The 2004 Winner of the Women in German Best Article Prize was Tracie Matysik's "In the Name of the Law: The 'Female Homosexual' and the Criminal Code in Fin-de-Siecle Germany," which appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality in January 2004. Dr. Matysik is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, whose work is situated at the intersection of European intellectual history and the history of gender and sexuality. The article is part of a larger research project that she is currently finishing, entitled Secular Ethics, Secular Sex: A Cultural History of Ethics Between Nietzsche and Freud.
In her article, Dr. Matysik discusses the “controversy around an effort in Germany in 1909 to criminalize female-female sexual relations. The controversy depicts how legal efforts to identify the ‘female homosexual’ as a criminal category exposed the lack of public agreement regarding her physiological, moral, and social constitution.” Dr. Matysik analyzes the juridical, medical, and activist discourses bearing on the debate, and the sometimes odd alliances among advocates and detractors. Her essay shows how medical arguments and social activism ultimately undermined efforts to criminalize female homosexuality.
The committee unanimously found that Dr. Matysik’s essay is an original, well-argued piece of scholarship on a fascinating topic, and that her work makes a substantial contribution to feminist scholarship in several discrete disciplines.
The article is available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_the_history_of_sexuality/v013/13.1matysik.html. If this link doesn't open, you can access the article as a PDF file through Project Muse.