Mathew Kuefler, the editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality for the past ten years, is passing the torch to Annette Timm, an associate professor of history at the University of Calgary, Canada. A contributor to past issues of the JHS, Timm has published articles for other journals, chapters for books, and her own works, The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin and Gender, Sex, and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day, which she co-authored with Joshua A. Sanborn.
Her current work in progress is Lebensborn: Myth, Memory, and the Sexualization of the Nazi Past. Timm has co-organized conferences such as the 2011 “Popular Sex: Mass Media and Sexuality in Germany,” which was combined with PopSex!, an exhibition of archives from Berlin’s early twentieth-century Institute for Sexual Science and original work by artists in Calgary and Berlin; and the 2007 “Democracy and Intimacy: Toward a Moral History of Postwar Europe.”
To help readers learn more about the new editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality, I conducted an interview with Annette Timm. She discusses her scholarly background, the future of the journal, and the important role of academic journals.
Could you tell us about your academic background, and how your research has prepared you for your new role as editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality?
I received my B.A. in history from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and both
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| Annette Trim |
my M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Chicago. When I began writing my dissertation, I was most interested in the history of health care. (This certainly had something to do with the experience of being a Canadian in the U.S. during Clinton’s first administration.) But my interest in eugenics and population politics in Germany— the various efforts of twentieth-century regimes to increase the birth rate— quickly led me to issues of sexuality. I had chosen to focus the dissertation on all aspects of these policies before conception because I wanted to be able to employ a truly relational approach to gender with an equal focus on men and women. But focusing on everything leading up to conception of course meant focusing on sexual choices. I looked at venereal disease control and marriage counseling, because health officials believed that these were the areas of health care where they could exert the most influence on individual Germans’ choices about when, with whom, and with what intentions they should have sex. (Before penicillin, venereal diseases frequently caused sterility and congenital disease, and in my time period, marriage counseling was primarily eugenic.) In revising the dissertation into a book, I refined my argument to insist that these efforts to create a sense of duty around sexual choices were central to the social construction of the German citizen during most of the twentieth century. Turning the “personal is political” slogans of the sixties and seventies on their heads, I argued that it was only after sex was somewhat reliably separated from reproduction that the justification for the worst intrusions into private decisions in the sexual sphere ended. Sex, at least for heterosexuals, could become private again. In Germany, this story was intertwined with the process of overcoming two dictatorships and reestablishing rights to individual bodily integrity. But I believe that similar stories could be told elsewhere and that the demise of a notion of the duty to reproduce was one step on the road to sexual freedoms and family rights for gays and lesbians.
