'Anders Dan De Anderen'

‘Anders dan de anderen’ Articulating female homosexual desire in queer Dutch narratives (1930-1939) Cyd Sturgess IN ５３ (３): １９３–２１１ DOI: １０.５１１７/IN２０１５.３.STUR Abstract During the early twentieth century, Germany and the Netherlands witnessed an unprecedented surge in discourses on sexuality, galvanized by the pioneering research of central European sexologists. Against the backdrop of sexological developments and the hedonism of post-war society, Berlin saw the emergence of a thriving homosexual circuit during the interbellum. Across the border, however, the conservatism of Dutch society meant that a Sapphic subculture would not fully emerge in the Netherlands until the mid- 1950s. Drawing on a framework that Laura Doan has recently termed ‘queer critical history’, and through an exploration of a selection of literary, scientific and ‘emancipatory’ writings, this article will examine how societal and cultural constructions of female same-sex desire in Dutch contexts were often at odds with scientific depictions of the ‘congenital invert’. Acknowledging the existence of this incongruence, as the article will argue, can provide historians with a space to explore alternative configurations of same-sex desire in Dutch interwar society that cannot be interpreted in the sense of a self-reflexive ‘lesbian’ identity. Keywords: queer, sexology, lesbian, Josine Reuling, Eva Raedt-de Canter, Magnus Hirschfeld, sexual inversion １ Introduction On Saturday, 4 December 1937 Josine Reuling’s novel Terug naar het eiland was described in the Sumatra Post as a ‘meesterwerk der nederlandse pornographie’. A story about the life of a young Swedish girl who has VOL. 53, NO. 3, 2015 193 INTERNATIONALE NEERLANDISTIEK romantic relationships with women during her extended summers in Paris, Reuling’s work sparked outrage in the newspapers of the Dutch colonies. Yet, it was not only the conservative colonial press that took a position against Reuling’s writing. In her native country Holland, Reuling’s novel also appears to have incited increasingly incensed debates within print media about her engagement with the subject of ‘de Lesbische liefde’.In December 1937, the Dordrechtsche Courant claimed that Reuling’s protago- nist was a ‘pathologisch geval’, while in the same month literary critic Top Naeff concluded in the cultural magazine Elsevier that Reuling’s focus on the ‘Lesbische liefde’ served to highlight her immaturity as an author. Although the contentiousness surrounding the subject of female homosexual desire in Dutch society appears to have brought the moral and literary integrity of Reuling’s writing into dispute, the visibility of the issue in the literary reception of Terug naar het eiland simultaneously suggests, for one of the first times in Dutch history, that lesbian desire had become a topic open to debate in the social and cultural arena in the Netherlands. Less than a decade earlier, the presence of female same-sex desire in Dutch literary and social circles is conspicuous to the modern historian only through its absence. Although, as Gert Hekma has claimed (1987; 1999), scientific and literary publications on the subject of male homosexuality had promoted quite ‘positive ideas about sexual variations’ by the early 1900s, Judith Schuyf has contended (1994) that lesbian desire remained little more than a ‘stilzwijgende samenzwering’ in Dutch society for much of the first half of the twentieth century.１ In light of the silences and omissions that characterize early lesbian experience in the Netherlands, and prompted by recent developments in queer historiography, this article will examine more closely what written narratives on the subject of female homosexuality might reveal about the ways in which women’s same-sex desires were constructed and ‘lived’ in Dutch contexts when viewed through a queer lens. By suggesting, as historian Laura Doan has done most recently (2013), that the contemporary understanding of sexuality as an ‘essential determinant’ of one’s social identity might not fully reflect the nuances of sexual experiences in the past, this article will attempt to shed light on the historical configurations of same-sex desire that sat outside of contemporary social discourses of ‘non-normative’ sexuality. After a brief survey of more recent approaches to homosexual history writing, a selection of historical ‘queer’ narratives will be presented in order to re-examine the assertion that sexual preference was a key marker of identity for women in the Netherlands after the turn of the twentieth century. 194 VOL. 53, NO. 3, 2015 ‘ANDERS DAN DE ANDEREN’ ２ Queer(ing) critical history In her pioneering work Odd girls and twilight lovers, Lillian Faderman claims that before the mid-nineteenth century ‘there was no such thing as a “lesbian” as the twentieth century recognizes the term [...]’, and suggests that it was not until after 1880 that ‘the category of the lesbian – or the female sexual invert – was formulated’ (1991, p. 2). Faderman argues that scientific interventions into the field of human sexual behaviour during the late nineteenth century meant that ‘passionate’ relationships between women acquired ‘an entirely different meaning’ in contemporary society and fundamentally changed the ways in which women perceived their behaviours. Furthermore, Faderman argues that popular scientific theories about same-sex desire provided ‘a set of concepts and questions [...] by which to scrutinize feelings that would have been seen as natural and even admirable in earlier days’ (p. 2). Faderman’s exploration of the emergence of the category ‘lesbian’ in America draws strongly on the Foucauldian notion of a great Rubicon moment in European history after which same- sex behaviours were considered to be ‘symptomatic expressions of durable underlying sexual disposition and character’ as opposed to singular, devi- ant acts (Voss 2005, p. 56). Before scientists attempted to distinguish between what they perceived to be ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviours and ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ desires, Foucault argues that sodomy was considered to be ‘a category of forbidden acts’ and that their transgressor ‘was nothing more than the juridical subject of them’ (1978, p. 43).２ As a direct result of the increasing popularity of scientific literature at the turn of the twentieth century, the homosexual, Foucault contends, became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology (p. 43). Although Foucault’s suggestion of a ‘Great Paradigm Shift’, as Eve Sedgwick termed it (1990, p. xvi), has provided the springboard for many pioneering explorations into historic homosexual experience, recent developments in queer historiography have questioned the efficacy of taking the concept of sexuality, as it is currently understood, as a starting point for historic research into homosexual experience.３ Much like Faderman’s insistence that a ‘lesbian’ identity emerged only at the turn of the twentieth century, Sedgwick claims that the division of sexual acts and preferences under the rubrics ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ is not a ‘natural given’ but rather ‘a STURGESS 195 INTERNATIONALE NEERLANDISTIEK historical process’ (p. xvi). However, it is Sedgwick’s application of queer theory’s assertion that sexual subjectivities are ‘fluid, unstable and perpe- tually becoming’ (Browne & Nash 2010, p. 2) that signals a fundamental ideological conflict between her approach to homosexual history writing and Faderman’s. Instead of looking to find identities constructed in the past in ways that can be identified as ‘lesbian’ in terms of the present, queer historical practices attempt instead to explore the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically (Sedgwick 1994, p. 8). The queer impulse to view ‘all assertions about reality as socially constructed’, therefore, offers a method of narrativising homosexual desire that is open to the possibility that historical same-sex experiences may have been constructed in ways that are incongruent with present-day thinking about what it means to be a lesbian.４ Building on both Sedgwickian and Foucauldian approaches to histori- cising sexuality, Laura Doan’s most recent contribution to the field of queer historiography Disturbing practices (2013), provides a framework that fundamentally questions the ‘privileging of the binary relation between nor- mativity and deviance’ in order to problematize the suggestion that sexual preference was ‘a key marker of identity’ for women after the turn of the twentieth century (p. 91). Drawing on her previous research on the subject of British lesbian subcultures (2001), Doan employs an approach she terms ‘queer critical history’ in order to demonstrate that even until the late 1920s many British women had ‘little sense of sexual selfhood or subjectivity’ and ‘did not think to attach to themselves sexual labels or names’ (p. 144). Doan’s deployment of sexual categories in order to ‘pose questions rather than provide answers about sexual identities we already know’ (p. 90) presents a particularly useful starting point for the study of historic Dutch female same-sex desire. Following a brief discussion of homosexuality as a sexological construction, this article will problematize

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