Different from the Others

Cyd Sturgess is a queer literary and cultural historian, who works as a Leverhulme postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University. Lecturing on themes of gender and desire in the media, Cyd's latest research project concerns issues of identity and precarity in community-based film festivals and the queering of documentary and archival practices.

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and Translations



Introduction

“Good” and “Bad” Femininities

Locating the “Fem(me)” in Histories of Sexuality

Labels and Names

Queer Historiographical Methods
Setting the Parameters for Historical Research



Part I: Socio-Medical Discourses



Chapter 1. Sex and the Cities – Locating Queer Feminine Desires

‘A Child of War’

A Conservative Modernity

Living Apart Together

The (Not So) Frivolous Flapper

‘Bubis’ and ‘Mädis’

Little Baskets and Cautionary Owls

Queer Activism in the City

Policing Same-Sex Desires    

Conclusions



Chapter 2. Sexual Science – The Queer Feminine Mystique

The Emergence of a Scientia Sexualis

Ideal Women, Ideal Marriages

Queer Female Desire At the Margins: Early Theories of Same-Sex Desires

Somatic Signifiers: Questions of Queer Legitimac

Intermediary Forms: Spectrums and Hierarchies of Queer Desire

Femininity as a (Queer) Woman’s Right

Seductive Don Juans and Curable Queers

Conclusions



Part II: Community Discourses

Introduction



Chapter 3. Fashioning Femininities in the Weimar Periodicals The Girlfriend and Love of Women

The Girlfriend: ‘Journal for Ideal Friendship’

Women’s Love: ‘Friendship, Love and Sexual Emancipation’

Discursive Divisions within Berlin’s Queer Subculture

Defining the Parameters of the Feminine

Literary Discourses and Feminine Desire

Fashioning Femininities

Trans Femininities

Anti-Feminine Discourses

Conclusions



Chapter 4. Marys and Mollys: Finding the Queer Feminine on the Dutch Press Landscape

The Cult of Domesticity

Beatrice (1939–1967)

The Young Woman (1924–1938)

We (1932)

The Right to Live (1940–1946)

Conclusions



Part III: Fictional Discourses

Introduction



Chapter 5. A Mother’s Love: Eva Raedt-de Canter’s Internaat (1930) and Christa Winsloe’s Das Mädchen Manuela (1933)

Eva Raedt-de Canter

Christa Winsloe

Boarding School (1930)

The Girl Manuela (1933)

‘Alone in the World’: Dynamic Desires in Boarding School

‘I want to be a boy’: Queering Sexological Tropes in The Girl Manuela

A Mother’s Love

“Confessions” and “Comings-Out”: Queer Desires as Queer Identities?

Conclusions



Chapter 6. When Object Becomes Subject: Feminine Protagonists in Anne E. Weirauch’s The Scorpion (1919–1931) and Josine Reuling’s Back to the Island (1937)

Anna E. Weirauch

Josine Reuling    

The Scorpion (1919–1931)

Back to the Island (1937)

Challenging Sexological Frameworks

Femininity in the Foreground

Hierarchies of Gender and Desire

Mother-Love and “Nonlesbian” Subjects

Conclusions



Conclusion



Bibliography