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In 1903, young Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger (1880–1903) published Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (literally: Sex and Character. A Principled Investigation), in which he maintained that the conception of "permanent bisexuality" he advanced was completely new. His claims were challenged in 1906 by physician Wilhelm Fließ (1858–1928), who referred to his elaborations on the issue in a treatise published in 1897. The accusation of plagiarism against the by then deceased Weininger were aggravated as Fließ blamed Sigmund Freud for having orchestrated an intrigue aiming at informing Weininger about the ideas on permanent bisexuality the physician had articulated. Despite the heated debate surrounding the primacy claims, none of those involved was prepared to admit that sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) had been the first to conceptualize permanent bisexuality in connection with his 1896 discussion of the sexual intermediariness of all human beings. Hirschfeld's Sappho und Sokrates—his first sexological treatise—aimed in the last resort at debunking closed distributional schemes of sexuality for the sake of a template of universal bisexuality modulated by the individual's unique sexual intermediariness. On these assumptions, it is not surprising that Hirschfeld's counterintuitive and profoundly deranging postulation of potentially infinite bisexual forms encompassing all existing sexed individuals was ignored by those partaking in the primacy debate. Irrespective of the disagreements the litigants may have had among themselves with respect to chronological or theoretical issues, they all sought to restore the full rights of the endangered phallicism subtending Western culture that Hirschfeld had set out to confute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German-Jewish physician, sexologist and critical race theorist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) was arguably one of the most significant sexual thinkers of the twentieth century and a renowned sexual minority rights advocate. Hirschfeld's sexual-emancipatory engagement has been widely acknowledged. But his groundbreaking universalization of sexual intermediariness and the resulting dissolution of binary, triadic or otherwise finite schemes of sexuality have been mostly ignored or misrepresented in intellectual history. A relevant exception in this regard is the way sexuality historian Manfred Herzer has shortly approached the "doctrine of sexual intermediaries" as the "key concept" of his thought. While assessing and setting in historical perspective Herzer's interpretive contentions, the present study foregrounds Hirschfeld's Darwinian-inspired, non-essentialist naturalism as the ontic support for the new sexual and race regime he envisaged. By conceptualizing the potential in-finitization of sexualities and races, Hirschfeld was envisioning an unprecedented path toward the Messianic—albeit a-theological—goal of intra-historic liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) conjoined issues of sexuality and race in works that foreground the aesthetic worth of Black bodies. While exposing Western figuration practices that exclude Black people from artistic visibility, Barthé also targeted the African American distaste for the explicit treatment of nudity. Barthé's androgynous sculptures have by now become the trademark of his art, but Barthésian scholarship still neglects the significance of a small group of statues, which de-emphasize the aura of same-sex desire, in order to explore the intricacies of corporeal ambisexuality. In view of his homoerotic depictions and the presence of the hermaphrodite at the core of his disruption of the sexual dichotomy, the frequent assumption that Barthé remained "closeted all his life" does not stand critical scrutiny. Instead of taking refuge in the sexual closet, Barthé debunked the man/woman binary as the foremost epistemic construct that prompts the societal need for sexual self-misrepresentations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between November 1930 and March 1932, German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) undertook a trip around the world, eventually visiting the United States (where he was greeted as the 'Dr. Einstein of sex'), Japan, China, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Egypt, and Palestine. The resulting travel report, entitled Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (1933), is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the then-emerging discipline of sexual ethnology, and comprises the irst non-Eurocentric, anti-colonialist critique of Asian cultures from a sexological perspective. Taking into account Hirschfeld's overarching design to dissolve close schemes of sexual, racial and cultural taxonomies, the study focuses on his assessment of China's religiously neutral, sober approach of sexual realities as 'a world-wide exception' intimately connected to its Confucian and Taoistic heritage, and resonating with the core premises of his Spinozian-inspired and Darwinian-based sexology. Notwithstanding his praise of Chinese sexual realism, however, Hirschfeld argued that China's sexual mores (Sitten) -- like all other sexual mores to date--fail to sufice the criteria of a universally valid sexual morality (Sittlichkeit). While the binary schemes of sexual distribution on which sexual mores are preponderantly grounded misconstrue the complexities of individual sexualities and foster, as compensation, the escapism into the non-constraints of other-worldly utopias, Hirschfeld's postulation of potentially ininite, uniquely nuanced sexualities leads to a radical blueprint of intra-historic sexual emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two prominent representatives of the sexual emancipation movement in Germany, John Henry Mackay (1864-1933) and Magnus Hirschfield (1868-1935) launched significant attacks on sexual binarism and its combinatories. Although Mackay defended the "nameless love" against seminal Christian and subsequent secularised misconstructions of its nature, he was unable to overcome the fundamental scheme of binomic sexuality. Hirschfield, however, resolved the theoretical issue through his "doctrine of sexual intermediaries" (Zwischenstufenlehre) which purports that--without exception--all human being are intersexual variants, i.e., unique composites of different proportions of masculinity and femininity. Since these proportions vary from one sexual layer of description to another in the same individual and can alter or be altered in time, it is sensu stricto not possible to postulate discrete sexual categories. Hirschfield's "doctrine" implies a radical deconstruction of not only binomic sexuality but its supplementation through a "third sex." It offers a meta-theoretical framework for rethinking sexual difference beyond the fictional schemes and categorical closures of Western traditions of sexual identity. His assumption of potentially infinite sexualities anticipates some of the basic tenets forwarded by the philosophical and political agendas of queer studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]