Reading Inversions: Queer Identities in 19th-Century German Literature
My PhD thesis investigates "upside-down" worlds in German literature and culture of a century. The "upside-down world" serves as the central tropus in my research on the intersections of philosophy, sciences and literature in 19th-century society. This also includes the question of how identity is depicted, staged and problematised through inversion within these three areas. On the other hand, I investigate the tendency within philosophy and sexual sciences to use inversion as the basic tropus to provide the subject with a stable identity - an identity that is distinguished from a fragmentary, pathological and perverse identity and constitutes itself through this very distinction. On the other hand, 19th-century literary depiction of inversion can be found that call into question such negative mechanisms und offer an alternative in order to represent identity.