The Administration of Gender Identity in Nazi Germany
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4494526 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J Caplan (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 72 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 171-180 |
| Publication date | 2011-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History Workshop Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/hwj/dbr021 |
| PMID | 22206119 |
| OpenAlex | W2142886586 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 7 |
The history of women and gender has undergone profound transformations and elaborations since Tim Mason began his work on ‘Women in Germany’ for the Ruskin History Workshop in 1973. At that time women’s history barely existed as an academic field, and what most of us knew about women in Nazi Germany was still largely drawn from Clifford Kirkpatrick’s 1939 book on women and family life. 1 In German women’s history, the two British pioneers were Jill Stephenson and Richard Evans, both of whom were completing dissertations on the subject that were published shortly before Tim’s two-part essay appeared in History Workshop Journal in 1976. 2 He began with one of his overriding concerns, the mobilization of resources for war, and with a characteristic question: why did something not happen that might have been expected to happen? In this case, why were women not mobilized to meet the wartime demand for labour? Typically, his answer led him into a wide-ranging and thoughtful account that took in the social history of women and the family, as well as the economics and politics of women’s waged labour between the 1920s and the 1940s. As always, he was sceptical of large-scale theories of determination – here, prevailing ideas about patriarchy, the family and capitalism that ignored, as he put it, ‘all the questions about Vermittlung [mediation] ... It won’t do to postulate even the most plausible of concordances between capitalism & 19-20c family organization & then simply assert that the latter was determined by the former’. 3 I will return to this point at the end of this essay. I decided to use my contribution to this feature to pick up Mason’s cue of explaining why something expected didn’t happen, and in an aspect of women’s and gender history that had barely got started in the 1970s: ‘outsider’ sexualities in Nazi Germany. Serious research on this began to appear only in the 1990s, with an agenda of questions arising from both feminist and gay history. 4 Since then a lot of painstaking research has recovered histories of persecution and survival, and has mapped the multiple and not altogether consistent operations of gender and sexuality in the power circuits of National Socialism. 5 This essay explores one of these inconsistencies which appeared at the far margins of outsider sexual behaviours and gender identities. Obviously the most important thing to
Administration (probate law) · Aesthetics · Art · Gender identity · Identity (music) · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law
Sexology’s Photographic Turn
Ich bin wegen dieses alles in allem gehindert.“ Zur amtlichen Vornamensänderung von trans und inter Personen unter der NS-Herrschaft / „By all of this, I am prevented from doing anything.“ Legal first name changes for trans and inter persons under Nazi rule
What does terrorism look like?’
Nazi Gender Ideology, Memoricide, and the Attack on the Berlin Institute for Sexual Research
Biologisms on the left and the right
Transgender Life and Persecution under the Nazi State
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2017 - 2023 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |