The Politics of Gender Concepts in Genetics and Hormone Research in Germany, 1900--1940 (2012)
The history of biological understandings of sex difference and sex determination reveals a surprising variety of conflicting views. In the first half of the twentieth century, notions of a binary and discontinuous sex difference competed with more fluid concepts of a binary order postulating the two poles of male and female connected by a continuum of different stages of `intersexuality'. Genetic experiments laid the groundwork for new claims that male or female organisms resulted from the combined effects of male and female genetic factors with possible intermediate stages of `intersexes'. Following a contrasting model in biochemistry, sex hormones were framed in a binary male-female order despite contradictory experimental results. The results of genetics and hormone research, moreover, entered into different political debates and struggles around gender. Around 1900, for example, the supporters of gender equality used the brand new theory of chromosomes' crucial role in inheritance to argue for women's university education. In the 1920s and 1930s genetic concepts of sex determination showed up in the conflicting debates about homosexuality, blurring gender norms, degeneration, racial purity and miscegenation. The history of these and other conflicting concepts reveals how deeply scientific concepts were informed by political aims and desired or abhorred gender orders. These concepts were never based on purely `scientific' or experimental results alone. It is not unusual for historians of science to find this sort of influence, as the construction of knowledge is understood as a process of social negotiation in interaction with the `Eigensinn' (intrinsic logic) of the investigated objects, theories and experimental systems used; it is deeply embedded in historical contingencies.1 My account of the politics of gender concepts in the history of genetics and hormone research in Germany between 1900 and 1940 revises existing histories of biological sex determination based on sources in the English language from the second half of the twentieth century. These histories follow a narrative of a binary, masculinist concept of sex determination in the 1950s, evolving into a more balanced concept by the 1990s, a concept which finally transcends the binary. The evolution is seen as being brought about by feminist and queer interventions.2 Going back to earlier decades of the century and to a different scientific arena, however, reveals a more nuanced and contradictory historical process. There is no simple story of linear progress to tell, and the story does not begin with a strictly binary, `two-sex-model' of difference.3
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