Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the queer ecology of sericulture

In 2000 and early 2001, Robert Tobin's book Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe appeared and began to reach university libraries and bookstores. At the time, I was about to complete an undergraduate degree in German studies at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota after having fled Alaska for the intellectual, social, and sexual freedom that only somewhere else could provide. Thanks to sympathetic and open-minded professors, my exploration of German literature, history, and culture included examinations of queer sensibilities to be found in works including those of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, August von Platen, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Mann, Christa Winsloe, G.W. Pabst—and Goethe. Tobin's Warm Brothers, which joined a couple of other innovative titles that had recently been published, including Queering the Canon and Outing Goethe & His Age (Lorey and Plews; Kuzniar), updated the study of German literature while pushing the field of gay and lesbian studies into queer studies in ways I found exhilarating. These titles put me on the road to the kind of queer media studies I discuss below, using queer sexuality and gender as a way into the medial worlds of historical figures and the eras in which they lived. One of the figures to whom Warm Brothers introduced me was Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895), who was the classicist founder of a periodical in Latin, nationalistic enthusiast of Großdeutschland, but also an activist for queer rights and liberation. Ulrichs's appearances in Warm Brothers are not extensive, but the context the book provided gave me an intriguing presentation of the roles Ulrichs played in the early articulation of non-normative gender and sexual identities. For years since then, I have wanted to know more about this person who had inspired such fearful homophobic loathing in numerous readers including none other than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Tobin 197; Marx and Engels 325).

Although Ulrichs's influence came primarily through the spread of his publications and eventually their citation by others, there remains much to be discovered about the ways in which Ulrichs's and his contemporaries’ extratextual activities contributed to the development of gender and sexual theories (Frackman). Public awareness of Ulrichs and his legacy has ebbed and flowed over the years (Sigusch; Stack). Various scholars have explored the role he played in the nineteenth-century articulation of non-normative gender and sexuality, which included influencing—and inspiring—other well-known figures like Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Carl Westphal as well as the British writer Edward Carpenter (Pretsell; Oosterhuis 139; Lehmstedt 60). Ulrichs's writings, most prominent of which was his twelve-volume series of short books or pamphlets, Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (1864–79), developed a congenitally determined system of gender and sexuality organized around what he called the Urning (Uranian). This latter term was Ulrichs's Plato-inspired label for gender and sexual identification that has been subsumed under the more recent labels of homosexuality, transgender, and intersex (Ulrichs, Vindex 1; Pretsell, Urning 1–2). His later, now oft-quoted phrase about male and female Urninge—anima muliebris virili (or respectively virilis muliebri) corpore inclusa (“female/male soul contained in a male/female body”)—with its particularly dated way of describing gender and sexual identity, fostered skepticism about the essentialist, “biologically-rooted” foundation of his ideas (Joyce 72).

Alongside his writing on gender-sexuality, Ulrichs maintained hobbies and side gigs, including in sericulture, which illuminate more of the gender-sexual medial world in which Ulrichs's theories spread. Sericulture—rearing silkworms, leading to the production of silk and more silk moth eggs—was an occupation in multiple senses of the word, providing Ulrichs with a hobby as well as a meager means of income. Ulrichs benefited from the extension of opportunities for silkworm cultivation to certain amateurs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries following the mass plantings of mulberry trees in Prussia and beyond. Their leaves constituted the silkworm's sole food source. He might have considered himself to fit in with some of the usual demographics of silkworm rearing. The supposedly more idle, smaller hands of women as well as those of male teachers and pastors were said to be well suited to the minimally remunerative pastime (Silbermann 109). Accordingly, Ulrichs placed advertisements in newspapers to purchase and sell silk moth eggs. Beyond being a mere commodity, silkworm trade established international networks of communication—with queer people among the interlocutors. In some of his communications, Ulrichs asked his correspondence partners to procure new varieties of eggs for him from their area (for example the United States). Thinking with Friedrich Kittler, silkworms constituted for Ulrichs and his network the promise for data “processing, storage, and transmission” (Wellbery xiii). Like computers, silkworms require hardware (rearing houses and technologies) and software (instruction manuals) to make possible humans’ interactions with them, on which they entirely depend. As media, silkworms become constitutive parts of the formation of early queer interpersonal networks, which renders valuable not only the fibers that make up their cocoons, but also the media operations that comprise silkworm cultivation. These small animals have shaped organizations of labor, capital, class, gender, architecture, and technology. Silkworms require the planting of swaths of mulberry trees to satisfy their voracious appetites for specific foliage, which in turn necessitated the creation of new bureaucracies, agricultural schemes for land use, and labor standards.

Silk and the humble but complex silkworm also found their way into Ulrichs's work on gender and sexuality. His Forschungen texts testify at various points to the importance of silk as a textile but also its role as a marker of social class and a signal of adherence to gender codes (Formatrix 26). At the same time, the tendency of the domesticated silk moth Bombyx mori to engage in same-sex acts that mimic copulation also caught Ulrichs's attention (Critische Pfeile 22–23, 91). A silkworm's cocoon even graced the pages of Ulrichs's published book of poetry (Auf Bienchens Flügeln 62). The silkworm is a contact node, a medium, between the human (cultivator) and silk (desired product). For Ulrichs, the silkworm was one conduit through which he interfaced with the world. Hence, Ulrichs’ relation to the silkworm represents a kind of queer ecology that queers not only gender and sex roles, but also traditional media categories.