Ina Linge. Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing. (University of Michigan Press)
Reveals how queer and trans life writers use narrative strategies to create the possibility for a livable queer life.
This book brings together an exciting new archive of queer and trans voices from the history of sexual sciences in the German-speaking world. A new language to express possibilities of gender and sexuality emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, from Sigmund Freud’s theories of homosexuality in Vienna to Magnus Hirschfeld’s “third sex” in Berlin. Together, they provided a language of sex and sexuality that is still recognizable today. Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing shows that individual voices of trans and queer writers had a significant impact on the production of knowledge about gender and sexuality during this time and introduces lesser known texts to a new readership. It shows the remarkable power of queer life writing in imagining and creating the possibilities of a livable life in the face of restrictive legal, medical, and social frameworks.
Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing will be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about LGBTQ+ history and literature. It also provides a fascinating insight into the historical roots for our thinking about gender and sexuality today. The book will be of relevance to an academic readership of students and faculty in German studies, literary studies, European history, and the interdisciplinary fields of gender and sexuality studies, medical humanities, and the history of sexuality. (Description from University of Michigan Press).
Q&A with Ina Linge
If your readers take away only one idea from your book, what would you want that idea to be?
For students who are new to gender and sexuality studies, or queer German studies, or for those who are simply looking to learn more about queer history and literature, I hope my book shows that LGBTQ+ people have always existed and have always actively and creatively shaped knowledge about what it means to be LGBTQ+. For readers interested in the history of sexuality, I would like them to know that new ideas about sex, gender and sexuality were not just created by scientists and professionals, but that LGBTQ+ communities and patients significantly shaped this knowledge. And I would like readers to recognise the remarkable power and strenuous work of queer life writing in imagining and creating the possibilities of a livable life in the face of restrictive legal, medical, and social frameworks.
What work or idea or thinker influenced you the most in the writing of this book?
As an undergraduate student I took a course called Introduction to Critical Theory, which introduced me, among other things, to gender studies and Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity. It blew my mind. I came from a small Catholic and East German (yes that combination is possible) town where gender was never talked about, nor was sex (the full extend of my sex education was abstinence training from the church). Butler’s work came at such an important moment in my life. To learn that gender is a ‘stylized repetition of acts’, that sex was gender all along, and that we somehow still have to make gender work at risk of violence – it changed my world. Since then, I’ve kept that sense of wonder at gender as a miraculous construct that I just want to explore further in every piece I write. In Queer Livability, I am particularly interested in Butler’s writing about the balancing act of a livable queer life that is pulled in many directions. In order to achieve a livable queer life, an individual needs to find a balance between two sometimes competing demands. First, to achieve a livable queer life, one needs to be able to express oneself and use terms to describe oneself that feel authentic, that represent how one truly feels. This is difficult, because what feels authentic or true is always already shaped by contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. Hence, the second demand of queer livability asks that we express ourselves in such a way as to be understood and recognized by others, taking into consideration normative demands and dominant discourses. To achieve queer livability by becoming legible as an authentic sexual subject oftentimes requires an insurmountable balancing act. Nonetheless, this is precisely what sexual-scientific life writing attempts to achieve.
Books answer questions, but they also raise new questions. What questions does your book raise?
A question I have asked myself a lot since writing this book is: who creates knowledge about gender and sexuality? And what kind of knowledge do people draw on when they create sexual knowledge? In my new project, I am really interested in the non-human world and how German-language artists, scientists and writers (1860s-1930s) mobilised knowledge about non-human animals and their environment to create new ideas about the place of LGBTQ+ people in a fair society. I have written about moths and butterflies, and am now turning towards ants, so a variety of often overlooked, non-charismatic animals. Whereas charismatic megafauna and pets create human-to-nonhuman ties through affinity and kinship, non-charismatic animals can trigger anxieties about multiplicity, monstrosity and wilful autonomy. I want to explore the striking parallel that non-charismatic animals seem to offer to contemporaneous concerns around queerness. What lessons have people learned about gender and sexuality by looking at nature and the non-human?
What got you interested in the topic of your book?
When I was studying for my master’s degree in gender studies at the University of Cambridge, I just wanted to soak up everything there was to know about gender and sexuality studies. But I was also terrified. I am a first generation academic and the University of Cambridge was so far beyond my dreams that I didn’t really know what I could contribute. My wonderful supervisor said to me: Ina, you can read German, that is a skill, why don’t you work on a German text? That is how I first came across N.O. Body’s Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren (translation published as Memoirs of A Man’s Maiden Years) and it has stayed with me ever since. Just as I felt a bit out of place in Cambridge, N.O. Body felt a bit out of place in writing. We just clicked. He wasn’t a writer turning towards the topic of gender, but a man who had been misrecognised as a woman in his youth and who tried to make sense of it all through writing. I wanted to treat this text gently but also engage with it intimately, intensely. Out of that, the concept of hospitable writing emerged early on, which I discuss in Chapter 1.
For those interested in learning more about your topic, what should they turn to next (after having read your book, of course)?
First of all: thank you for reading my book! Please get in touch if you have thoughts, I would love to hear from you. If readers want to learn more, I would love for them to explore the primary texts that I discuss in the book. Erich Amborn/Alex Kretzschmar’s Und dennoch Ja zum Leben (only available in German) is fascinating, and so is Daniel Paul Schreber’s tragic Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (translation published as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness). For students new to queer German studies and the history of sexuality, there are so many amazing books to recommend. My students are obsessed with Katie Sutton’s work and Sexuality in Modern German History (Bloomsbury, 2023) is an amazing introduction to the topic. I also recommend works by Heike Bauer, Jennifer Evans, Jana Funke and Laurie Marhoefer, all of whom have such a talent for writing with passion and clarity. Some really exciting new scholarship, for example by Jonah Garde and Zavier Nunn, is sure to shape scholarship in the German history of gender and sexuality for years to come.