Cross-dressing, Male Intimacy and the Violence of Transgression in Third Reich Photography
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This co-authored article draws upon two distinct genres of photography, police mugshots and amateur soldier snapshots, to illustrate the value of queer visual culture methodologies for how to think about the visualization of violence, masculinity and desire. Building upon two vastly different depictions of male to female cross-dressing, one produced between 1934 and 1938 by the Berlin police and Gestapo of a transvestite and the other produced between 1940 and 1944 by cross-dressing Wehrmacht soldiers behind the lines, we argue that in searching for evidence of intact identities, we overlook important ambiguities. We first show how different photographic traditions have framed gender and sexual non-conformity in the historical record and then go deeper into an image analysis. Drawing upon cross-dressing as a polyvalent performance of masculinity, as play, camp and an identity category, we explore how photographic sources help us better appreciate the multiple and sometimes coexisting layers of feminized masculinity at work during the Third Reich. By queering Nazi history and reading the police mugshots and amateur Wehrmacht photographs within and beyond their visual frames, we point out the limits of reducing every image of cross-dressing to an expression of an inchoate gay or trans identity and argue for analysis that embraces the multiple layers of histories gathered around visual sources.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it