The Institute for Sexual Science was founded in Berlin in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld and became a centre for the first wave of the homosexual rights movement. Following its motto ‘through science to justice (per scientiam ad justitiam)’, the Institute campaigned against the criminalisation of male homosexuality through scientific research and education and used its extensive collection of sexological photographs towards this end.

This talk will explore to what extent the use of photography by Hirschfeld and his peers conveyed a decriminalised view of sex-gender nonconformities, or whether it perpetuated the queer body’s criminal association. By focusing on the so-called Zwischenstufenwand (wall of sexual intermediates), a public display of photographs at the Institute, the talk will compare sexological and criminal photographs in terms of epistemology, visuality, display, and reception. It aims to show that sexological and criminal photographs share the premise of biological determinism and a mode of visualisation that focuses on the physical body as a marker of abnormality. It argues that these images not only highlighted queer bodies’ differences from others but also facilitated acts of social positioning that further debased sex-gender nonconforming people. As a result, despite their emancipatory potential, sexological photographs failed to normalise and subsequently decriminalise sex-gender nonconformities.

Through a comparative analysis of sexological and criminal photographs, this talk not only expands on recent scholarship on the “photographic turn in sexology” (Sutton, 2018) in the early twentieth century but also offers another perspective on why the Institute’s activism only achieved limited success.

Xiaojue Michelle Zhu is a PhD candidate in History of Art and Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Her research broadly focuses on German modernism and the visual culture of early twentieth-century Germany. Provisionally titled ‘The “Criminal” Other?: The Politics of Citizenship in the Visual Culture of the Weimar Republic’, her thesis examines representations of non-normative bodies in Weimar Germany from an intersectional perspective and explores their relationships with the law and the concepts of citizenship and criminality. Her doctoral research is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) via the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-east England (CHASE) and the Courtauld Scholarship. She was selected as Scholar-in-Residence at the Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2025. She has published, given papers and organised events on various aspects of early twentieth-century German visual culture and topics such as decolonial art practices, Black British art and gender inequalities in the contemporary art world.

The event is free and open to all. Registration link.

The seminar series is part of the project Imagining Justice: Law, Politics and Popular Visual Culture in Weimar Germany, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.