Information about the author:

Abstract:

Taormina in Sicily, established by the ancient Greeks, attracted contemporary artists in the fin de siècle, as well as gay men and women. One of their main attractions was the German photographer Baron von Gloeden who became famous for his images of partly naked and naked youths in pseudoancient style. Preoccupied with questions of gender all her life, Zinaida Gippius spent more than a month in Taormina in 1898, falling in love with the gay Anri Briquet, then the composer Elisabeth Overbeck. What is important is that instead of Gippius’s earlier triangulated practice and theory of love she became attracted to love between two individuals and tried to conceptualize it in those terms. The essay is dedicated to her paradoxical ideas about the in-betweenness of gender in the erotic context including Gloeden’s setting as well as Gippius’s related fictional and personal writing.