Mysterium des Geschlechts (Mystery of Sex, 1933) and the affective appeal of cinematic sex research

Sex research in the early twentieth-century German-speaking world was a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary project, from experiments in hormone research to the search for a homosexual cure. By the 1920s, the scientific study of sex was gaining prominence thanks to the booming sex reform movement: activists, doctors, feminists and organisations whose interests were increasingly aligning with those of commercial film studios. ‘Sex education’ or ‘enlightenment’ films were moving from the pedagogical documentaries on venereal disease of the immediate postwar years to more melodramatic narratives around themes like abortion, prostitution or homosexuality. Previous scholarship has highlighted the role of negative emotions such as fear, shame and disgust in demonstrating the consequences of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ sexual behaviours in such pedagogical endeavours. This article turns to one of the last films produced in this vein, on the cusp of National Socialism in Germany but still in the context of ‘Red’ Vienna, the 1933 Austrian production Mysterium des Geschlechts (Mystery of Sex). It argues that this film both teaches and problematises the clinical gaze through affective engagement with its two young medical student protagonists, one male and one female, who move between lecture theatre and Vienna’s sexual underworld as they learn to embody medical authority. Its racy narrative integrates medical teaching footage spanning an impressive collection of interwar fascinations: hormonal ‘rejuvenation’ surgeries, abortion and non-conforming sex-gender identities. Advocating for ethically attentive engagement with such films, this article argues that Mysterium makes viewers complicit in medical objectification, but also enables more emancipatory readings, including of its queer and trans subjects. Through its affective alignments, this film works to democratise the clinical gaze of sexual science.