ARTH 392 - Gender Issues in Art and Art history: Representations of Queerness in Weimar Berlin

• Thursdays, 12:15-14:45
• EV-1-605
• Instructor: Kathryn Simpson

This interdisciplinary course will examine the orgiastic Weimar era of “wicked Berlin” in pre-Hitler Germany, with an eye to its many representations of queerness. Weimar Berlin, which critics called “a new hell on earth,” is also known as history’s erotic metropolis; it was the international sex-tourist mecca of the twenties and early thirties, a place where even the air itself ostensibly produced perversions. Berliner Luft [Berlin air] “was said to contain a toxic ether that attacked the nervous system, stimulating long-suppressed passions as it animated all the external tics of sexual perversity.” Much of this so-called “perversity” had to do with various forms of behaviour and identity that could be considered “queer,” either then and/or now: bisexuality; cross-dressing and drag; homosexuality; non-monogamy and other non-normative lifestyle choices; pansexuality; sex acts considered “degenerate”; as well as trans* identifications and more. Throughout the course we will compare and contrast different representations of queerness in Weimar Berlin, not only in visual art (e.g., the oeuvres of Otto Dix, George Grosz, Jeanne Mammen, and Christian Schad) but also in visual culture (e.g., ephemera such as the pervasively popular Berlin sex guidebooks), and not only during the Weimar era (1918–1933) but also in subsequent representations of the culture and society of Weimar Berlin. Moreover we will consider and debate the links between the aesthetics and ideology of Weimar Berlin, on the one hand, and those of contemporary culture on the other.

There will be some thematic and chronological continuity between this course and the previous course, in the fall term, “Art in Its Changing Context: The Aesthetics of Ugliness in Viennese Modernity”; students may choose to enrol in both courses but are by no means obliged to do so.