History Law/Legal Nonfiction

“Gender is no Substitute for Sex:” A Comparative Human Rights Analysis of the Legal Regulation of Sexual Identity

U.K. regulation of sexual identity within a marriage context has traditionally been linked to biological sex. In response to the European Court of Human Rights decisions in Goodwin and I.,2 and in order to address the question of whether a transsexual person can be treated as a ‘‘real’’ member of their adoptive sex, the U.K.…

History Nonfiction Theory

Introduction: Why Queer German History?

This essay examines ways in which historians might learn from queer approaches to the past. Drawing inspiration from queer theory and ideas long circulating in cultural, literary and medieval studies, it argues that there is much to be gained when we adopt a more self-reflexive, genealogical, context-specific analysis of lives lived. A queered history interrogates…

History Nonfiction Photography Theory

The Ethics of Seeing : Photography and Twentieth-Century German History

Throughout Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic…

History Nonfiction Theory

Foreword: When Gender Can’t Be Seen amid the Symbols: Women and the Mexican Revolution

Sex in Revolution challenges the prevailing narratives of the Mexican Revolution and postrevolutionary state formation by placing women at center stage. Bringing to bear decades of feminist scholarship and cultural approaches to Mexican history, the essays in this book demonstrate how women seized opportunities created by modernization efforts and revolutionary upheaval to challenge conventions of…

Archive History Nonfiction Photography Theory

Unconcealable Realities of Desire: Amelio Robles’s (Transgender) Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution

One can almost see it: a smile of satisfaction spreading across Amelio Robles’s face as he looks at the studio portrait in which he poses like a dandy: dark suit, white shirt, tie, wide-brimmed black hat, leather shoes, and a white handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket.¹ Standing with a cigarette in one hand…

Archive History Nonfiction Theory

Lorenza Böttner: From Chilean Exceptionalism to Queer Inclusion

Although critical efforts since the end of Chile’s dictatorship have successfully deployed narratives of dissident gender comportment to disrupt the country’s neoliberal discourse of economic exceptionalism, some queer narratives of the postdictatorship period that are not contingent on Chile’s dictatorial, violent past have been excluded from this debate. The story of Lorenza Böttner, a transgender…