March 19, 2025 @ 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm
Zoom
Jeffrey Schneider (Vassar College)
Comment by: Ervin Malakaj (University of British Columbia)
Chair: Chad Gibbs (College of Charleston, Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies)
Jeffrey Schneider is a Professor of German Studies, Faculty Director of Affirmative Action, and Director of Global Nineteenth Century Studies at Vassar. Schneider works on foreign language pedagogy as well as the intersections between the Prussian military and the modern queer emancipation movement in Imperial Germany.
Starting in the nineteenth century in Germany, colourful military uniforms became a locus for various queer male fantasies, fostering an underground sexual economy of male prostitution as well as a political project to exploit the army’s prestige for queer emancipation. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, a series of scandals derailed this emancipatory project. Simultaneously, public debates began to invoke homosexuality, sadism, transvestism, and other sexological concepts to criticize military policies and practices.
In pursuing the threads with which queer authors and activists stitched their fantasies about uniforms, Jeffrey Schneider offers fresh perspectives on key debates over military secrecy, disciplinary abuses in the army, and German militarism. Drawing on a vast trove of materials ranging from sexological case studies, trial transcripts, and parliamentary debates to queer activist tracts, autobiographies, and literary texts, Uniform Fantasies uncovers a particularly modern set of concerns about such topics as outing closeted homosexuals, the presence of gay men in the military, and whether men in uniform are more masculine or more insecure about their sexual identity.
Uniform Fantasies explores the intimate entanglements between military politics and queer sexual politics in Germany during the decades leading up to the First World War.
Sponsored by:
Mosse Lectures
George L. Mosse Program in History
College of Charleston Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies
UW-Madison Center for European Studies