Four lineages with different archives and different methods, kept deliberately apart — from Ulrichs in 1864 to the theorists of the present.
Sexuality and gender have distinct intellectual histories, and this department keeps them apart. Sexology is the oldest of the lineages — empirical, clinical, and the parent of the medical literature on gendered embodiment. Feminist theory descends from women’s studies through the sex/gender distinction to the poststructuralist turn. Gay and lesbian studies descends from homophile scholarship into historical recovery. Queer theory emerged from the third but reasons like the second. These are different fields, with different archives and different methods, and they are routinely treated as one. The division here is genealogical: a scholar is placed by where the work descends from and how it proceeds — not by what it is about, and not by who the scholar is. The department carries positions its own members would reject in each other. That is deliberate. A department holding only one side of a live dispute is doing something other than scholarship. The four sections are at different stages of construction, and each says so below rather than letting the present distribution of numbers stand as an argument about which lineage matters.
Sexology and Medicine
The empirical and clinical lineage — from Ulrichs’s first defence of the Urning and Krafft-Ebing’s pathology, through Hirschfeld’s institute to the diagnostic apparatus of the twentieth century, and the writers who turned back on it. This section is substantially complete.
Forensic Psychiatry · Disease and Vice · The Case History · Degeneration
The Viennese forensic psychiatrist whose Psychopathia Sexualis ran to twelve editions and whose central distinction — disease or vice — was meant to save defendants from the courts by moving them into medicine. He was the man Ulrichs wrote to, and he granted the congenital while refusing the leap to the physiological.
Can help you study: The case-history method, the disease/vice distinction, degeneration theory, the Latin veil and who a book is written for, and the asymmetric burden of proof.
→ Converse with Richard von Krafft-Ebing
Sexual Inversion 1897 · Anomaly and Disease · Sampling from Free Life
The English physician who noticed that everything his profession knew about inversion had been learned in asylums and prisons, and who therefore went and found the others — people in ordinary employment, in good health, unknown to any doctor. From them he argued that abnormal and diseased are two studies and not one. He was prosecuted for saying so in plain English.
Can help you study: The sampling critique, the distinction between anomaly and pathology, comparative method, and the cost of writing for a general reader.
→ Converse with Havelock Ellis
Sexualwissenschaft · The Anthropological Method · The Sampling Critique
The Berlin dermatologist who coined Sexualwissenschaft and made the sharpest version of the argument against his own field: that a science built out of the hospital and the consulting-room is a magnificent structure resting on a sampling error, and that the remedy is not a better clinic but leaving the room altogether.
Can help you study: The anthropological turn in sexology, the critique of degeneration theory, encyclopaedic method, and the question where else, and when else?
→ Converse with Iwan Bloch
Zwischenstufenlehre · Sexual Intermediaries · Per Scientiam ad Iustitiam
Founder of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, and the man who built an institution on the proposition that justice would follow from science. His doctrine of sexual intermediaries held variation to be continuous and biological rather than categorical and deviant. His library was burned in 1933. He is cross-listed here from the Institut collection.
Can help you study: The theory of sexual intermediaries, science offered as legal argument, the Institut and its work, and what happens to a research programme when the state objects to it.
→ Converse with Magnus Hirschfeld
The Transsexual Phenomenon 1966 · Sex Orientation Scale · Reversible Before Irreversible · Diagnosis by Request
An abstraction of the argument, not a portrait of the man. The endocrinologist whose 1966 book supplied the criteria the gender clinics then used, and who said openly that he had no test — nothing in the blood or the chromosomes distinguished his patients from anyone else. What he had instead was fifty-one cases and one governing question: what becomes of this person if we do nothing?
Can help you study: Diagnosis in the absence of a test, the reversible-before-irreversible principle, scaling as a clinical device, and how a criterion becomes a gate.
→ Converse with the Simulacrum
Seelische Sexualleiden · Psychotherapy · Sexual Suffering as Medical Suffering
Head of the Institut’s department for the psychic suffering produced by sexuality — not the sexuality itself, but the collision between what a person was and what the world required. He held that treating a mind is not the same act as treating a brain, a behaviour or a symptom, and that which of those you believe you are doing decides everything after. Cross-listed from the Institut collection.
Can help you study: The philosophical foundations of psychotherapy, sexual distress as a medical rather than a legal matter, and Weimar clinical psychology.
→ Converse with Arthur Kronfeld
Taxonomic Method · Individual Variation · Behaviour as Character · Incidence and Frequency
An entomologist before he was a sexologist, and the method was settled on gall wasps eighteen years before it was pointed at people: count everything, and never discard the specimen that does not fit. He observed that the older workers made a practice of throwing their exceptions into the waste basket, and he spent his life on the contents of that basket.
Can help you study: Taxonomic method and individual variation, the seven-point scale, the difference between incidence and frequency, and what a sample can and cannot support.
→ Converse with Alfred Kinsey
Sexualaufklärung · Sex Education · Marriage Counselling
He ran the Institut’s sex education and marriage counselling clinic, through which thousands passed — workers, women, the very young — wanting to understand their own bodies. His position was that they had not arrived ignorant by accident: the ignorance had been arranged, and knowledge was therefore the first medicine. Cross-listed from the Institut collection.
Can help you study: The history of sex education, the Weimar counselling clinics, and popular scientific writing as a political act.
→ Converse with Max Hodann
Genitalumwandlung · Early Gender Surgery · Forensic Opinion · The Transvestitenschein
He documented among the first gender-affirming surgeries performed anywhere, and wrote the forensic opinions that allowed people to live in their true sex under law — which was, in practice, the more powerful of his two instruments. He worked quietly and the work was not quiet. Cross-listed from the Institut collection.
Can help you study: The earliest gender surgery and its documentation, expert testimony as an instrument of protection, and the Weimar transvestite certificate.
→ Converse with Felix Abraham
Gender Identity and Gender Role · The Sequence of Determinants · Coinage and Jurisdiction · The Contested Protocol
An abstraction of the argument, not a portrait of the man. He borrowed gender from the grammarians because medicine had no word for what he was looking at, and held that sex is not one variable but a chain of links that can come apart. This is a contested position and the case against it is carried inside the simulacrum, at full strength, in his own terms — including the consent principle he authored and the criterion by which his own most-cited case fails.
Can help you study: The sequence of determinants, how a coinage moves a subject from one jurisdiction to another, naturalised norms in scientific dress, and how to examine a protocol whose subjects could not consent.
→ Converse with the Simulacrum
Gender Identity · The Sex/Gender Distinction · The Ladder from Prejudice to Law · The Clinic and Its Evidence
An abstraction of the argument, not a portrait of the man. He split sex from gender deliberately and then declined to defend the coinage, printed the strongest objection to his own key term on his own third page and left it unanswered, and gave as much space to how we look as to what is found. His ladder — prejudice, guess, proposition, testable hypothesis, law of nature — is the most useful instrument in this section.
Can help you study: Placing a claim on a rung before discussing it, the method half of a book, why a few well-chosen examples counterfeit a class, and the limits of clinical evidence stated by a clinician.
→ Converse with the Simulacrum
The Marital Relationship as the Patient · Dual-Sex Cotherapy · The Silent Cotherapist · Failure Rates as the Only Honest Statistic
An abstraction of a clinical method, not a portrait of two people — and it speaks in the plural, because the instrument was two people working as one. Its premises: that there is no uninvolved partner in a marriage carrying sexual dysfunction; that neither sex can know the other’s experience from the inside, so each side of the room needs an interpreter; that control of a session belongs to the cotherapist who is not talking; and that since nobody can define therapeutic success without prejudice, the only number worth publishing is the failure rate.
Can help you study: Treating a relationship rather than a person, cotherapy design, why reported success rates deserve three questions before they deserve discussion, and what independent reproducibility asks of a clinical claim.
→ Converse with the Simulacrum
Manufacture of a Diagnostic Category · Recursive Criteria · Passing and Voice · Counterdiscourse
Based on the published writings of a living author, and abstracted from them: this is a topology of an argument, not a portrait of a person. Its central find is a closed circuit — the clinics published a criterion; the candidates read it and supplied the matching account; the papers reporting the match secured the funding. It took several years to see, and the reply it produced founded a field.
Can help you study: How a diagnostic category gets assembled and by whom, recursive criteria, what a test forbids you to say, and turning an accusation into a method.
→ Converse with the Simulacrum
Gajdicsian TaxonomyLiving — an abstraction of published work
Desire versus Identity · Conversion Practices · Legislative Consequence · The Cost of Conflation
Based on the published writings of a living author, and abstracted from them: a topology of an argument, not a portrait of a person. It separates the sex of the people someone is drawn to from who someone understands themselves to be, and tests a statute at the point where the two are hardest to tell apart. It is a contested position, and the strongest objections to it are carried inside the simulacrum in its own terms — including the objection drawn from its author’s own history.
Can help you study: The orientation/identity distinction, reading a statute at its hard case, comparing worst cases rather than likelihoods, and why non-directiveness is difficult to specify.
→ Converse with the Simulacrum
Articulation as a Measure of Importance · Transgender as an Analytic Concept · Queering the Woman Question · Standpoint and Its Limits
Based on the published writings of a living author, and abstracted from them: a topology of an argument, not a portrait of a person. Two moves define it. Faced with a category and the case it handles worst, it refuses the question of whether the case belongs and asks instead what the category becomes once the case is standing in it. And faced with a question that loses on the numbers, it concedes the arithmetic completely and then changes the measure — not how many people identify with a question, but how many other questions it can be joined to.
Can help you study: Categories read from their hardest cases, defining a term by movement rather than destination, the historian’s backward move, intersectional argument built from a located standpoint, and stating the limits of a standpoint as precisely as its reach.
→ Converse with the Simulacrum
Feminist Theory and Gender
The lineage that descends from women’s studies through the sex/gender distinction to the poststructuralist turn — its object gender as a system of social organisation and power, not desire and not identity. This section is at an early stage. The scholars presently listed are cross-listed from other departments; the theorists native to the lineage are being built. The gaps are known and named, and de Beauvoir first among them.
Helene Stöcker(1869–1943) · cross-listed from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft
Neue Ethik · Feminist Pacifism · Reproductive Rights · Bund für Mutterschutz
The New Ethic: sexuality governed by love and consent rather than by legal marriage, and the double standard of sexual morality read as a political structure rather than a natural one. She founded the League for the Protection of Mothers to give practical support to the women the law refused to protect, which is why she belongs to this section rather than to the clinical one — her object is the organisation of power, not the diagnosis of a patient.
Can help you study: Early feminist sexual ethics, consent as a organising principle, the double standard as political structure, and the link between pacifism and sexual reform.
→ Converse with Helene Stöcker
Mulveyan Visual PleasureLiving — an abstraction of published work · cross-listed from Film Studies
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema · The Male Gaze · Scopophilia · Counter-Cinema
The argument that classical cinema structures looking as masculine and being-looked-at as feminine — and that the structure is in the apparatus, in the camera and the cut, rather than in the intentions of anyone making the film. It is the clearest instance in the department of a feminist analysis that locates power in form rather than in content.
Can help you study: Reading a formal apparatus for the position it assigns its viewer, scopophilia and identification, and what a counter-cinema would have to do differently.
→ Converse with the Simulacrum
Walbyan PatriarchyLiving — an abstraction of published work · cross-listed from Sociology
Six Structures of Patriarchy · Public vs Private Patriarchy · Theorizing Patriarchy
Against the use of ‘patriarchy’ as a single undifferentiated thing: six structures — paid work, housework, the state, violence, sexuality and culture — each with its own logic, interacting, and shifting historically from a private to a public form. The move is decomposition, and it is what makes the concept testable rather than merely denunciatory.
Can help you study: Decomposing a totalising concept into structures that can vary independently, the private-to-public shift, and how to make a political concept do empirical work.
→ Converse with the Simulacrum
Francisian GenderLiving — an abstraction of published work · cross-listed from Sociology
Gender Identity & Education · The Boys’ Underachievement Debate · Subject Choice
Gender treated not as something a pupil is but as something constructed in the classroom daily — and the ‘boys’ underachievement’ debate taken apart to ask whose achievement is being measured, against whose standard, and what the aggregate statistic conceals about class and ethnicity.
Can help you study: Gender as a daily construction rather than an attribute, interrogating an educational statistic, and how a moral panic is assembled from real numbers.
→ Converse with the Simulacrum
Teaching to Transgress · Engaged Pedagogy · Education as the Practice of Freedom · Presence · Community
Teaching to Transgress · Engaged Pedagogy · Education as the Practice of Freedom · Presence · Community
Can help you study: Teaching to Transgress · Engaged Pedagogy · Education as the Practice of Freedom · Presence · Community
→ Converse with bell hooks Simulacrum
The Ethics of Ambiguity · Situated Freedom · Becoming Rather Than Being · The Second Sex · Otherness
De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) opened second-wave feminism. Its analysis — “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — distinguished biological sex from socially constructed gender before those terms existed in their current forms, and showed how women had been defined as the Other, defined in relation to men rather than in themselves. She was a philosopher before she was a feminist: her framework was Sartrean existentialism, to which she made her own contributions in The Ethics of Ambiguity.
Can help you study: Can help you with: The Second Sex and its arguments, the sex/gender distinction, the concept of the Other in existentialist philosophy, existentialist ethics and ambiguity, the relationship between existentialism and feminism, de Beauvoir’s fiction and memoirs, and the foundations of second-wave feminist theory.
→ Converse with Simone de Beauvoir Simulacrum
Gay and Lesbian Studies
The lineage that descends from the homophile apologists of the nineteenth century through gay liberation into historical recovery — its object same-sex desire, its persecution, and its cultures. The section holds a live disagreement from its first three members: Symonds requires the defensible case to be masculine on both sides, Carpenter builds his entire case on the figure Symonds excludes, and Bray shows from the court records that public recognition of such a bond became the evidence trail by which men were ruined. The section is under construction and the twentieth-century historians are still to come.
Burden of Proof · The Third Sex · Innateness · Legal Reform
A Hanoverian jurist who, writing to his own family in 1862 and publishing from 1864, made the first sustained argument that same-sex desire is congenital rather than vicious — and who put the burden of proof on the majority to demonstrate what it had only ever assumed. He is the founding text of two lineages this department separates, and of their confusion.
Can help you study: The shifting of a burden of proof, the decomposition of sex into independently varying parts, early legal reform argument, and how an existence proof works.
→ Converse with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs
A Problem in Modern Ethics · A Problem in Greek Ethics · The Witness and His Post · The Invariance Test
A Renaissance historian and Greek scholar — not a physician — who read the whole medical and forensic literature of sexual inversion in four languages and found it methodologically incompetent. His instruments are a layman’s: ask from what post a witness was looking and what his position forbade him to notice; ask whether a theory could have come out any other way; and hold a phenomenon constant while varying the society that judges it, since a classification that moves with the opinion is a classification of the opinion. He printed both essays in editions of ten and a hundred copies.
Can help you study: Testing a classification for invariance, detecting an unfalsifiable theory, separating a symptom from the conditions that produced it, dating a text apart from its reception, and dividing a category before defending it.
→ Converse with John Addington Symonds
The Intermediate Sex · Homogenic Love · The Middle Region · Function Rather Than Tolerance
A Cambridge mathematician who became a curate, then neither, then a market gardener and socialist pamphleteer. He read the Continental science and wrote it into English for the public it had been addressed away from — and made two moves nobody else in the section makes. He refuses to defend anything as merely harmless, asking instead what work it does that the society could not do without; and he answers the doctors not by asserting health but by tracking which way their own concessions were moving, year by year, and predicting where they would arrive. One of the five papers in his 1908 book concerns children and is deliberately excluded from this simulacrum, which says so itself.
Can help you study: Finding the inhabited middle of a binary, arguing from the trajectory of expert opinion rather than asserting a verdict, moving a case from harmlessness to function, distinguishing jurisdiction from approval in law, and why concealment rather than desire may be the corrupting agent.
→ Converse with Edward Carpenter
Brayan Friendship-Code(1948–2001) · an abstraction of published work
Elizabethan Sodomy and Friendship · The Signs Are the Same Signs · Reading by Absence · The Accusation as Solvent
The documentary historian of the section, and the counterweight to the two apologists who precede him. Working from state papers, household accounts and conduct books rather than from published argument, he shows that the signs of the admired masculine friendship and the signs of the execrated sodomite were one set of signs — the shared bed, the embrace, the common table — so that an accusation adds nothing and works instead by subtraction, withholding the conventions that would have made the intimacy legible as innocent. The meaning is in what is missing.
Can help you study: Reading a document by what it withholds rather than what it reports, dating the social conditions that make a reading credible, distinguishing a manipulable code from an automatic mentality, and what an accusation does to a career that is quite separate from whether it is true.
→ Converse with the Simulacrum
Queer Theory
The lineage that emerged from gay and lesbian studies but reasons like feminist theory — anti-identitarian, indebted to poststructuralism, and concerned with the normative rather than with a population. This section is at its outset: the two scholars listed are cross-listed ancestors rather than members, and nothing native to the lineage has yet been built. It is named here because the department’s argument requires it to exist, and an empty section that says so is more honest than a silent omission.
Power · Knowledge · Discourse · Discipline · Genealogy · The History of Sexuality · Biopolitics
Michel Foucault, whose genealogies of madness, punishment, sexuality, and knowledge transformed the study of power. His analyses of how institutions produce the subjects they govern remain essential to political theory, sociology, cultural studies, and the philosophy of science.
Can help you study: Power and knowledge, discourse analysis, the history of institutions, biopolitics, governmentality, surveillance, and the archaeology of ideas.
→ Converse with Michel Foucault Simulacrum
Gloria Anzaldúa(1942–2004) · cross-listed from Rhetoric & Criticism
Borderlands · Mestiza Consciousness · Nepantla · Code-Switching · Rhetoric of the Margins
The other ancestor, and the one who arrived at the section’s central habit from a different direction: the tolerance for ambiguity, the refusal to resolve a contradiction that is doing work, and the border understood as a way of thinking rather than a line. She writes from a position rather than about one, which is why the theoretical lineage that followed could not simply absorb her.
Can help you study: Holding contradictions without resolving them, writing from a located position, code-switching as an argument rather than a style, and the borderland as an epistemology.
→ Converse with Gloria Anzaldúa
