On Behalf of Hermaphrodites and Mongrels: Refocusing the Reception of Magnus Hirschfeld's Critical Thought on Sexuality and Race

J Homosex. 2021 Apr 16;68(5):777-801. doi: 10.1080/00918369.2019.1661686. Epub 2019 Oct 1.

Abstract

German-Jewish physician, sexologist and critical race theorist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was arguably one of the most significant sexual thinkers of the twentieth century and a renowned sexual minority rights advocate. Hirschfeld's sexual-emancipatory engagement has been widely acknowledged. But his groundbreaking universalization of sexual intermediariness and the resulting dissolution of binary, triadic or otherwise finite schemes of sexuality have been mostly ignored or misrepresented in intellectual history. A relevant exception in this regard is the way sexuality historian Manfred Herzer has shortly approached the "doctrine of sexual intermediaries" as the "key concept" of his thought. While assessing and setting in historical perspective Herzer's interpretive contentions, the present study foregrounds Hirschfeld's Darwinian-inspired, non-essentialist naturalism as the ontic support for the new sexual and race regime he envisaged. By conceptualizing the potential in-finitization of sexualities and races, Hirschfeld was envisioning an unprecedented path toward the Messianic-albeit a-theological-goal of intra-historic liberation.

Keywords: Binary sexuality; Messianic thought; closed sexual taxologies; de-finitization (or in-finitization) and emancipation of the sexes; male pregnancies; sexual and racial individuality; sexual categorizations and natural continuities; sexual intermediariness and racial hybridity; third sex; universalized hermaphroditism.

MeSH terms

  • Civil Rights
  • Disorders of Sex Development
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Judaism
  • Literature, Modern*
  • Male
  • Racial Groups*
  • Religion and Sex
  • Sexual and Gender Minorities*
  • Sexuality*

Personal name as subject

  • Magnus Hirschfeld