Katie Sutton will talk about 'Scientific Respectability and Popular Disseminations of Sex Research in Interwar German Film'. In the socially progressive and politically tumultuous interwar period, researchers in the German-speaking lands were world leaders in the study of sex. She will focus on two films, one documentary and one fictional, that deal with questions of deviant sexualities and personalities in ways that aligned with the important Weimar-era genre of the social hygiene film. The Steinach-Film (The Steinach Film, 1923), a documentary detailing Viennese physiologist Eugen Steinach’s pioneering sex organ transplant experiments, and G W Pabst’s 'Geheimnisse einer Seele' (1926), a thriller narrative as a means of popularizing the still-new methods and theories of psychoanalysis. 

Dr Katie Sutton is a lecturer in German and Gender, Sexuality and Cultural Studies at the Australian National University, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics. She is the author of 'The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany' (Berghahn Books, 2011), and is currently working on a book project on encounters between psychoanalysis and sexual science in the German-speaking world from 1890-1930.