Queering Judaism and Masculinist Invention: German Homonationalism Around 1900

The chapter places current secular homonationalism and its Othering of cultural-religious differences in a historical genealogy. It focuses on the Second German Empire, wherein the political crisis around the Kaiser and his alleged ‘homosexual’ circle of friends, was represented as a “male gender crisis”. Just as debates within the incipient gay movement, mostly fostered by the “masculinists”, the discourse focused on ‘normal masculinity’. I’ll address a religious contour of and possible Jewish inflection in the construction of homosexualities. Processes of racialization and queering Judaism did play a significant role for marking an internal differentiation between an “effeminate”, “degenerate” Jewish homosexuality, and an “ultra-virile”, “healthy”, Aryan inversion. The masculinists were the right-wing, anti-Semitic part of the German gay rights movement. Their key model of an ideal state was the homoerotic male-band. The chapter interconnects postcolonial-, gender- and studies in anti-Semitism