Violent Sensations: Sexuality, Crime, and Utopia in Berlin and Vienna, 1860-1914

Vienna and Berlin were crucial sites in the development of modern conceptions of gender and sexuality, and also in the political emancipation movements these conceptions inspired. Prominent in this context were the birth of the science of sexology, the earliest articulations of homosexuality as an identity, the concomitant movement to abolish persecution of sexual minorities, and the “first-wave” feminisms of the turn of the century. At the same time, these cities became host to prurient fantasies that held a surprisingly prominent place in the period’s high culture, science and popular culture. Spector’s synthetic analysis shows how these narratives of sexuality and violence are part of a self-critical discourse on and of the modern subject.