“Reading, Writing, Cutting, Pasting, <i>Urning</i> : The Queer Textual Practices of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs”

Abstract Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s 19th-century creation of the term “Urning” (Uranian), which he saw as a kind of gender inversion, to describe same-sex desire was a product of his position within media cultures. Ulrichs’s extensive relationship with text, including his letter correspondence, poetry, and scientific books on sexuality, shows how his relationship with media was crucial for his own self-understanding as well as the articulation of the non-pathologizing and non-criminalizing Uranian personality. The article uses the linguistic and rhetorical technique of parenthesis to show how Ulrichs’s textual practices evince queer self-articulation and agency. Taking a rhetorical position becomes a way of assuming authorial and cultural significance or at least presence. Parenthesis is a way of understanding Ulrichs’s media interventions, within both his own reading practices and those of others. Through the use of objects like newspapers, paper, pens, pencils, books, and letters, Ulrichs embedded examples of cut-and-paste and lists, among others, to participate in both the communication networks of his time and the contentious development of popular and scientific conceptions of gender and sexuality. Most fundamentally, by analyzing Ulrichs’s annotated poetry collection, letters, and published texts, the article shows how underlying cultural techniques of reading and writing were tools in support of the visibility of non-normative sexuality and gender.