ABSTRACTHow does attention to dogs open up understanding of the queer, and more specifically, the Sapphic, past? This article examines the forgotten enmeshments of lesbian and pedigree dog subcultures in 1920s England. It takes as its case study one of the best‐known couples of Sapphic modernity, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, and their dachshunds, Wotan and Thorgils. Bringing into dialogue scholarship on queer, trans and animal history, it traces the historical footprint of the dogs and considers how what this article calls the ‘canine archive of sex’ – a wide range of documents including show catalogues, newspaper reports, fiction and scientific writing – adds to understanding of the complexities of modern Sapphic history. Sapphic here is used to denote relationships between people assigned female at birth, some of whom may have transed gender norms and expectations. The article argues that the records of Hall's and Troubridge's involvement in the world of dog breeding expand understanding both of Sapphic modernity specifically and the intersections between histories of sexuality and gender and animal history more broadly. They reveal how gender norms, class privilege and racialised practices converged in modern pedigree culture, shaping canine–human relationships as well as the queer subcultures that formed around them.

What is the use of queer history? In present-day Hungary, like in other countries with right-wing governments, LGBTQI lives have become a target for attack, often by being figured as alien to national traditions and history. In Hungary, measures such as a new family policy that figures the heteroreproductive family as key to national survival, as well as the more recent ban on discussions of transgender and homosexuality in schools, are articulated explicitly in terms of a racialized anti-immigration polemic. These measures represent genders and sexualities that deviate from the binary norm as recent “inventions,” practices implicitly without a Hungarian past that have entered the country with the arrival of “foreign” liberalism in the post-Communist era.Anita Kurimay's important new study, Queer Budapest, 1873–1961, exposes the fallacy of such claims by carefully charting the complexities of queer lives, representations, and politics in the period from the 1870s to the 1960s. This was a turbulent time in Hungarian modernity, bookended by the establishment of Budapest as capital city during the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the end of Stalinism in 1961. In the decades between these events Hungary experienced radical political system changes. Bringing into view the multifaceted roles of homosexuality in this changing political history, Kurimay presents fascinating insights into the vagaries of Hungarian queer history specifically and the methodological and archival challenges of queer history more broadly.The book opens with an investigation of Budapest's thriving queer scene during the city's so-called Golden Age at the turn of twentieth century, when, like in other European metropoles, queer subcultures, and especially male homosexuality, gained greater visibility. During this time the Budapest Metropolitan Police established a homosexual registry “for known notorious homosexuals, especially blackmailers” (21), a unique record that now survives only through secondhand accounts. From these materials, and by also examining related medical, legal, and cultural records, Kurimay is able to draw a complex picture of the homosexual subcultures of the time and their relationship to state authority. In the early twentieth century, for instance, the registry seems to have been used primarily to try to stamp out blackmail and other illegal practices rather than homosexuality itself. Its uses changed after the consolidation of Communist power in 1948, when an additional national register of homosexuals was set up. The book's final chapter reveals how the information gathered in these official but top-secret records was used to recruit, through coercion and fear of exposure, “homosexual agents [who] were key players in the Communist efforts to loosen the hold of religion and the church over the Hungarian population” (226) by “bringing to light the homosexual affairs of priests and nuns” (228).The attention to these difficult aspects of queer history, especially its implication in complex histories of state oppression, is a real strength of Queer Budapest. While I would have liked to learn more about Hungary's ethnic complexities and racial politics—LGBTQI Roma, for example, are gradually gaining greater visibility both in public life and academic scholarship—Queer Budapest carefully attends to class, sexuality, and gender. A stand-out example is the discussion of an early twentieth-century lesbian scandal centering on Cécile Tormay, an anti-Semitic Hungarian nationalist and anti-communist who was a major figure during the restoration of conservative power in 1920. In 1923 Tormay's name appeared in court proceedings initiated by a member of Hungary's aristocratic elite, Count Zichy, who petitioned to divorce his wife, Eduardina Pallavicini, because of her “unnatural” relationship with Tormay. Pallavicini was the president of the National Association of Hungarian Catholic Women's Association, a high-profile public role that put her at the heart of the conservative establishment. The court case caused a public scandal, comparable to the trials of Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, which prompted some of the first public discussions about homosexuality and lesbianism in England. Its outcome was, however, radically different: the Hungarian court concluded that Tormay's and Pallavicini's intimate relationship was not sexual but instead the manifestation of a passionate shared patriotism. Both women were able to maintain their reputations and presence in conservative political life.If the case shores up the national framing of modern sexual debates in Hungary, it also reveals how other histories are submerged in, and suppressed by, such dominant narratives. In addition to perpetuating the denial of the existence of sex between women, for example, it offers a glimpse at some of the intersections between lesbian and transgender histories. According to Kurimay, trial witnesses falsely claimed to have seen Tormay with Sándor Vay. Vay had gained notoriety in the later nineteenth century when his father-in-law sued him for fraud and the ensuing trial exposed that Vay had been assigned female at birth. By the time Vay was allegedly seen with Tormay, he had been dead for some years. In this case, then, the strategy of evoking one “deviant” figure to discredit another was not successful. Yet, as Kurimay shows, other myths about Hungary's queer history proved to be more persistent.Queer Budapest could not be more timely. Kurimay observes that in Hungary today, “according to the popular idea, which ironically unites both the young LGBTQ communities and their harshest adversaries, queer culture came about following 1989 on both the wings of liberal democracy and capitalism” (234). Her rich study is a must read for anyone interested in Hungary, queer history, the modern history of sexuality in Europe, and the political (ab)uses of LGBTQI life.

In this roundtable, four curators of exhibitions showcasing sexual archives and histories—with a particular focus on queer and trans experiences—were asked to reflect on their experiences working as scholars and artists across a range of museum and gallery formats. The exhibitions referred to below were Bring Your Own Body: Transgender between Archives and Aesthetics, curated by Jeanne Vaccaro (discussant) with Stamatina Gregory at The Cooper Union, New York, in 2015 and Haverford College, Pennsylvania, in 2016; Odarodle: An imaginary their_story of naturepeoples, 1535–2017, curated by Ashkan Sepahvand (discussant) at the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) in Berlin, Germany, in 2017; Queer, curated by Ted Gott, Angela Hesson, Myles Russell-Cook, Meg Slater (discussant), and Pip Wallis at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, in 2022; and TransTrans: Transatlantic Transgender Histories, curated by Alex Bakker, Rainer Herrn, Michael Thomas Taylor, and Annette F. Timm (discussant) at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, Germany, in 2019–20, adapting an earlier exhibition shown at the University of Calgary, Canada, in 2016.

Increased access to visual archives and the proliferation of digitized images related to sexuality have led a growing number of scholars in recent years to place images and visual practices at the center of critical historical inquiries of sexual desire, subjectivity, and embodiment. At the same time, new critical histories of sexual science serve both to expand the temporal and geographical frames for investigating the historical relationships of sex and visual production, and to generate new lines of inquiry and reshape visual studies more broadly. The contributors to this issue invite us to ask: What new questions and challenges for the study of sex and sexual science are posed by critical studies of the visual? How are new visual methodologies that focus on archives changing the contours of historical knowledge about sex and sexuality? What—and where—are new methodologies still needed? “Visual Archives of Sex” aims to illuminate current research that centers visual media in the history of sexuality and that interrogates contemporary historiographies.

Previous articleNext article No AccessModernVeronika Fuechtner; Douglas E. Haynes; Ryan M. Jones (Editors). A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960. xiii + 437 pp., notes, index. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. $34.95 (paper). ISBN 9780520293397.Heike BauerHeike Bauer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 110, Number 1March 2019 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702512 Views: 55Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2019 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2019, Isis 110, no.S1S1 (Jan 2020): 21–310.https://doi.org/10.1086/707594

One of the iconic images of the rise of theThird Reich is a famous photograph of books burning. Those books were taken from the library of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, founded in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the first people to articulate a discourse of homosexual rights. In The Hirschfeld Archives, Heike Bauer uses Hirschfeld’s extensive published writings and surviving papers to trace the impact of violence on queer life and queer activism in early twentieth-century Germany.

The chapter re-examines Dracula's relationship to late nineteenth-century sexological discourses. It shows that the (im)possibilities of heterosexuality came under scrutiny as much as perceived deviations from that norm.

Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture? This book presents compelling new research on how homophobia, suicide, gender violence, abuse, racism, and the impact of war and colonialism shaped the emergence of modern homosexual rights activism. It examines forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism and foundational transgender work. In 1919 he opened the world’s first Institute of Sexual Sciences in Berlin. Attracting international visitors including doctors, artists, writers and political activists, it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. Attacks against queer life play a formative role in modern same-sex culture. Yet remembering the victims is only part of the task of queer history. The Hirschfeld Archives attends to the queer dead and injured, but it also demonstrates that the development of homosexual rights politics in the West had gendered and racialized limits.

The special journal issue ‘Contemporary Comics by Jewish Women’ brings together essays, interviews and original artwork by or about Jewish women comics artists. In this Introduction we reflect on our own approach to, and in investment, in this project, and in so doing also explain the scope and content of this special issue.

This chapter examines the role of translation in the work of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). Focusing on an account of a verbal attack on a homosexual man by his physician in turn-of-the-last-century Philadelphia, it demonstrates how attention to issues of translation expands understanding of the relationship between discourse and experience in the sexological archive. Arguing that Hirschfeld refused to translate overtly homophobic content, the chapter shows how Hirschfeld 'staged untranslatability' in an attempt to draw attention to the violent effects of normative discourses on the lives they inscribe.