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Jill Suzanne Smith, Different from the Others: German and Dutch Discourses of Queer Femininity and Female Desire, 1918–1940, German History, Volume 42, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 454–456, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghae038
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Extract
There is little doubt that the German-speaking world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries played a defining role in the history of sexuality. Psychiatrists, biologists and medical doctors like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld and Albert Moll shaped the burgeoning field of sexology by naming non-normative sexual behaviours and exploring those behaviours in their writings. The process of identifying and describing various forms of sexual expression was difficult to disentangle from categorizations of gender. As Cyd Sturgess reminds readers in Different from the Others: German and Dutch Discourses of Queer Femininity and Female Desire, the sexological discourse produced in Germany often linked homosexual desires with inverted gender expression, meaning that a gay man was defined as feminine and a lesbian woman as masculine. The codification of non-normative desires as sexual and gender identities, therefore, cemented certain assumptions about ‘women desiring women’, to use a phrase found throughout Sturgess’s book—that they were masculine, that their masculinity was evident in their physical appearance and in their active pursuit of a more passive, feminine partner—assumptions that persisted well into the late twentieth century and significantly influenced scholarly work on women’s sexuality.
