Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890-1933

Uses historical case studies to illuminate women's claims to emancipation and to sexual subjectivity during the tumultuous Wilhelmine and Weimar periods in Germany.

Desiring Emancipation traces middle-class German women's claims to gender emancipation and sexual subjectivity in the pre-Nazi era. The emergence of homosexual identities and concepts in this same time frame provided the context for expression of individual struggles with self, femininity, and sex. The book asks how women used ne...