Jeffrey Schneider. Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany. (University of Toronto Press)
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 criticize 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 gay men in the military, and whether men in uniform are more masculine or more insecure about their sexual identity. (Description from University of Toronto Press).
Q&A with Jeffrey Schneider
If your readers take away only one idea from your book, what would you want that idea to be?
While I trust readers will be as fascinated as I was by the various fantasies and debates about homosexual officers, the underground economy of soldier prostitution, and the shocking instances of sadistic disciplinary abuses in the army, I hope they close the book with a clear sense of the disastrous consequences that resulted from the persistent and complex queer male attraction to the military uniform, including, in Thomas Mann’s case, the its function as an internalized standard for measuring his own homosexual self-worth. Not only did public outrage over the more sordid aspects of this queer fascination with uniforms effectively derail the queer emancipatory project, but it also offered little space for critical resistance to the build-up to war in 1914. And, beginning with Heinrich Mann, it also underwrote the progressive left’s queerphobic effort to explain authoritarianism and fascism through male-male desire.
What work or idea or thinker influenced you the most in the writing of this book?
Work by George Mosse, James Steakley, Isabel Hull, Biddy Martin and the public scholars that founded the Schwules Museum in Berlin were important influences and foundations for this study. In the early stages of the project, it seemed like the methodologies in Michel Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality offered the most useful tools for thinking about queerness (and sexuality more generally) as an effect of power/knowledge as well as a form that power took. But as I tried to make sense of various trial transcripts, parliamentary debates, sexological treatises, and literary works that are part of my study, I realized that I needed additional tools to understand what seemed to be the essentially fantastical nature of the discourses. That drove me to incorporate psychoanalytic work on fantasy—most notably the theories of Slavoj Žižek—and to consider how historians (and historically minded literary and queer scholars) could profitably use psychoanalytic thought to open up a new perspective on the past.
Books answer questions, but they also raise new questions. What questions does your book raise?
Great question! My book focuses exclusively on the rich fantasies that men harbored about either being soldiers or sexually desiring them—and the broader reactions and debates they provoked. But while that narrow focus was necessary for the book’s coherence, it left out half the population. There is a similarly complex story to be told about the fantasies that structured the relations between women and the military in Imperial Germany. In addition to examining women’s erotic fantasies about men in uniform (repeatedly deemed both natural and prevalent), such a study might also include female fashion, the pacifist movement, and the various women who wished to or did don uniforms—as a route to social respect in a militarized state, an expression of transgender longing, or a form of queer expression.
What got you interested in the topic of your book?
The idea for this project first arose in the wake of American (and later German) debates about whether gay men and lesbians could serve openly in the armed forces. I realized that such debates were also flashpoints in Imperial Germany, which was something I wanted to excavate. But while scholars had written about some of the important homosexual scandals involving military officers, I began to see that military uniforms and policies also incited a wide panoply of queer sexual fantasies, erotic practices and public debates that included sadism, masochism, fetishism, (male) prostitution, and transgender identities.
For those interested in learning more about your topic, what should they turn to next (after having read your book, of course)?
For readers interested in a broader overview of the queer emancipation movement in Imperial Germany, Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin (Vintage, 2015) and Clayton Whisnant’s Queer Identities and Politics in Germany (Harrington Park Press, 2016) are excellent places to start. Many people might also be interested in the subsequent entanglements between the queer emancipation movement and the German military (or paramilitaries) in later decades. In An Intimate History of the Front (Palgrave, 2014), Jason Crouthamel gives a glimpse into a new kind of queer politics that emerges in the First World War and informs the more self-conscious and militant forms of queer activism in the Weimar Republic. That text sets up readers for Laurie Marhoefer’s Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (U of Toronto P, 2015) and Andrew Wackerfuss’ Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement (Harrington Park Press, 2015).