{"title":"Sexology’s Photographic Turn: Visualizing Trans Identity in Interwar Germany","authors":"Katie Sutton","doi":"10.7560/JHS27305","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"P h o t o g r a P h i c e v i d e n c e P l a y e d an increasingly important role in the efforts of early twentieth-century sexual scientists to establish their discipline as what Michel Foucault describes as “legitimate knowledge.” Since the late nineteenth century, pioneers in the field of sexology, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing in Vienna, Havelock Ellis in Britain, and Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany, had relied heavily on the autobiographical statements of patients and other informants in their efforts to uncover the mysteries of human sexual life, publishing these as case histories in support of newly forged classifications of what they at first described as sexual “pathologies” and “perversions.” But the almost exclusive reliance on subjective textual evidence began to change when technological developments in photography and its mass reproduction combined with an expanding patient base in ways that enabled sexologists to embrace this seemingly more empirical form of evidence. Historians have shown that from the mid-nineteenth century onward scientists had started turning to photography as a more tangible, “scientific” form of evidence that, in its mechanical objectivity, resonated with society’s abiding concern with the “Truth.” This article","PeriodicalId":45704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"7","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of the History of Sexuality","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.7560/JHS27305","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 7
Abstract
P h o t o g r a P h i c e v i d e n c e P l a y e d an increasingly important role in the efforts of early twentieth-century sexual scientists to establish their discipline as what Michel Foucault describes as “legitimate knowledge.” Since the late nineteenth century, pioneers in the field of sexology, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing in Vienna, Havelock Ellis in Britain, and Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany, had relied heavily on the autobiographical statements of patients and other informants in their efforts to uncover the mysteries of human sexual life, publishing these as case histories in support of newly forged classifications of what they at first described as sexual “pathologies” and “perversions.” But the almost exclusive reliance on subjective textual evidence began to change when technological developments in photography and its mass reproduction combined with an expanding patient base in ways that enabled sexologists to embrace this seemingly more empirical form of evidence. Historians have shown that from the mid-nineteenth century onward scientists had started turning to photography as a more tangible, “scientific” form of evidence that, in its mechanical objectivity, resonated with society’s abiding concern with the “Truth.” This article
P h o t o g r a P h i c e v i d e n c e P l a y e d在20世纪初性科学家努力建立米歇尔·福柯所说的“合法知识”的过程中发挥着越来越重要的作用。自19世纪末以来,性学领域的先驱,如维也纳的Richard von Krafft Ebing、英国的Havelock Ellis,以及德国的马格努斯·赫希菲尔德(Magnus Hirschfeld),在努力揭开人类性生活的奥秘时,他们在很大程度上依赖患者和其他线人的自传体陈述,并将其作为案例历史出版,以支持他们最初所描述的性“病理”和“变态”的新分类。“但是,当摄影及其大规模复制的技术发展与不断扩大的患者基础相结合,使性学家能够接受这种看似更具经验的证据形式时,对主观文本证据的几乎完全依赖开始改变。历史学家已经表明,从19世纪中期开始,科学家们开始将摄影作为一种更有形、更“科学”的证据形式,以其机械的客观性,与社会对“真相”的持久关注产生了共鸣