“Projecting Deviance/Seeing Queerly” is an investigation of the representation of homosexuality in cinematic, scientific, lay, and literary texts during West Germany’s Adenauer Era (1949--1963). It examines postwar attempts to produce a stable system of sexuality and gender constructions purportedly destabilized by the interwar years of the Weimar Republic followed by National Socialism, the Holocaust and World War II. This study focuses specifically on the representation of homosexuality by examining at once socio-cultural efforts to reestablish sexual “normalcy” while at the same time offering queer interventions into such efforts. My attention in the first half of this dissertation rests on an analysis of the dominant and largely homophobic discourses surrounding male homosexuality culled from a variety of contemporary sources, including Willhart Schlegel’s biological theories of homosexuality and constitution, empirical sociologist Helmut Schelsky’s emphasis on cultural influences, Veit Harlan’s social problem film Anders als du und ich (§175), and Heinrich Böll’s Der Zug war pünktlich. Drawing from feminist and queer interventions in film spectatorship in addition to feminist literary theories of reading, the second portion of my dissertation foregrounds the processes of assigning meaning to cultural artifacts and explores the contours of these processes in order to reveal the ways in which the 1950s might be “queered.” After proposing a theory of film spectatorship, I examine the public image of Liselotte Pulver, the star of three cross-dressing or Hosenrolle films, and suggest a queer reading of two of these, Fritz und Friederike and Gustav Adolfs Page. This project is organized around a fundamental tension between the ideological functions of representation and the agency of individual subjects.