Sexology’s Photographic Turn: Visualizing Trans Identity in Interwar Germany

Abstract

P h o t o g r a P h i c e v i d e n c e P l a y e d an increasingly important role in the efforts of early twentieth-century sexual scientists to establish their discipline as what Michel Foucault describes as “legitimate knowledge.” Since the late nineteenth century, pioneers in the field of sexology, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing in Vienna, Havelock Ellis in Britain, and Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany, had relied heavily on the autobiographical statements of patients and other informants in their efforts to uncover the mysteries of human sexual life, publishing these as case histories in support of newly forged classifications of what they at first described as sexual “pathologies” and “perversions.” But the almost exclusive reliance on subjective textual evidence began to change when technological developments in photography and its mass reproduction combined with an expanding patient base in ways that enabled sexologists to embrace this seemingly more empirical form of evidence. Historians have shown that from the mid-nineteenth century onward scientists had started turning to photography as a more tangible, “scientific” form of evidence that, in its mechanical objectivity, resonated with society’s abiding concern with the “Truth.” This article