Katie Sutton

I live and work on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country in Canberra, Australia. My research and teaching interests focus particularly on German 20th and 21st-century culture, literature, and history, from the cultural dynamism of the Weimar Republic to contemporary trans and queer literature. Much of my research examines the history of gender and sexuality, including a new collaborative project on photography and film in 20th-century sex research.

My latest book, Sexuality in Modern German History (Bloomsbury, 2023) offers a survey study across 200 years of German history, nvestigating the diverse and often contradictory ways in which individuals, activists, doctors, politicians, artists, social movements and cultural commentators have defined 'normal' sexuality in Germany over the past two centuries, and how these definitions have been used to shape identities, behaviours, bodies and practices.

Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s-1930s (University of Michigan Press, 2019) is a cultural history of sexuality and medical-scientific sex research examining debates around the sexual life of the child, the nature of shellshock, the origins of homosexuality, trans identity, and the role of the sex hormones. It is the first book to closely examine vital encounters among this era’s German-speaking researchers across their emerging professional and disciplinary boundaries.

The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (Berghahn Books, 2011) explores the widely-discussed 'masculinization of woman' in 1920s German popular culture, in areas such as fashion, sport, literature, cinema, and magazines produced by newly emerging sexual minorities. It traces the connotations and controversies surrounding this figure from her rise to media prominence in the early 1920s until the beginning of the Nazi period.