Introduction

We can trace the origins of queer studies in the North American academy to around 1990, the year both Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's The Epistemology of the Closet and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble appeared. The same period also saw the founding by David Halperin and Carolyn Dinshaw of GLQ, the Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. These publications offered radically new ways of reading literature, culture, and gender and modeled a (queer) methodological flexibility that was liberating for so many of us. Sedgwick, with Michel Foucault, located homosexuality as the recurring truth of the (sexual) "secret" at the heart of modern subjectivity. And Butler likewise exploded distinctions between interior and exterior, gender and sexuality, reminding us of the ineluctably constitutive role of constructed and imagined gender/sex binaries in modern fantasies of the normative, whole (unfragmented) subject. The paths of both theorists, and of queer studies more broadly, developed beyond these frames: Sedgwick's work, as Peter Rehberg points out in his contribution to this forum, moved toward autotheory and affect, and Butler famously revised some of their philosophical reflections in Gender Trouble via a return to questions of embodiment in Bodies that Matter (1993) before exploring topics such as queer kinship and melancholia. There is no question that queer studies has generated a methodological plurality that invites us to take the quer in queer seriously, to think neither wholly in opposition to nor in affirmation of rigidified rules for academic thought and writing. In this way, queer theory is not for the faint of heart, but surely exactly what our profession needs in this time of the long crisis of German studies and the humanities. Queer theory models innovative combinations of theoretical paradigms and an intellectual eagerness to play with and against the norms of our field(s). There is something honest about a queer approach to culture, perhaps because queer theory, no matter how eclectic, always contains a thread that ties it in some way to queer bodies and desires, however varied these may be. Indeed, bodies and affects lie at the core of all scholarly projects, but both queer studies and queer theory cop to this truth and wear it on their sleeve. Robert Deam Tobin was a founder of queer German studies. His loss to the field is immeasurable. Many of the contributors to this German Quarterly forum gathered at the German Studies Association (GSA) conference in Montréal in September 2023 to honor his memory in an event sponsored by two scholarly groups that are profoundly indebted to Tobin for his immense contributions, the Goethe Society of North America and the Trans and Queer Studies GSA Network. We learn much about the early days of queer German studies and about Tobin's own intertwining personal and professional paths through reading his essay "Confessional: Sexuality and Textuality," which his husband Ivan Raykoff has generously allowed us to publish here. We learn that queerness is often experienced in our culture in mediated form, via, in Tobin's case, travel and a foreign language (German). Fellow queer German studies pioneer Alice Kuzniar reminds us of the intersecting of Tobin's queer origin story with the origins of queer German studies in her wonderful reflection published here. Tobin and Kuzniar attended the Rutgers queer theory conference in the early 1990s, and, together with Simon Richter, they organized the famed 1994 Modern Language Association Convention session on "Outing Goethe and His Age" that was the seed of the eponymous volume published by Stanford in 1996. With these contributions, they subsequently changed the face of our field. Tobin's Warm Brothers: Queer Theory in the Age of Goethe and Kuzniar's The Queer German Cinema followed in 2000. And the rest is, we might say, living history. The contributors to this forum represent a wide array of scholars working within and around queer studies whose work has been touched by Tobin's. They offer insights into some of the diverse paths queer studies has opened up within German studies. They explore, as in the pieces by Rehberg and Erin Ritchie, enduring questions about the place of embodiment and affect within (queer) writing and representation. Rehberg turns to Tobin's confessional piece itself to discuss the epistemological and performative possibilities of queer autofiction and autotheory, while Ritchie underscores the shared theoretical frames that link queer studies and fat studies. Other essays in this forum utilize the lens offered by queer studies and queer theory to view areas of culture that have previously been overlooked in favor of a traditionally rigid insistence on well-worn cultural narratives. Imke Meyer invites us to see poetic realism anew by attending to the queer nature and queer textual entanglements created by "Stoffe" in Adalbert Stifter's Bunte Steine (1853). Kyle Frackman turns to nineteenth-century queer rights activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in order to read networks and ecologies via a queer lens, through a focus on Ulrichs' devotion to sericulture, the rearing of silkworms for the production of silk. Ervin Malakaj points to the vibrancy of queer occult discourse in early twentieth-century Germany, shifting the lens away from sexology to a new field of knowledge, embodiment, and desire. Vance Byrd and Javier Samper Vendrell open the window to new (queer) insights into aesthetics and artistic creation via a focus on queer print cultures and artists who have historically been excluded from the cultural canon. All of these scholars are making queer German studies ever more inclusive, in all senses of the word. On the other hand, queer studies and queer theory are not strangers to exclusion. Already in her monograph Between Men (1985), Sedgwick pointed to the patriarchal structures of homosociality that render the feminine irrelevant and invisible, highlighting the potential unholy entanglements between homosociality/homoeroticism and misogyny (see also Gustafson). Along these lines, Jennifer Evans and Barbara Mennel both remind us of the reactionary and conservative elements that haunt the history of queer culture to this day. Evans turns to Tobin's own work on Julius Evola, tracing the misogynist and far-right ideologies of this popular reactionary Italian theorist of the queer Right. Mennel highlights the ecstatic fandom surrounding the history of Mädchen in Uniform while pointing simultaneously to the fact that Dorothea Wieck, the actor who played Fräulein von Bernburg, thrived professionally under the Nazis. As Evans and Mennel make clear, a queer approach will not exclusively yield a progressive picture. Queer filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim was inspired by Tobin's Warm Brothers to create the film Männerfreundschaften (2018), a camp engagement with the Goethezeit in which Tobin himself is featured. This film is a reminder of the mediating and distancing mechanisms—both temporal and spatial—that lie at the origins of queer German studies. Tobin focused his early explorations of German queerness on the eighteenth century, a period that precedes the cementation of modern normative terminology (though certainly not of prejudice). Similarly, John O'Hara asks us in his contribution not only to include but to expand trans German studies by turning our gaze to the past, to the period before, as he puts it, "the birth of sexology." O'Hara proposes that we explore transness before "trans," in the premodern and early Enlightenment eras. Both directly and indirectly, all of these scholars have been inspired by Tobin's pioneering work. I only wish he were still here to experience with us the as-yet-unimagined paths these and related projects will take.