FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur
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Claims und Challenges: Mediale Normalisierungspolitik und Prekarität in Casting-Formaten
No full textKarin BrunsClaims and Challenges: Media Normalisation Policies and Precarity in Casting FormatsThis paper explores the role of new media formats, including living history, scripted reality and casting shows, within the neoliberal transformation of the economy and society. It reveals how casting shows in particular represent a reflex to ongoing economic precarisation and concomitant fears of marginalisation. Structurally, such shows operate as production sites precisely for the flexible, self-normalising subject constantly striving for self-optimisation and who is imagined as the new, ideal-type employee of the future. While interdependent categories such as gender, ethnicity, age, and sexuality are generally crucially important for such formats, top model shows in particular are purposefully targeted at promoting “female career models.”
Lust am Prekären? Gefallen(d)e Frauen
No full textJoyful Precariousness? Pleasing Fallen WomenIn the summer of 2011, two events concerning the rights of women to uninhibitedly expose their bodies and put their sex appeal on show received wide coverage in German public media. Thousands of “slutwalkers” walked the streets of metropolises all over the world to protest against sexual harassment and to assert the right of women to dress or undress as they please. Also in 2011, members of the German national women soccer team posed for sexually explicit photographs to be published in the July issue of Playboy magazine. In both instances, different as they were, the women tried to empower themselves through images of their bodies in order to frustrate or destabilize misogynist stereotypes as well as potential denunciations and infringements resulting from these. However, for a woman to offer her more or less naked body for sexually enticing images is a precarious strategy that runs the risk of corroborating what it seeks to challenge. Apparently, the female body itself is still a spectacle of precariousness, of semantic ambiguity as to whose body is being depicted for whom to see, decipher, and deal with, and to what end. Clear-cut interpretations appear to be preferred, though, by the majority now and then, particularly in the wake of the historical prevalence of the bourgeoisie. Looking at selected art works from the Early Modern period, which were blithely assumed to be portraits of mistresses or courtesans, reveals that ambiguous female nakedness tends to be hard to accept. The traditional connection of Biblical sin with enticing female nakedness makes for prejudiced images of mistresses and prostitutes that do not have much to do with the historical reality of the women who actually engaged in these precarious social roles and who often did not have the means to take care of their own imagery and personal memory. Sexually explicit images of female bodies thus have a long-standing tradition of being linked to deviancy, social discrimination, and moral denunciation directed at particular role models but also at women in general. Contemporary inventions of mass media visual culture – be it a slut or a playmate – will hardly lead out of this dead end
Sicherheitslos. Prekarisierung, die Künste und ihre Geschlechterverhältnisse
No full textSecureless. Precariousness, the Arts and Gender RelationshipsWhat are the possibilities of resistance against the acute precariousness of life? What needs to be done right now? How can we think autonomy and freedom if they are no longer to be understood as concepts exclusively evoking dissident practices of life, but work within the training procedures of neoliberal individual responsibility. How can the critique of an economy of individual self-optimization be made productive in order to share, co-share, and communicate an ethical responsibility for the fundamental securelessness of life, of all our lives? The issue is based on papers that were given at the symposium Sicherheitslos. Prekarisierung, die Künste und ihre Geschlechterverhältnisse held at Berlin University of the Arts in October 2011, initiated by Linda Hentschel and organized together with Miriam Dreysse and Kerstin Brandes. Taking up the ongoing debates in the arts, in visual culture, theatre and media studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and gender studies, it explored how systems of representation re/present, structure and stabilize precariousness, or rather: the precarity of life, but also and simultaneously enable interventions
Reclaim (Intervenieren gegen veröffentlichte Pressebilder)
No full textReclaim (Intervening against published Press Photos)As part of their participative community project “Hotel Gelem”, artists Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud started a collaboration with Roma families in Berlin. The families were invited to design the edition for this FKW issue. “Reclaim” explores collective authorship as a means of protection against vulnerability and as a strategy to intervene into extrinsic images of self as they are determined by hegemonic representational politics and visual practices.
