Abstract
Ina Linge’s analysis of queer livability in twentieth-century Germany is largely developed from theories in the work of Judith Butler and Magnus Hirschfeld, and is primarily based upon several German (auto)biographical narratives: Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren [A Man’s Girlhood Years], Karl Martha Baer, 1907), Tagebuch einer männlichen Braut [Diary of a Male Bride], published anonymously, edited by Walter Homann (1907), Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memories of My Nervous Illness) by Daniel Paul Schreber (1903), Und dennoch ja zum Leben [Life Nonetheless] by Erich Amborn (1981) and Freud’s Wolf Man’s memoir (The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man, 1971) as well as interview transcripts with Kurt R. Eissler, an Austrian psychoanalyst. What unites these texts is their narrators’ focus on difficulties in understanding their sex and gender identity and in accustoming themselves to a society which sets restrictive norms upon their body and mind. Throughout, Linge advocates a hospitable reading of these memoirs so as to comprehend the hardships and, on certain occasions, the agency of their narrators. Linge maintains that these ego documents not only reveal the gender problems and social prejudices their narrators have to confront and endure, but also demonstrate a thorny process of how some carefully and creatively use sexual-scientific discourses and normative restrictions ‘prosthetically to construct a livable life’ (p. 4). Linge has successfully achieved her academic goal of illuminating queer and transgender people’s desire and efforts for ‘safety, subjectivity, survival, self-exploration, and livability’, against the conventional approach of deeming them as merely passive objects to be gazed at, demonized, commercialized, and analysed (p. 189).
In her Introduction, Linge explains that the attainment of queer livability relies upon a prosthetic use and reframing of sexual-scientific discourses, and is thus ‘the result of an embodied positioning with regard to norms that support and protect the subjects they define’ (p. 5). Linge is convinced that for those queer life writers, ‘safety, knowability, and livability’ matter more than challenging, transgressing or subverting restrictive norms (p. 7). However, the memoirs impose a challenge to the ‘normative constraints of a gender binary’ (p. 20), and call for attention to the materiality of the body, not only its gender and flesh in the narrow sense, but also its ‘haptic, narrative, discursive, and sartorial’ features (p. 21). At the beginning of the twentieth century, sexual and psychoanalytical discourses become more accessible and could therefore provide a framework to guide these writers. Meanwhile, their narratives are used as case studies and vital evidence for research or ideological purposes by sexologists and psychoanalysts, including Freud and Hirschfeld.
In Chapter 1, Linge explains her methodology, that is, hospitable reading, extracting the ethical implications from Derrida and defining her ‘approach to reading texts that avoids establishing a hierarchical relation between narrative and reader that posits the reader as judge’ (p. 52). A hospitable reading enhances readers’ ‘powerful, participatory, and active interaction with’ those queer and transgender memoirs (p. 61), and it facilitates readers’ recognition of queer and transgender suffering. An ethical and hospitable reader responds in an open, just and loving fashion towards otherness.
In Chapter 2, Linge presents her cautious use of the metaphor prosthesis which is borrowed from ‘disability studies and cultural theory’ (p. 28), and a detailed analysis of the life writer’s agency. But she warns that this metaphor may obscure the ‘pain, difficulty, and discrimination’ that queer and transgender people have experienced (p. 66). N. O. Body, the first-person narrator of Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren, uses Hirschfeld’s questionnaire as ‘prosthetic support’ (p. 73). It was first used in 1898/1899 and updated in 1908 for a large-scale collection of data on gender and sexual orientation/diversity. The memoir navigates Hirschfeld’s questions and criteria about sex, gender and desire (p. 76), with the result that ‘his maleness becomes legible and his ascribed female identity collapses’ (p. 80), thus achieving a certain degree of livability. It is also through queer life writers’ prosthetic use of sexual-scientific discourses that their agency is displayed. Those discourses are ‘discursive constraints on subjects’, but meanwhile those subjects are provided with ‘the language to think and write’ (p. 68). Within the discursive frame(s), their lives and their life stories will later become vital sources for academics, as ‘a prosthetic support for medico-scientific thought’ (p. 90), and possibly a prosthetic disruption.
Chapter 3 starts with how queer bodies ‘are framed as ill-fitting, at odds with normative expectations’ (p. 101), and, innovatively, is concerned with how ‘livability relies on the livable framing and staging of the body in relation to its social and normative surroundings’ (p. 140), because those norms ‘are not deterministic but remain flexible and dynamic’ (p. 103). Linge notices how the ‘physicality of the [queer] body’ is verbally described in words, virtually represented in photos, and commercially employed in department stores to incite potential customers’ desire, to encourage them to gaze and to spend their money. Controversially, the so-called unusual body may facilitate a queer person to obtain a certain degree of livability, for instance, a male shop assistant’s femininity is acceptable in the women’s clothing section of a department store because ‘it has a bodily weight and bodily contours’ under that particular social and commercial circumstance (p. 140).
Essentially, Chapter 4 is a continuation of Linge’s argument about the subjectivity of queer and transgender people, but switches its focus to frame(s) established by medico-scientific institutions (p. 143). It begins with Eric Santner’s discussion of ‘investiture’. With a particular emphasis upon the performative and symbolic nature of this process, Linge coins the term trans-investiture to indicate ‘the investiture of gender transformation’ (p. 143), for instance, during a family party when a female subject announces herself to be a male, or an official ceremony when a new sexual identity is publicly recognized. Linge argues that transgender individuals may ‘appropriate institutional investiture’ for a change of gender and more vitally for a livable life (p. 144).
Chapter 5 presents Linge’s revision of conventional readings of the Wolf Man case. Instead of reading Wolf Man as passive and submissive to norms, Linge notices his ‘lifelong struggle to achieve a livable life’ (p. 193), and his desire ‘to reveal himself at [his] own will’ but meanwhile his fear of being gazed upon when the situation was out of his control (p. 212). It is through this complex combination of desire and anxiety that the Wolf Man’s subjectivity and agency becomes overt.
Linge presents a refreshing and valuable analysis of diverse (auto)biographical queer and trans writing in this book. Scholars and students of gender and queer studies will find it inspiring. Besides, it is also an important contribution to German cultural and literary studies.