution as well as a political project to exploit the army's prestige for queer emancipation. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, a series of scandals derailed this emancipatory project.
Simultaneously, public debates began to invoke homosexuality, sadism, transvestism, and other sexological concepts to criticise military policies and practices. In pursuing the threads with which queer authors and activists stitched their fantasies about uniforms, Jeffrey Schneider offers fresh perspectives on key debates over military secrecy, disciplinary abuses in the army, and German militarism. Drawing on a vast trove of materials ranging from sexological case studies, trial transcripts, and parliamentary debates to queer activist tracts, autobiographies, and literary texts, Uniform Fantasies uncovers a particularly modern set of concerns about such topics as outing closeted homosexuals, the presence of gays in the military, and whether men in uniform are more masculine or more insecure about their sexual identity.
Critic Reviews
"Schneider's broad analysis of the cultural significance of 'soldier love' - Soldatenliebe - provides an original and important contribution to the queer history of Wilhelmine Germany. It tackles a theme that is often mentioned but never fully explored, namely the homoerotic componentof German and particularly Prussian militarism."
--Robert M. Beachy, Associate Professor of History, Underwood International College at Yonsei University"In centring questions of fantasy as well as the paradoxes and ambivalences of erotic desire, and exploring the astonishingly myriad ways controversies over German militarism intersected with arguments about gender and sex, Schneider provides a wholly fresh take on the cultural context in which the first queer rights movement in the world was born. Ingenious original readings of novels by the mutually warring Mann brothers are a particular highlight."
--Dagmar Herzog, Distinguished Professor of History, Graduate Center, City University of New York" Uniform Fantasies is an intriguing analysis of German militarism from the unique perspective offered by Slavoj Zizek's blend of Marx and Lacan. Schneider demonstrates the important but extraordinarily complex role that the fascination with military uniforms played in the queer scene, in the literature of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and in the wider realm of German culture and politics prior to the First World War."
--Clayton J. Whisnant, Chapman Professor of the Humanities and European History, Wofford CollegeAbout the Author
Jeffrey Schneider is an associate professor of German Studies at Vassar College.
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