An inventive intervention, precarious and provocative, within the multilingual medical humanities, which makes a case for the way German research and medical humanities hold one another alive by performing it out.
Dramatis personae:
German Research as keystone mutualist
Medical Humanities as keystone mutualist
Historical past of Artwork as a keystone species
Crimson wooden ants (species group Formica rufa) as ecosystem engineers
Ina Linge as The Comedian
Annja Neumann as The Poet
Peacock as metaphor
The Reader as co-creator
Prelude
A desolate and barren panorama …
The Poet, The Comedian, Crimson wooden ants.
The Poet
A weblog publish play that names each the Medical Humanities and German Research as keystone mutualists is inevitably a political intervention; a provocation that intends to spur a debate – so we hope.
The Comedian
That’s proper! There isn’t any formal settlement concerning the circumstances that set up a “keystone species,” not to mention a “keystone mutualist.” The title of “keystone mutualist” is normally attributed to “organisms that take part in mutually helpful interactions, the lack of which might have a profound influence on the ecosystem” (Nationwide Geographic 2023).
The Poet
A keystone species, regardless of how small or insignificant it appears to be like (factors to the ants climbing up a damaged shoehorn), is a crucial a part of an ecosystem. Keystone roles could be transformative – (to the ants) no stress!
The Comedian
The dramatic rigidity of our play arises particularly from the ecological area of interest of German Research as a keystone species throughout the analysis ecosystem that sustains the medical humanities. This can be a matter of its working circumstances, its materials results and the results this ecosystem has for communities, particularly for small teams of usually missed (basis) species of researchers, who don’t work in, however are inclined to work by means of, the crucial medical humanities. Collectively, we (walks in a circle by gesturing in direction of her fellow performers and viewers members) ask questions concerning the worth that the expanded medical humanities can add to public debates and the way they’ll form actual world developments.
The Poet
We’re additionally performing in a second of disaster (thunder), the place trendy languages programmes in larger schooling are threatened with redundancies and closures throughout the UK, to the purpose that German, as a various subject, faces extinction. German research wants the medical humanities – in spite of everything, the capability to interact with, and work in, unsure circumstances is a key function of the utilized medical humanities (Thacker, Wallis and Profitable 2021); and the medical humanities can thrive with the wealthy supplies, strategies and researchers that German research supplies.
Crimson wooden ants
I’ve nothing explicit to say but, but when I don’t say one thing, you could start to disregard me.[1]
Act I
German Research is setting the scene by offering a wormhole into early-twentieth-century, German, sexual data manufacturing. The floor of the stage space is roofed with pine needles, small branches and concrete particles.
Annja Neumann and Ina Linge step onto the stage.
Annja Neumann
Keystone mutualists, by definition, take part in mutually helpful interactions of their ecosystem. With out their exercise, the ecosystem would change drastically or collapse altogether. What if German Research have been a keystone mutualist for the expanded medical humanities ecosystem? What function do interactions between German research and the medical humanities play in your analysis on queer livability?
Ina Linge
(Pushes glasses up nostril) In my monograph, I regarded on the function of “queer livability” in German sexual-scientific life writing. I requested: how do queer and trans folks within the early twentieth century within the German-speaking world navigate what I recognise as a balancing act: expressing oneself in a means that feels genuine, and, on the similar time, in such a means that they’re understood by medical professionals on whose assist they usually depended. It’s actually vital to stress that analysis on the German historical past of sexuality is extra than simply an illustrative “case examine” for the medical humanities.
Medical Humanities enters centre left, inflicting a powerful breeze that sends pine needles, small branches and concrete particles flying throughout the stage. Crimson wooden ants enter centre left and appear unperturbed.
Analysis in trendy languages is commonly misunderstood as providing illustrative examples to conversations already taking place elsewhere. If we’re fortunate, we then get to assert that our analysis can nonetheless one way or the other (gesticulates wildly) inform how – in my case – we take into consideration gender and sexual well being and wellbeing right this moment. On this chain of reasoning, German research is simply a small feather within the crown of a peacock – with out the feather, it’s rather less fairly, nevertheless it’s nonetheless clearly a crown (a tough wanting peacock with a number of feathers lacking slowly walks throughout and stops centre stage).
However German research analysis makes a way more vital contribution. Radically new concepts about intercourse, gender and sexuality emerged within the German-speaking world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This was an extremely vital interval for shaping trendy concepts about sexual and gender identification nonetheless in use right this moment. For instance, round 1910, the well-known German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld coined the phrase “transvestite” and described it as “the erotic want to cross-dress” (Hirschfeld 1910). Though many right this moment contemplate this phrase and its definition derogatory, it was vital for its time, as a result of it offered a language for identification. We will see Hirschfeld’s work as a part of a posh and lengthy historical past of transgender identification – the understanding that somebody identifies as a gender totally different from the one assigned at beginning.
However it isn’t simply the fabric we examine as German research students, but additionally how we examine it – our strategies and significant interventions – that make our contributions so vital to the medical humanities right this moment. The neat family tree from “transvestite,” as a sexual-scientific and medical time period, to “transgender” has been questioned by German research students and historians of Germany. They’ve proven how trans people and communities up to now introduced themselves in relation to, and infrequently in productive but additionally painful rigidity with, sexual-scientific discourses (Sutton 2012; Heaney 2017; Nunn 2023).
My very own work brings an vital literary perspective to this debate by tracing how historic LGBTQ+ folks challenged the dominance of scientific fashions of gender and sexuality by means of life writing, artistic and literary strategies. That is a part of a now well-established flip within the German historical past of sexuality, which exhibits that sexology was not restricted to scientific inquiry, and as a substitute highlights the vital function that cultural texts performed in society’s understanding of identification, well being and sexuality (Bauer 2009; Funke/Fisher 2015; Linge 2023). This analysis and the tensions it uncovers generates crucial questions for the medical humanities right this moment: who’s drugs for? Who has the facility and authority to form medical data? Whose our bodies and minds are implicated or marginalised on this course of of information creation? What violence is exerted on marginalised folks on this course of?
So what I wish to argue is that with out the “German case,” our understanding of the challenges and complexities of well being and wellbeing, as they relate to gender and sexuality right this moment, can be vastly impoverished.
Annja Neumann
So, what you’re saying is that the peacock, as a species, wouldn’t exist with out German Research (the Peacock panics, adjustments into battle or flight mode and falls off the stage).
[Act II & Act III coming soon]
Notes
[1] The English psychoanalyst Winnicott was stated to say comparable throughout evaluation with certainly one of his sufferers. See Guntrip. 1975. “My Expertise.”
In regards to the authors
Dr Ina Linge is Senior Lecturer in German within the Division of Languages, Cultures and Visible Research on the College of Exeter, UK. Her analysis in queer German research, environmental humanities, and medical humanities investigates early twentieth-century sexual data manufacturing as a collaborative endeavour between the humanities and medical and pure sciences. Publications embrace the monograph Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing (Michigan College Press, 2023), which explores the significance of queer and trans life writing for sexual data manufacturing in early-twentieth-century Germany. Her latest work has explored the function of the non-human in sexual data manufacturing, see for instance an article on the function of butterfly experiments for German gay-rights activism and analysis within the Nineteen Twenties (winner of the 2020 Girls in German article prize); and a co-edited particular situation on “Intercourse and Nature” for Environmental Humanities (2022).
Dr Annja Neumann is a Principal artist-researcher and innovator, a change marketing consultant, and an educator with 15+ years’ expertise on the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, the place she has simply joined the school for the Deepening Inventive Follow studying expertise for organisational management. She connects analysis as a cultural anthropologist and literary and efficiency scholar along with her embodied apply as theatre-maker, author and digital media artist. She additionally works as an Affiliated Lecturer in Digital Humanities on the College of Cambridge and as a Senior Analysis Fellow at Magdalene Faculty, Cambridge.
References
Bauer, Heike. 2009. English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fisher, Kate, and Jana Funke. 2015. “British Sexual Science past the Medical: Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-Historic, and Cross-Cultural Translations.” In Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters throughout the Trendy World, edited by Heike Bauer, 95–114. Philadelphia: Temple College Press.
Guntrip, Harry. 1975. “My Expertise of Evaluation with Fairbairn and Winnicott—(How Full a Outcome Does Psycho-Analytic Remedy Obtain?).” Worldwide Evaluation of Psycho-Evaluation 2: 145–56.
Heaney, Emma. 2017. The New Lady: Literary Modernism, Queer Idea, and the Trans Female Allegory. Evanston, IL: Northwestern College Press.
Hirschfeld, Magnus. 1910. Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb. Berlin: Alfred Pulvermacher.
Linge, Ina. 2023. Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing. Ann Arbor, MI: College of Michigan Press.
Nunn, Zavier. 2023. “Trans Liminality and the Nazi State.” Previous & Current 260: 123–57. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac018.
Sutton, Katie. 2012. “‘We Too Deserve a Place within the Solar’: The Politics of Transvestite Identification in Weimar Germany.” German Research Evaluation 35: 335–54. https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2012.a478043.
Thacker, Neepa, Jennifer Wallis, and Jo Profitable. 2021. “‘Able to being in uncertainties’: utilized medical humanities in undergraduate medical schooling.” Medical Humanities 48: 325–34. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-012127.
