Christiane Carris's central concern is to question the entanglements of sexuality and gender in their legal-medical power dimension at the beginning of the 20th century. To do this, the author focuses her analysis on the psychiatric reports from the court files of Berlin's guardianship proceedings between 1900 and 1933. The legal sources regarding 'female madness' have remained overlooked in the German-speaking world and are examined in various ways throughout this book. Concepts of mental illness and the categorizations of madness in psychiatric discourse, as well as the constructions of gender identity, are elaborated upon.