Gender, Sexuality, and History (321-0-20)

Topic

Sex and Nazi Germany

Instructors

Zavier Nunn

Meeting Info

Locy Hall 110: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Sex and Nazi Germany: two charged topics. What do they have to do with each other? More than you might think. The Nazis cared a great deal about sex. Decisions about who should have children, and who should be sterilized, sat at the center of racial policy. Brothels were set up for soldiers and for forced laborers in concentration camps. Paragraph 175 sent thousands of gay men to prison and then to concentration camps as well. At the same time, ordinary Germans were promised pleasure, a right extended to "Aryans" and withheld from Jews and other "undesirables." Sex had a purpose for the Third Reich: it fed the birth rate, enforced labor discipline, lifted military morale, and fueled racial war. Racism, Dagmar Herzog writes, has always also been about sex. Under National Socialism this was true in the extreme.

Studying who could have sex—or change sex—and how in the Third Reich tells us as much about racial purity, biopolitics, national identity, and state policy, as sex itself. We will cover the sexual cultures of Weimar Berlin, Nazi reproductive and racial policy, the homoerotics of fascist masculinity, Nazi theories of sexuality, the persecution of gay men, lesbians, and transvestites, sexual violence in the camps, and the place of sex in the cultural memory of Nazi Germany. Students will encounter this history through court records, medical files, memoirs, photographs, film, and scholarship.

Teaching Method

Seminar

Evaluation Method

- attendance and participation
- leading discussion
- in-class assessments
- exam (final)
- paper

Class Materials (Required)

All will be provided in Canvas

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Historical Studies Foundational Discipline
SoC Individual and Social Behavior Distro