Sexual Identity at the Limits of German Liberalism: Law and Science in the Work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895)

Abstract

I n h I s a u t h o r I t a t I v e Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), the forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) stressed that the nosology in his book was a classification not of sexual acts but of diseases that could only be diagnosed by paying attention to “the whole personality” (Gesammtpersönlichkeit) of each patient.1 Similar statements became common at the end of the nineteenth century, when Krafft-Ebing and his contemporaries created a new conceptual space for organizing sex. “Sexuality,” as it came to be called in the second half of the nineteenth century, was defined as a feature of one’s identity—an internal attribute that could be visible through but never reducible to individual characteristics such as conduct, personal and family history, body shape, gestures, clothing, and fantasies or dreams. The focus was now on who one is rather than on what one does. For the most part, historians of sexuality have found this distinction between acts and identities to be methodologically useful. They have used it as a yardstick to separate sexuality from other types of sexual organization: where there is sexual identity, there is sexuality. Most famously and influentially, Michel Foucault contrasted the premodern sodomite, who was “nothing more than the juridical subject of ” forbidden acts, with the nineteenth-century homosexual, who “became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology.”2 Foucault’s passage has often been interpreted as claiming not only that homosexuality is a type of identity but also that, unlike the act of sodomy, it did not exist before the nineteenth century.3