Course description
Gender and sexuality fundamentally shape how we see the world and how the world sees us. How we understand gender and sexual identity in relation to our sense of self and others is always open to change. Historical, literary and visual perspectives can help us understand how our contemporary ideas about gender and sexuality emerged, how they intersect with power, science and the law, and how they might be thought differently.
This course will take you on a journey into the past, to explore how new and modern ideas about sex, gender and sexuality emerged in a fascinating moment of history. A new language to express possibilities of gender and sexuality emerged at the turn of the twentieth century in the German-speaking world. from Sigmund Freud's 'original bisexuality' in Vienna to Magnus Hirschfeld's 'third sex' in Berlin.
In this course, you will learn how new ideas about gender and sexuality emerged at the crossroad between modern sexual sciences and literature, film, photography and visual culture. You will trace how global networks and exchanges influenced as well as disseminated these modern ideas about gender and sexuality. We will move across disciplines and draw on key texts in gender and sexuality studies to examine this important cultural, historical and sexual-political moment. In doing so, you will examine how sciences and the arts came together to form knowledge about sexual and gender identity and diversity, sexual health and sexual rights, topics that are still hotly debated today.
This course will make the most of our intercultural classroom. Throughout, the international audience of VIU will provide opportunity to make cross-cultural comparison to enrich our understanding of the diversity of gender and sexual experience across the globe. The course will also make themes directly relevant to the place in which we study: together, we will go on a field trip to Lido Island, where Thomas Mann's famous novella Death in Venice is set, to trace the journey of sexual knowledge production across borders. Overall, this module will give you the confidence to understand the vital role that you, as multilingual and international humanities student, can take in questioning and reimagining dominant social values and cultural constructs in our world today.

Learning outcomes of the course
By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Demonstrate insight into historical and critical understandings of concepts of sex, gender and sexuality
• Produce formal, thematic and generic analyses of literature and visual culture in their scientific, cultural and political contexts in their relationship to issues of gender and sexuality
• Draw productively on the recommended secondary literature and make confident use of critical tools and theoretical concepts to enrich analysis
• Analyse historical scientific texts, literature, film, photography and visual culture in a variety of genres and styles
• Conduct self-guided research and manage your own time effectively
• Construct a critical, coherent and substantiated argument in writing, discussions or presentations

Teaching approach
The method of instruction will be seminar discussions using a flipped classroom approach, with students leading prepared classroom activities. Sessions will be supported by the assignment of seminal readings. Field trip to Lido Island.

Assessment
a) Class participation and short presentations throughout the course (20%)
b) Blog post that explores module content with reference to case studies from other cultural or historical contexts (30%).
c) Essay on a topic of choice (50%)

Bibliography/Recommended Reading:

Session 1: Gender, Sciences and the Arts: Origins
Day 1: Introduction. Listen to the podcast "Adventures in Time and Gender: episode 1. [40 mins] and episode 2 [37 mins] We will only discuss episode 2 in class, but you will need episode 1 for context. If you are pressed for time, you can listen to the first few mins of episode 1 and then skip-ahead to episode 2. If you have time, please listen to the whole episode. Available here:
http://adventuresintimeandgender.org
Day 2: Excerpt from Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990).

Session 2: The Invention of Gender and Sexuality
Day 1: Read excerpt from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998).
Day 2: Read excerpts from Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlins Third Sex ([1904]-2017), Portrait of Berlin: 13-23. Lives and activities: 36-43. Names: 54-57. Uranian balls 65-69. Judge for yourselves: 88-89. [30-pages in total]

Session 3: Transgender Life Writing
Day 1: Read excerpt from N.O. Body, Memoirs of A Man's Maiden Years (1907): p. 3-9; 16-18; 30-32; 75-79; 102-111 [23 pages in total]
Day 2: Read "Gender. Agency, and Prosthetic Metaphor: The Case of N.O. Body" in Ina Linge. Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023).+ excerpt from Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008).

Session 4: Sex Education
Day 1: Watch Richard Oswald (dir.), Different from the Others (1919) [49 mins] + read excerpt from José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU-Press, 2009).
Day 2: We are going to read a whole monograph together. Ervin Malakaj's Anders als die Andern (London: MeGill-Queen's University Press, 2023). You can choose which chapter you would like to read (we will discuss this in the seminar):

1. Chapter "Producing Anders als die Andern. Melodrama between Genre Cinema and Public Health Discourse" (34-59)
2. Chapter 2: "The Form of Melodramer Gesture. Anguish, and Queer Life in Anders als die Andern (60-99)
3. Chapter 3: "Feeling Backward with Anders als die Andern" (100-125)

Session 5: Sexual Sciences and Race
Day 1: You can choose which secondary source to read (we will discuss this in the seminar):

1. Paul Schrader. "Fears and fantasies: German Sexual Science and its Research on African Sexualities," 1890-1930, Sexualities 23, nos. 1-2 (2020): 127-145.
2. Jana Funke, "Navigating the-Past: Sexuality, Race, and the Uses of the Primitive in Magnus Hirschfeld's The World Journey of a Sexologist," in Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past, eds Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 111-134.
3. Robert Deam Tobin, "Sexology in the Southwest: Law, Medicine, and Sexuality in Germany and its Colonies," in Towards a Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1950, eds Veronica Fuechtner, David Hayes and Ryan Jones (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017): 141-162.
4. Laurie Marhoefer. "Introduction" in Racism and the Making of Gay-Rights: A-Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022).

Day 2: We will discuss images supplied by the course leader in class.

Session 6: Gender and Sexuality in Venice
Day 1: Read excerpts from Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912).
Day 2: Read Robert Deam Tobin, "Thomas Mann's Erotic Irony: The Dialectics of Sexuality in Venice," in Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex (Pennsylvania: Penn Press, 2015).

Session 7: Field trip to Lido Island

Session 8: Endocrinology, Hormones and Rejuvenation
Day 1: Read excerpts from Vicki Baum, Helene (1932) [30-pages]
Day 2. Read Maria Makela. "Rejuvenation and Regen(d)eration: "Der Steinachfilm, Sex Glands, and Weimar-Era Visual and Literary Culture," German Studies Review 38, no. 1 (2015): 35-62

Session 9: Gender, Psychoanalysis & Film
Day 1: Watch Paul Czinner (dir.). Fräulein Else (1929) [1 hour 46 mins]
Day 2: Read excerpt from Sigmund Freud, "Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria." Standard Edition Vol. 7 (1905-[1901]): I will make this available as a pdf.

Session 10: Female Masculinity on Screen
Day 1: Watch Leontine Sagan (dir.), Girls in Uniform (1931) [1 hour 23mins] + excerpt from Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
Day 2: You can choose which secondary source to read (we will discuss this in the seminar):

• Richard Dyer. "Weimar: Less and More Like Others," in Now You See It, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2013): 23-62.
• Katie Sutton. "The Trouser Role: Female Masculinity as Performance." in The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2011): 126-150.
• Valerie Weinstein. "Working Weimar Women into the National Socialist Community:
• Carl Froelich's Women's Labor Service Film, Ich für Dich-Du für mich (1934), and Mädchen in Uniform (1991)," Women in German Yearbook (2009): 28-49.

Session 11: Queer Photographic Portraits
Day 1: Read Birgit Lang and Katie Sutton, 'An Ethics of Attentiveness: Photographic Portraits and Deviant Dwelling in German Queer and Trans Archives', Monatshefte 114, no. 3 (2022): 363-83.
Day 2: We will discuss images supplied by the course leader in class.

Session 12: Global Legacies
Day 1: You can choose which secondary source to read (we will discuss this in the seminar).

• Michiko Suziki, "The Science of Sexual Difference: Ogura Seizaburo, Hiratsuka Raicho, and the Intersection of Sexology and Feminism in Early-Twentieth-century Japan," in Towards a Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1950, eds Veronica Fuechtner, David Hayes and Ryan Jones (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017): 258-278.
• Shrikant Botre and Douglas E. Haynes, "Understanding R. D. Karve: Brahmacharya, Modernity, and the Appropriation of Global Sexual Science in Western India, 1927-1953,"in Towards a Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1950, eds Veronica Fuechtner, David Hayes and Ryan Jones (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017): 163-185.
• Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu, "The "Ellis Effect": Translating Sexual Science in Republican China, 1911-1949, "in Towards-a-Global-History-of-Sexual-Science, 1880-1950, eds Veronica Fuechtner, David Hayes and Ryan Jones (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017): 186-210.
• Chiara Beccalossi, "Latin Eugenics and Sexual Knowledge in Italy, Spain, and Argentina: International Networks Across the Atlantic," in Towards-a-Global-History-of-Sexual-Science, 1880-1950, eds Veronica Fuechtner, David Hayes and Ryan Jones (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017): 305-329.

Day 2: Final group discussion.

Last updated: March 24, 2026