Desiring Women: Constructing the Lesbian and Female Homoeroticism in German Art and Visual Culture, 1900-1933

This dissertation examines the construction of female homoeroticism and the lesbian in German and Austrian art and visual culture from ca. 1900 to 1933, tracing a shift from invisibility to visual cliche. At the same time as sexologists and homosexual rights organizations introduced German readers to new theories of sexual identity, German audiences were introduced to homoerotic female subjects in the widely circulating sculptures and drawings of Auguste Rodin and the erotic prints of Felicien Rops. In Austria, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele depicted double female nudes within the genre of the figure study, in which genius was predicated on the transformation of male desire for the model into the ideal (female) nude. In Germany, Max Klinger called on orientalism to distance lesbian desire in his final print portfolio, Pavilion, 1915. The obscenity trial in 1911 of Franz von Bayros and his publisher, Alfred Semerau, for the publication of Der Toilettentisch, demonstrates the intersections between discourses on pornography and national health. During the Weimar Republic, Otto Dix and Rudolf Schlichter represented grotesque fantasies of female-female violence. Jeanne Mammen made a career as a popular illustrator of Berlin types including lesbian women for journals such as Simplicissimus. Furthermore, Mammen was commissioned to illustrate the pseudo-Sapphic poems of Pierre Louys, Songs of Bilitis. Christian Schad was fascinated by all divergentes from the norm, and depicted fantasies of lesbian sex. From the mid 1920s until the early 1930s, two political and social groups advocating homosexual rights, Der Bund fur Menschenrechte and Deutsche Freundschaftsverband, published journals for their female readers. For these journals-Die Freundin, Frauenliebe, and Garconne-Junggesellin-the female editors selected cover photographs of female nudes. In a process of bricolage, the editors chose photographs originally produced for other, mostly male viewers, and presented them for lesbian readers