Rieder, Ines and Diana Voigt. 2019. The Story of Sidonie C. Freud's Famous “Case of Female Homosexuality.” Trans. Jill Hannum, Ines Rieder. Saint Helena, CA: Helena History Press. 371 pp.

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Heterogeneous Persecution: Lesbianism and the Nazi State

In recent years scholars have shown increasing interest in lesbianism under National Socialism. But because female homosexuality was never criminalized in Nazi Germany, excluding Austria, historians have few archival sources through which to recount this past. That lack of evidence has led to strikingly different interpretations in the scholarly literature, with some historians claiming lesbians were a persecuted group and others insisting they were not. This article presents three archival case studies, each of which epitomizes a different mode in the relationship between lesbians and the Nazi state. In presenting these cases, the article contextualizes them with twenty-seven other cases from the literature, arguing that these different modes illustrate why different women met with such radically different fates. In so doing, it attempts to bridge the divide in the scholarship, putting persecution and tolerance into a single frame of reference for understanding the lives of lesbians in the Third Reich.

Inverse Intimacy: Reconfiguring ‘Personal Relations’ in Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel

Ever since its publication in 1927, Elizabeth Bowen's first novel, The Hotel, has prompted critical responses that have tried to gauge the ways in which the narrative represents intimacy between women. Although one of its earliest reviewers sensed that the ‘dark, forlorn spirit of inversion is all through it’, modern critics have acknowledged that The Hotel is not engaged with the sexological models of inversion that inform Radclyffe Hall's contemporaneous novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928). At the same time, commentators have recognized that The Hotel forms part of a group of 1920s fictions that address female homosexuality with increasing openness. For the most part, readers have focused close attention on the intimate friendship that develops between the young Sydney Warren and the middle-aged widow Mrs. Kerr. This bond, even if it is fraught with tension, remains a source of prurient fascination among the other English residents enjoying a wintertime dolce far niente on the Italian Riviera. Still, the sustained critical focus on the attachment that develops between these two characters has tended to ignore the significance of the partnership between the two single women, Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald, that places the whole span of the novel in parentheses. Although recent studies by Elizabeth Cullingford and Maud Ellmann have drawn attention to Bowen's interest in what it means to be a ‘singleton’ or part of stadial series of personal relationships (single, couple, and triad), little has been said about the two spinsters, each of whom is ‘half of a duality’. The present essay concentrates attention on the ways in which the enumerative turn in Bowen studies broadens in scope when we look at how Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald appear as both two in one and one in two: a narrative formula that reminds us not of sexual inversion but the inverse number in mathematics. It is this type of inverse intimacy between woman and woman that triumphs at the end of The Hotel.

RELIGIOSITY AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION STUDENTS' ATTITUDES TOWARDS HOMOSEXUALITY

The aim of the present study was to investigate the attitudes of self-oriented heterosexual students of the Department of Physical Education and Sports Science towards male and female homosexuality, in combination with the level of religiosity they display. The religiosity factor was evaluated based on the frequency of visits paid to temples to perform religious duties. Concerning their attitudes, the scale used was the Greek version of Attitudes Towards Lesbians and Gay Men (ATLG) with two factors, for male and female homosexuality respectively. The sample consisted of 552 self-oriented heterosexual students. The independent variables used were related to gender, age, and religiosity. From the analysis of the results, it was found that the factor of religiosity has a decisive influence on the formation of heterosexual students' attitudes towards both male and female homosexuality. It is further suggested to investigate the factor in combination with other variables.