Invertito – Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten
(Invertito – Annual for the History of Homosexualities)
A new magazine introduces itself
Dear readers!
This is the first volume of the new magazine Invertito – Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten (Annual for the History of Homosexualities). Invertito wants to dedicate itself to the historical research of female and male same-sex love, eroticism and sexuality and thus close a sensitive gap within the German-speaking scientific publicising. The annual is edited by the Fachverband Homosexualität und Geschichte (Federation of Homosexuality and History), whose members have been engaged mostly within documentary work, work in museums and the federation’s work for years. It is not only open for members of the federation, but also to everyone who does research concerning the history of homosexualities and who is acquainted with the problems, that face especially young scientists and those who are not associated with an university, who try to address these topics in historiographic periodicals. Invertito invites established scientists and university teachers as well as students, just graduated and semi-professional and non-academic researchers to participate. All articles should fulfill scientific requests as well as be readable for interested non-scientists. Each volume contains approximately three articles on a main topic. Additionally, smaller contributions, selected reviews, references to new publications, current commentaries, (picture-)documentaries, and, as far as possible, discussions and theoretical debates are included also.
The main contributions of this first volume go back into the first three decades of the Federal Republic of Germany, that is, into the "Adenauer Era" and into the phase of social and political change. They want to negotiate larger contexts as well as illuminate specific research inquiries. The two articles of Burkhardt Riechers and Kirsten Plötz examine the image of male and female homosexuality during that time, each from a distinct perspective, that is, first the self-image of "homophiles" in contemporary magazines, secon, the society’s image that "lesbians" were confronted with in the beginnings of the FRG. Finally, with his analysis of the handling of homosexuality within the German students' movement, Stefan Micheler provides a contribution to demystifying the view of the German Students Movement of the late sixties. That all three essays have been written by graduate-students is mainly due to the deficits of the current research, which has not yet discovered these issues and not yet included them in the academic canon.
Finally, that male authors outnumber female ones in the entire volume, is mainly due to the members’ structure of the editing federation. We hope for a greater participation of women – also among the editors – and regret that organisations, in which homosexual men and women are represented equally, are still the exception in the German-speaking countries.
"Invertito" views itself as a programmatic title. The Latin noun inversio and the Latin verb inverto were adopted from many European languages as loan words and thus enlarged in their meanings. Even in Latin they already have multiple meanings: inversio means shift, irony, allegory; invertere can be translated as to turn over, to turn around, to reverse, to stir up, to plow up, to turn inside out, to twist, to change, to alter, to express something with other words, to turn something upside down. The German language also knows invers, Inversion, invertieren as loan words. The magazine Invertito wants to change the conventional view of history, to turn common researchers‘ opinions upside down, to mirror the existing, but also to turn it around – in short, it wants to withdraw itself from the hegemonic heteronormative view and resist it.
In the German language alone, a great number of terms exists that same-sex acting or loving people were assigned or assigned themselves during the years: "Sodomiter" and "Tribaden", "Urninge" and "Urninden", "Verzauberte", "Freundschaftsmänner" and "Freundschaftsfrauen", "Freunde" and "Freundinnen", "Männerhelden" as well as "Angehörige des Dritten Geschlechts" ("Members of the third sex"). To put all this under the umbrella "homosexual" is a subsequent construction. Among others, there are also the terms Invertierte, invertiert, invertierte Sexualität, which Sigmund Freud (1905) and Hans Blüher (1912) took over from Jean Martin Charcot and Magnan (1882) and which were used by various other authors as well. Roman languages also know the word as a synonym for "homosexual" (Spanish: invertido, inversion sexual, Italian: inverto, invertito/a). The best translation would probably be: of a different kind/twisted. The title Invertito shows that one should not press the people who are introduced through research into constructions of identity by simply viewing them as "homosexuals", but refers to the diversity of terms, identities, self- and assumed definitions through time and space.
The plural "homosexualities" is supposed to point out two things: For one thing it expresses that the idea of a diachronic, unitary history, in which sexuality is regarded a phenomenon untouched by changes through time, has to be replaced by historical accounts, by "stories" about the diverse appearances and conceptions of same-sex life and loving. Secondly, it is supposed to point out that female "homosexuality" cannot be equaled with its male counterpart and cannot be developed out of it or be referred to it, but instead is realised through self-sufficient concepts and manifestations.
Research on same-sex love, eroticism and sexuality takes its place within the broad field of gender and sexualities studies, which has emerged from several roots since the 1970s. Here, one has to name especially: the appropriation of the past by the homosexual liberation movement, which concentrated especially on the aspect of the persecution of same-sex acting people and the history of the "homosexuals" since the 19th century; emergence of a feminist womens’ history, in which the examination of relations between women has its firm place and which has meanwhile extended itself to the history of gender, and the social historical research on sexuality, familiy and "private life", originated from the Annales school’s history of mentalities and the history of everyday life.
Often older fields of research – mostly located at the margins of the historiographical mainstream – could contribute resources, in order to subject them to new inquiries, for example the "Sittengeschichten" (history of morals) or medical collections of case histories. The traditional "criminal history" with its perspective from the top was just the same replaced by a social and everyday life research of "criminality" from the bottom; in this context, sexual delinquency also had its firm place.
During the 1980s, the entire historiography on genders and sexualities was seized by a basic change of paradigmata. The use of deconstructivist methods, especially the reception of Michel Foucault, led to a historical contextualizing of seemingly objective terms (such as "sexuality", "love", and so on), to a denaturalizing of the sexual and the physical in general, and called into question universal theories of the entire history. The following (not yet finished) essentialism-constructivism-debate sharpened the view for the necessity of defining and questioning terms such as (homo-)"sexuality", "sex", or "criminality" in their specific historical social context over and over again. For about ten years, the historicizing of the sexual is enforced through the connection of deconstructivism and feminist theories, especially by Judith Butler, who cancelled the distinction between "sex" as a biological and "gender" as a sociological category and rejected any "prediscursive" idea of a woman’s image (and man’s image as well). Finally, with "queer theory", a new connection between science and political liberatory practice is striven for.
A broad range of approaches concerning research of same-sex conditions is to be represented in Invertito. The magazine is supposed to mirror the current status of discussions, to lend a voice to different positions and, as far as possible, to contribute in promoting and further developing theoretical debates.
The research on the history of homosexualities therefore goes far beyond the mere consideration of social minorities; it concerns gender and social conditions in general. It makes visible realities and concepts of life outside and besides the bourgeois-heterosexual nuclear family norms that are hegemonic today. The decoding of societal images, terms and norms as constructed is helpful in questioning power relations and in pointing at the basic changeability of today’s conditions.
Especially in the German-speaking countries there is a lot left to be desired in this field. Here one still insists strongly on viewing sexualities and sexes as ahistorical categories and also as something "private". So long, the emphasis of interest is on the early homosexual liberation movement, on the Nazi-period, and for approximately ten years, there are increasing (if still single) activities concerning the Middle Ages. In opposition to that, the Early Modern Period, that is the époques of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, is nearly unexplored in the German-speaking countries, while it has been worked on extremely intensively in many other West-European countries and the USA. The theoretical debates mentioned above are also just starting to be acknowledged in Germany. Thus there is a fundamental research interest in all historical phenomena of same-sex behavior in theoretical regards as well as regarding specific subjects.
May Invertito promote the networking and establishment of historical research on homosexualities and thereby not simply establish an exotic-colorful island within the dominant science, but help to change the perspective on past and present in general in a progressive way.
The editors and co-editors therefore ask all readers kindly to join the new magazine with constructive critique and to feel addressed personally to participate in the following volumes with own contributions.
The Editorial Staff