UC Santa Cruz

How does one grasp, historically and conceptually, the relatively recent phenomenon that gay identity politics is systematically mobilized to support racism and imperialism, a phenomenon theorized as "homonationalism" (Puar) and "gay imperialism" (Haritaworn, Erdem & Tauqir)? This dissertation examines psychoanalysis, sexuality, and nationality in late Habsburg Austria in the light of recent analyses of homonationalism and gay imperialism in order to contribute to a better understanding of the long intertwined histories of sexuality, individual selfhood, and racial modernity.

Sigmund Freud's theories of sexuality and gender--especially the theories of castration, sexual difference, and Oedipus--form the core of a psychoanalytic understanding of the self. Despite, and in some cases precisely through, their alleged universal character, these theories participate in a battle over the meanings of Czech, European, German, Jewish, and Christian identities brought on by drastic changes in the social and political organization of late Habsburg Austria: industrialization, mass migrations, competing nationalisms, and the rise of the antisemitic movement.

In four chapters, titled "Coming Out, Castration, and the Biopolitics of Parental Narcissism," "Sexuality, Antiquity, and the Embodiment of European Culture," "Ritual Murder and Sexuality in the Hilsner Affair," and "Suggestion and Certainty: Two Approaches to a Critique of Antisemitic Knowledge," I read Freud's theories of sexuality and gender together with documents of contemporary social, political, and cultural events: the state's establishment of a social welfare program in 1917; the Badeni affair of 1897 and the politics of Czech and German language rights; the production of King Oedipus at the Viennese Burgtheater in 1886; the Hilsner affair of 1899/1900 and the antisemitic ritual murder discourse. Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Nationality in Late Habsburg Austria suggests that psychoanalytic accounts of gender and sexuality normalize and justify racialized notions of individuality.