卡尔-海因里希-乌尔里希斯和养蚕业的古怪生态学

IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS GERMAN QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-05-03 DOI:10.1111/gequ.12433
Kyle Frackman
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Tobin's <i>Warm Brothers</i>, which joined a couple of other innovative titles that had recently been published, including <i>Queering the Canon</i> and <i>Outing Goethe &amp; His Age</i> (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 <i>Warm Brothers</i> introduced me was Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895), who was the classicist founder of a periodical in Latin, nationalistic enthusiast of <i>Großdeutschland</i>, but also an activist for queer rights and liberation. Ulrichs's appearances in <i>Warm Brothers</i> 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).</p><p>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, <i>Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe</i> (1864–79), developed a congenitally determined system of gender and sexuality organized around what he called the <i>Urning</i> (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, <i>Vindex</i> 1; Pretsell, <i>Urning</i> 1–2). 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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. 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Ulrichs's writings, most prominent of which was his twelve-volume series of short books or pamphlets, <i>Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe</i> (1864–79), developed a congenitally determined system of gender and sexuality organized around what he called the <i>Urning</i> (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, <i>Vindex</i> 1; Pretsell, <i>Urning</i> 1–2). 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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. 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引用次数: 0

摘要

2000 年至 2001 年初,罗伯特-托宾的著作《温暖的兄弟》(Warm Brothers:同性恋理论与歌德时代》一书问世,并开始进入大学图书馆和书店。当时,我正准备在明尼苏达州的一所小型文理学院完成德语研究的本科学位,在此之前,我逃离了阿拉斯加,寻求只有其他地方才能提供的思想、社会和性自由。多亏了富有同情心、思想开放的教授们,我对德国文学、历史和文化的探索包括对同性恋情感的研究,这些作品包括约翰-约阿希姆-温克尔曼、奥古斯特-冯-普拉滕、英格博格-巴赫曼、托马斯-曼、克里斯塔-温斯洛、G.W. 帕布斯特以及歌德的作品。托宾的《温暖的兄弟》与最近出版的其他几本创新性著作,包括《Queering the Canon》和《Outing Goethe &amp; His Age》(Lorey and Plews; Kuzniar)一起,更新了德国文学研究,同时以我认为令人振奋的方式将同性恋研究领域推向了同性恋研究。这些著作让我走上了我将在下文讨论的同性恋媒体研究之路,将同性恋和性别作为进入历史人物及其所处时代的媒体世界的途径。卡尔-海因里希-乌尔里希斯(Karl Heinrich Ulrichs,1825-1895 年)是《温暖兄弟》向我介绍的人物之一,他是拉丁文期刊的古典主义创始人、Großdeutschland 的民族主义狂热者,同时也是同性恋权利和解放的活动家。乌尔里希斯在《温暖的兄弟》一书中出现的次数并不多,但该书提供的背景让我对乌尔里希斯在早期非规范性别和性身份的表达中所扮演的角色有了一个耐人寻味的了解。虽然乌尔里希斯的影响主要来自于他的出版物的传播以及其他人对这些出版物的引用,但关于乌尔里希斯及其同时代人的文本外活动如何促进了性别和性理论的发展(弗莱克斯曼),还有很多东西有待发现。多年来,公众对乌尔里希斯及其遗产的认识起伏不定(Sigusch; Stack)。不同的学者探讨了他在十九世纪非规范性别和性问题的阐述中所扮演的角色,其中包括影响和启发其他著名人物,如理查德-冯-克拉夫特-艾宾(Richard von Krafft-Ebing)、卡尔-韦斯特法尔(Carl Westphal)以及英国作家爱德华-卡彭特(Edward Carpenter)(Pretsell; Oosterhuis 139; Lehmstedt 60)。乌尔里希斯的著作,其中最著名的是他的十二卷本短篇丛书或小册子《Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe》(1864-79 年),围绕着他所谓的 "乌拉宁"(Urning),发展出一套先天决定的性别和性系统。后一个术语是乌尔里希斯受柏拉图启发而提出的性别和性认同标签,已被归入同性恋、变性人和双性人等最新标签(乌尔里希斯,《Vindex》1;普雷塞尔,《Urning》1-2)。他后来关于男性和女性 Urninge 的短语--anima muliebris virili(或分别为 virilis muliebri)corpore inclusa("女性/男性的灵魂包含在男性/女性的身体中")--现在经常被引用,其描述性别和性身份的方式特别过时,导致人们对其思想的本质主义和 "生物根基 "持怀疑态度(乔伊斯 72)。乌尔里希斯在撰写有关性别-性行为的文章的同时,还保持着一些业余爱好和副业,其中包括养蚕业,这为乌尔里希斯的理论传播提供了一个性别-性行为的媒介世界。养蚕可以生产蚕丝和更多的蚕蛾卵,是一种多重意义上的职业,为乌尔里希斯提供了业余爱好和微薄的收入。十八和十九世纪,随着普鲁士及其他地区大量种植桑树,一些业余爱好者也有了养蚕的机会,乌尔里希斯因此受益匪浅。桑叶是蚕的唯一食物来源。他可能认为自己符合养蚕的一些常规人口统计。据说妇女以及男教师和牧师的手比较闲、比较小,非常适合这种报酬微薄的消遣(Silbermann 109)。因此,乌尔里希斯在报纸上刊登了买卖蚕蛾卵的广告。蚕丝贸易不仅仅是一种商品,它还建立了国际交流网络--对话者中就有同性恋者。在他的一些通信中,乌尔里希斯要求他的通信伙伴从他们的地区(如美国)为他采购新品种的蚕卵。 与弗里德里希-基特勒(Friedrich Kittler)一样,对于乌尔里希斯和他的网络来说,蚕构成了数据 "处理、存储和传输 "的希望(Wellbery xiii)。与计算机一样,蚕也需要硬件(饲养房和技术)和软件(使用手册)来实现人类与蚕的互动,而人类与蚕的互动则完全依赖于硬件和软件。作为媒介,蚕成为早期同性恋人际网络形成的构成部分,这不仅使构成蚕茧的纤维变得有价值,也使构成养蚕的媒介操作变得有价值。这些小动物塑造了劳动、资本、阶级、性别、建筑和技术组织。蚕需要种植成片的桑树来满足它们对特定树叶的贪婪欲望,这反过来又需要建立新的官僚机构、土地使用的农业计划和劳动标准。他的 Forschungen 文集不仅证明了丝绸作为纺织品的重要性,还证明了丝绸作为社会阶层标志和遵守性别规范信号的作用(Formatrix 26)。同时,被驯化的蚕蛾(Bombyx mori)有模仿交配的同性行为的倾向,这也引起了乌尔里希斯的注意(Critische Pfeile 22-23, 91)。在乌尔里希斯出版的诗集(《Auf Bienchens Flügeln 62》)中,蚕的茧甚至出现在书页上。蚕是人类(栽培者)和丝绸(理想产品)之间的一个接触点,一个媒介。对乌尔里希斯来说,蚕是他与世界交流的一个渠道。因此,乌尔里希斯与蚕的关系代表了一种同性恋生态学,这种生态学不仅对性别和性角色提出了质疑,也对传统的媒介类别提出了质疑。
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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 Urningeanima 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.

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来源期刊
GERMAN QUARTERLY
GERMAN QUARTERLY Multiple-
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
33.30%
发文量
55
期刊介绍: The German Quarterly serves as a forum for all sorts of scholarly debates - topical, ideological, methodological, theoretical, of both the established and the experimental variety, as well as debates on recent developments in the profession. We particularly encourage essays employing new theoretical or methodological approaches, essays on recent developments in the field, and essays on subjects that have recently been underrepresented in The German Quarterly, such as studies on pre-modern subjects.
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Issue Information Preface: German Quarterly Special Issue on Form Intertextuelle Verhandlungen. Zur Kafka-Rezeption in der afrikanischen Literatur The Sociality of Form: Camillo Sitte's Urban Morphologies Meter Against Essentialism
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