USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Review: Tamar Heller and Patricia Moran (eds.). Scenes of the Apple. Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Recent critical theory has demonstrated that food and its preparation exceed a mere quotidian function in women\u27s lives, in order to represent the inconspicuous marker of their position within the micro- and macro-structures of power. Discipline and the surveillance of the body, that panoptical male connoisseur which resides in female consciousness, as well as the constraints of heterosexual economy in general, stand in stark opposition to the question of satisfying women\u27s appetites and ambitions. This collection of essays highlights women\u27s encounter with food and writing, from the Victorian era to the present. Following Hélène Cixous\u27s focus on the biblical scene of the apple - where Eve\u27s defiant eating of the forbidden fruit was seen as paradigmatic of female rebellion against the invisible patriarchy - the editors associate the process of eating with the desire to speak, gain prohibited knowledge, transgress, and, eventually, claim authorship. The process of eating and/or fasting is thus interrelated with female hunger, aspiration, self-denial, and nurturing; it reflects on women\u27s complicated relationships within the networks of power and their ways of voicing and validating their own choices
Too Fat, Too Hairy, Too (In)visible: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and Normative Femininity
Get PDFIt seems that there is much potential at the site of the PCOS body to transgress the boundaries of normative femininity. In many ways, the PCOS body already does just that. In all of its hairy, balding fatness, the PCOS body represents a challenge to what is expected of the female body. The problem is that it lacks visibility. It is hidden within the matrix of cultural expectations, and attempt to make the PCOS body visible are regulated not only by society but by women with PCOS as well. Will future attempts by the PCOSA and other organizations like it ever make the PCOS body a body that matters? Perhaps working in conjunction with NAAFA or other organizations fighting for the acceptance of diversity in body type and kind is one way of doing so, but until then, the PCOS body will remain invisible, a hairy, balding, infertile fat body shuffling along in the dark made visible only when subject to ridicule and regulation
Liquid Laughter: A Gendered History of Milk & Alcohol Drinking in West-German and US Film Comedies of the 1950s
Get PDFThis paper aims to present a Gender History of the social dimension of laughter. It intends to demonstrate, by scrutinizing several West-German and US film comedies of the 1950s, that romantic comedies of that era firstly served as a tool in a process of (re-)establishing heteronormative and patriarchal gender systems; secondly, we will outline that this development was highly contested and depended on constantly referring to forms of gender subversion and deviance
A Man\u27s Work in a Female World? Gender Paradoxes of Male Childcare Workers
No full textThe analytical focus of this article is on everyday occupational life of male teachers in German pre-schools and male care workers in childcare centers. In light of the minority status of men in this occupation, attention is paid particularly to tensions experienced by male care workers and how these tensions are dealt with in relation to identity formation. Are male childcare workers the prototypical "new men," with implications for de-gendering and professionalising care work? Or are male childcare workers faced with the same structural disadvantages of female occupations, in addition experiencing contradictions in relation to their masculinity? In order to address these questions, the actions and experiences of male childcare workers are examined in relation to work colleagues, parents and the children with whom they interact on a daily basis as part of their work practice
Iconicity as a Doorway to a New Space: Lesser Known East German Women Writers in the Seventies and Eighties
Get PDFChrista Wolf, Anna Seghers, Irmtraud Morgner, Brigitte Reimann and Maxie Wander are not the only women who wrote in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Although these five are the most well-known of that country\u27s female authors, their fame should not cause us to ignore the very varied corpus of unrecognised literature produced by East German women. I uncovered more than 350 names of women who lived, wrote and were (or at least tried to be) published in Eastern Germany between 1971 and 1989, i.e. the second half of GDR history or the "Honecker era" (Lequy 487). Among this multitude, I choose to concentrate here on the eight I find most interesting from the point of view of literary iconicity. Applying Peirce\u27s semiotics, I distinguish successively between imagic, diagrammatic and metaphoric iconicity. All eight authors I selected for this paper explore and exploit the materiality of words. Thanks to the corporeality of language, they open a door to new literary and political dimensions. This paper aims at both showing which innovative aspects literary iconicity brings to the works of lesser known GDR female writers, and analysing which innovative aspects their works bring to the theme of iconicity
Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell
Get PDFThe American philosopher Stanley Cavell is one of the very few thinkers in the Anglo-Saxon dispensation of philosophy who addresses the role of gender and desire in our possessing language. While Cavell\u27s oeuvre is receiving more and more attention in Europe, the issues of gender discussed in and raised by his writing are not systematically explored. Against this silence in Cavell scholarship, this paper aims to show exegetically how philosophizing about language and about sexuality are connected in Cavell\u27s work. Systematically, I will argue secondly that for Cavell not metaphysics but concrete gender and sexual arrangements motivate the yearning for the impossible, which characterizes so much of modern western philosophy. To this end I will trace a connection between Cavell\u27s technical discussions of Wittgensteinian understanding of language and his own reflections on gender and marriage in opera and film
Review: Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher, eds. Africa After Gender?
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
In Africa After Gender?, the editors Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher present a range of articles rooted in different disciplinary approaches — ranging from the social sciences to literary theory and history – which demonstrate the broad range of African gender scholarship. This anthology adds to a number of recent publications within African gender studies which counteract the Western hegemony of gender research by pointing to the specificity of experiences of colonialism and racism, the differences in political and economic environments, the interpretations of feminist theory as well as the importance of questions around positionality, standpoint and intersectionality — amongst others (1). In the introduction, “When Was Gender?”, the editors approach the question of what the meaning of gender in an African context can be by pointing to the temporal location within gender discourse
Review: Marc Epprecht. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS.
No full textThe presence or absence of homosexuality in Africa is certainly one of the most hotly contested debates in academic and political circles in recent years. This debate was orchestrated partly because of the desire of African homosexuals to come out of the closet and secure legal and institutional recognition for their sexual orientation, which is considered "unnatural," "abnormal" and "unAfrican" by mainstream heterosexual Africa. At the center of this seemingly intractable contestation is a well-articulated position that same-sex affairs are not only alien to the continent but were introduced by foreigners, notably Westerners, during colonial rule. Some African leaders like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda launched formidable repressive attacks aimed at "cutting the head of the roaring monster." The release of important studies like Murray and Roscoe\u27s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, Marc Epprecht\u27s Hungochani and Neville Hoad\u27s African Intimacies, among others, signals a new turning point in academic engagement with sexuality discourses. These authors denounced the absence of non-normative sexuality in Africa by looking at institutionalized forms of same-sex affairs among some select African ethnic groups
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the frontmatter and editorial:
As recent as half a century ago, the history of medicine was primarily a field preoccupied with the development of medical ideas about diseases and treatments and how they changed over time. After the rise and intervention of the "new" social history, the field has now expanded to being more attentive to the voice of the patient, a methodological turn advocated by such historians of medicine as Roy Porter. Writing women back into the grand historical narrative of medicine can certainly be viewed as one of the decisive consequences of this historiographical transformation since the 1960s. However, as the scholarship of Thomas Laqueur (Making Sex, 1990) and Charlotte Furth (A Flourishing Yin, 1999) has made clear, to make issues of gender and the body more pertinent to the history of medicine oftentimes requires a complete re-evaluation of the analytic category of gender itself. In other words, the revisionist task should not stop at the level of making sure more "voices" are heard. Whether we treat the rise of the two-sex model in Enlightenment Europe or the emergence of gynecology in Song China as a paradigmatic turning point in the history of medicine, the methodological turn to "culture," broadly defined, from social history should inspire us not only to improve grand narratives on a more empirically-inclusive ground, though this should rightfully be a priority, but also to reassess the assumptions embedded within the framing of any narrative from the very outset