UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the roles played by drawing and the graphic arts in the conceptual emergence of the queer male subject in Germany over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A central premise, which provides the theoretical framework for the investigation, holds that early-nineteenth-century scientists and aesthetic theorists co-produced new conceptions of “healthy” and “degenerate” artistic expression that were intrinsically bound to a developing discourse on normative and non-normative sexual desire. This conception evaluated both human and artistic development according to a telic, hierarchical rubric that twinned creation and procreation, positing a healthy, disciplined sexual fantasy as a prerequisite for the development of artistic talent. The dissertation argues that within such a system, a persistent affinity developed between queer men and undisciplined drawing practices that stemmed from the perceived unnaturalness of both.

The project is comprised of four case studies spanning roughly 1830 to 1930, each of which explores how drawing and its attendant subgenres served crucial functions for both queer men (who came to rely on their pens and pencils to visualize their sexual identity) and scientists (who used these drawings to map the contours of the new scientific category of “the homosexual”). In analyzing four diverse object types and genres of drawing—private sketching, academic nude studies, tattoos, and book illustration—the dissertation argues for an understanding of drawing as an inherently queer medium. Furthermore, it argues for the central significance of graphic expression as a key site of queer male identity formation, a practice pursued against scientific discourses aimed at pathologizing homosexual subjectivity.