Course description

Gender and sexuality fundamentally shape how we see the world and how the world sees us. How we understand gender and sexual identity in relation to our sense of self and others is always open to change. Historical, literary and visual perspectives can help us understand how our contemporary ideas about gender and sexuality emerged, how they intersect with power, science and the law, and how they might be thought differently.

This course will take you on a journey into the past, with a specific focus on literature, film, and visual culture, to explore how new and modern ideas about sex, gender and sexuality emerged in a fascinating moment in history. In the German-speaking world around 1900, a new language emerged to express possibilities of gender and sexuality, from Sigmund Freud’s ‘original bisexuality’ in Vienna to Magnus Hirschfeld’s ‘third sex’ in Berlin. In this course, you will learn how new ideas about gender and sexuality emerged at the crossroad between modern sexual sciences and literature, film, photography and visual culture. You will trace how global networks and exchanges influenced as well as disseminated these modern ideas about gender and sexuality. We will move across disciplines and draw on key texts in gender and sexuality studies to examine this important cultural, historical and sexual-political moment. In doing so, you will examine how sciences and the arts came together to produce knowledge about sexual and gender identity and diversity, as well sexual health and sexual rights – topics that are still hotly debated today.

This course will make the most of our intercultural classroom. Throughout, the international audience of VIU will provide opportunity to make cross-cultural comparison to enrich our understanding of the diversity of gender and sexual experience across the globe. The course will also make themes directly relevant to the place in which we study: we will discuss Thomas Mann’s famous novella Death in Venice, set in Venice and on Lido Island, and the course offers a museum field trip (further information tbc). Overall, this module will give you the confidence to understand the vital role that you, as multilingual and international humanities student, can take in questioning and reimagining dominant social values and cultural constructs in our world today.

Learning outcomes of the course
By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Demonstrate insight into historical and critical understandings of concepts of sex, gender and sexuality
• Produce formal, thematic and generic analyses of literature and visual culture in their scientific, cultural and political contexts in their relationship to issues of gender and sexuality
• Draw productively on the recommended secondary literature and make confident use of critical tools and theoretical concepts to enrich analysis
• Analyse historical scientific texts, literature, film, photography and visual culture in a variety of genres and styles
• Conduct self-guided research and manage your own time effectively
• Construct a critical, coherent and substantiated argument in writing, discussions or presentations

Teaching approach
The method of instruction will be seminar discussions using a flipped classroom approach, with students leading prepared classroom activities. Sessions will be supported by the assignment of seminal readings. Field trip to Lido Island.

Assessment
a) Class participation and short presentations throughout the course (25%)
b) Beginning in week 1, students will work towards a journal, scrapbook or mind map to prepare their final project. A draft of this will form the basis of the midterm evaluation. (25%).
c) Independent course project: a research-based final project on a specific topic related to gender and history, literature or culture, based on the course journal. This can take the form of a traditional research paper or a creative project (e.g. podcast, zine). Students will present this coursework to the class during the exam week. (50%).

Below is a suggested course outline. Please note that sessions will be adapted based on student input and suggestions.

Week 1: Gender, Sciences and the Arts: Welcome to Berlin!
Day 1: Listen to the podcast “Adventures in Time and Gender”: episode 1 [40 mins] and episode 2 [37 mins] We will only discuss episode 2 in class, but you will need episode 1 for context. If you are pressed for time, you can listen to the first few mins of episode 1 and then skip ahead to episode 2. If you have time, please listen to the whole episode. Available here: http://adventuresintimeandgender.org/
Day 2: Excerpts from Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele, Gender: A Graphic Guide (Icon Books, 2019).

Week 2: Sexology and the “Invention” of Homosexuality
Day 1: Excerpts from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998).
Day 2: Watch Richard Oswald (dir.), Different from the Others (1919) [49 mins]. Read Ervin Malakaj, “Producing Anders als die Andern: Melodrama between Genre Cinema and Public Health Discourse”, in Anders als die Andern (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), p 34-59.

Week 3: Transgender Lives and Trans Life Writing
Day 1: Katie Sutton, “‘We Too Deserve a Place in the Sun’: The Politics of Transvestite Identity in Weimar Germany,” German Studies Review 35, no. 2 (2012): 335–54.
Day 2: Excerpts from N.O. Body, Memoirs of A Man’s Maiden Years (1907) and Ina Linge, “Gender, Agency, and Prosthetic Metaphor: The Case of N.O. Body” in Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023).

Week 4: Lesbianism on Screen
Day 1: Watch Leontine Sagan (dir.), Girls in Uniform (1931) [1 hour 23mins]
Day 2: Cedar Lensing-Sharp, “Erotic Pedagogy, Power Play, and Suspended Pleasure in Mädchen in Uniform ([Girls in Uniform] (1931)” in Birgit Lang, Ina Linge and Katie Sutton (eds), Weimar’s Queer Visual Cultures (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2026).

Week 5: The Politics of Race and Gender
Day 1: Tina Campt, “Resonant Echoes”: The Rhineland Campaign and Converging Specters of Racial Mixture” in Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2004), p. 31-62.
Day 2: Excerpts from Laurie Marhoefer, Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022).

Week 6: Gender and Sexuality in Venice
Day 1: Read excerpts from Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912).
Day 2: Read Robert Deam Tobin, “Thomas Mann’s Erotic Irony: The Dialectics of Sexuality in Venice,” in Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex (Pennsylvania: Penn Press, 2015).

Week 7: Museum field trip (tbc)

Week 8: Heterosexuality, Marriage and Contraception
Day 1: Excerpt from Hanne Blank: Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), p. ix-xxvii and p. 1-21.
Day 2: Excerpts from Donna J. Drucker, Contraception A Concise History (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020).

Week 9: Gender, Psychoanalysis and Women’s Desire
Day 1: Watch Paul Czinner (dir.), Fräulein Else (1929) [1 hour 46 mins]
Day 2: Read excerpt from Sigmund Freud, “Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” Standard Edition Vol. 7 (1905 [1901]): I will make this available as a pdf.

Week 10: Mental health and Masculinity
Day 1: Katie Sutton, “How World War I Changed Sex Research: War Neurotics, Shell Shock, and Sex in an Era of Industrialized Violence”, in Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s-1930s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019).
Day 2: Pamela E. Swett, “Selling Sexual Pleasure in 1930s Germany”, in Pamela E. Swett, Corey Ross, and Fabrice d’Almeida (eds), Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Week 11: Endocrinology, Hormones and Rejuvenation
Day 1: Read excerpts from Vicki Baum, Helene (1932) [30 pages]
Day 2: Read Maria Makela, “Rejuvenation and Regen(d)eration: ‘Der Steinachfilm,’ Sex Glands, and Weimar-Era Visual and Literary Culture,” German Studies Review 38, no. 1 (2015): 35-62.

Week 12: Global Legacies
Day 1: You can choose which secondary source to read (we will discuss this in the seminar).
Michiko Suziki, “The Science of Sexual Difference: Ogura Seizaburo, Hiratsuka Raicho, and the Intersection of Sexology and Feminism in Early-Twentieth-century Japan,” in Towards a Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1950, eds Veronica Fuechtner, David Hayes and Ryan Jones (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017): 258-278.
Shrikant Botre and Douglas E. Haynes, “Understanding R. D. Karve: Brahmacharya, Modernity, and the Appropriation of Global Sexual Science in Western India, 1927–1953,” in Towards a Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1950, eds Veronica Fuechtner, David Hayes and Ryan Jones (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017): 163-185.
Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu, “The “Ellis Effect”: Translating Sexual Science in Republican China, 1911–1949,” in Towards a Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1950, eds Veronica Fuechtner, David Hayes and Ryan Jones (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017): 186-210.
Chiara Beccalossi, “Latin Eugenics and Sexual Knowledge in Italy, Spain, and Argentina: International Networks Across the Atlantic,” in Towards a Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1950, eds Veronica Fuechtner, David Hayes and Ryan Jones (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017): 305-329.
Day 2: Final group discussion.

Course duration: 40 hours of tuition
Credits equivalence: 6 ECTS

Last updated: June 25, 2026