“Radiant mirages” of childhood: trans, queer, and intersex remembrances at the turn of the twentieth century

This article analyzes sexological narratives of non-normative childhoods in France, England, and Germany between 1860 and 1933. These recollections, which recount early childhood games, dreams, and fantasies, as well as adolescents’ first initiations into sexuality, exceed the scientific apparatus through which they were elicited, edited, and published. By reading these texts along the grain, this article distinguishes three ways in which these accounts surpass or subvert the expected format of the case study, which is typically oriented toward diagnosing sexual precocity and demonstrating the innate character of erotic deviations. The affective and sensorial invocation of lost utopian worlds, the development of political and critical analyses of domination, and the detailed description of erotic configurations that resist so-called “modern” categories, all constitute interpretive avenues for rethinking Europe’s “perverse” past. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .