USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the frontmatter and editorial:
This special issue of gender forum is the outcome of several conversations with David Berger over the last two months. I became aware of his story through a talk show in December 2010, where he was invited as a guest to speak about his book Der heilige Schein which by that time had already become a bestseller. After that I saw his name reappear frequently, be it on TV or in newspapers. I became intrigued by the remarkable media interest and his personal explanations, particularly because he was always shying away from labels and positionings which others were very quick to employ for him. I noticed how my own attributions and conceptualisations of “victim and perpetrator” as well as “self and other” were questioned by his stance and how an imagined safety of distance to the established discourses regarding the Roman Catholic Church and sexuality was beginning to falter. Berger\u27s story rather is indicative of a more general problem, namely how to balance individual and group interests, the complex self and social identity
Choosing Belly Dance
Full text linkBelly dance originated in a patriarchal tradition, viewing women’s lives and bodies as objects for male oppression and sexuality. In this context, a female soloist performing an eroticized form of dance generally became an opportunity for the performer to be demeaned or exploited. Although these uncomfortable possibilities still exist in the contemporary performance world, modern women have found ways to control these situations and to turn the dance into a vehicle for the expression of their sexuality and female power. In fact, many women are extremely attracted to this dance form and find their involvement in belly dance to be a personally enriching experience. This individual ethnography describes one woman’s history working as a belly dancer in New York City. It uses details about costume, body image, performance environment, interaction with the audience, attitudes to sisterhood, and the transformative power of artistic expression to explore how belly dance intersects with modern women’s perceptions of gender and sexuality
Film – Körper: Zur humankörperlichen Dimension des Mediums als Ressource für literarästhetische Rezeptions- und Lernprozesse
Full text linkIm Rahmen einer Einzelfallstudie mit dem Viertklässler Boris (Pseudonym) wurden bezüglich seiner literarästhetischen Rezeptionsprozesse zum Momo-Medienverbund unerwartet oft selbst initiierte Rollenspiele beobachtet. Darin bezog sich Boris mit ganzem Körpereinsatz auf seine Rezeptionen, indem er Inhaltsaspekte nachspielte oder potenziell Mögliches innerhalb der Regeln der fiktionalen Welt durch Substitution gestaltete. Ausgelöst wurden die Rollenspiele vorrangig im Kontext der Veräußerung von Imaginationen zu den eingesetzten Filmen (Realspielfilm, Zeichentrickspielfilm und -serie). Zudem wurde beobachtet, dass der Schüler die entstandenen inneren Bilder nicht in Sprache übersetzte, sondern beim szenisch-spielerischen Transfer die Kongruenz der referenzierten Modalitäten im Innen und Außen nutzte. Auf diese Weise brachte er latente Bedeutungsschichten körpersprachlich zum Ausdruck, die er – so unsere These – verbalsprachlich noch nicht explizieren bzw. in Worte übersetzen konnte. Im Beitrag stellen wir die Potenziale des leiblich-ästhetischen Respondierens auf Film für die Didaktik zur Diskussion und argumentieren für eine Erweiterung der Leihkörperschafts-Theorie nach Voss (2006).
Abstract (English): Film – Body. On the Human-Body Dimension of the Medium as a Resource for Literary-Aesthetic Processes
As part of an individual case study with fourth-grader Boris (pseudonym), self-initiated role-playing games were observed unexpectedly often with regard to his literary-aesthetic reception processes for the Momo media mix. In these games, Boris referred to his receptions with his entire body by acting out aspects of the content or by creating potential possibilities within the rules of the fictional world through substitution. The role-playing games were primarily triggered in the context of making himself imaginations about the films used (real-life feature film, animated feature film and animated feature series). It was also observed that the student did not translate the resulting inner images into language, but used the congruence of the referenced modalities inside and outside during the role-playing games. In this way, he expressed latent layers of meaning through body language, which, according to our thesis, he was not yet able to translate into words. In this article, we discuss the potential of bodily-aesthetic responses to film for didactics and argue for an extension of Voss\u27s (2006) theory of ‘borrowed bodies’ (Leihkörperschaft).
 
Large Language Models, and the Humanization of Nature through Artificial Communication
Full text linkThis paper examines large language models (LLMs) through Elena Esposito’s concept of “artificial communication,” arguing that this framework helps us understand LLMs as instantiations of what Marx called the “humanization of nature.” Rather than viewing LLMs as possessing human-like intelligence, Esposito conceptualizes them as artificial participants in communicative processes that process information statistically without understanding. This perspective situates LLMs within human practices and reveals them as realizations of our communicative capacities and embodiments of our social relations. Under capitalism, the objectification of human life-activity in LLMs becomes alienation, human capacities realized into forms that return to dominate their creators. The contradictions arising from this dialectical process define the terrain for transformative praxis, offering potential resolutions to Esposito’s problem of “control over control.” Addressing the underlying social relations embedded in these systems enables a collective reappropriation of artificial communication that preserves meaning, ambiguity, and uncertainty within human flourishing
How should the generative power of Large Language Models (LLMs) be interpreted? Do chatbots understand linguistic meaning?
Full text linkHow can we explain that contemporary AI chatbots provide appropriate, sometimes complex answers to many questions, yet neither understand the human language nor have access to the world? This essay attempts to answer this question in eight steps: 1. Anthropomorphism should be avoided because diversity, not similarity, forms the basis for successful human-technology interactions. 2. The cultural technique of flattening (illustrated/inscribed inscriptions) offers creative potential for social epistemology and is a springboard for digitalization. 3. Humans restore the amputated depth dimension of artificial flatness through interpretation. 4. Computers analyze and synthesize huge data collections using surface technology, i.e., without interpretation, as patterns only. Behaving like a machine is also a proven template that has historically enriched all cultural techniques of formalizing symbolism. 6. Written colloquial language functions in two dimensions: as the content of human-interpretable linguistic expression and machine-operable token statistics. 7. Token relations form socially sedimented, ‘unconscious’ knowledge, which is processed by trained AI algorithms. 8. The duality of perspectives of human-interpretable language and machine-operable token statistics is the basis of the potential of contemporary AI
"Femme(inine) Diaspora": Queering the Lesbian Femme
Full text link"Femme(inine) Diaspora" forms part of a continuing discussion between feminists and queer theorists in the sex/gender/sexuality debates and the politics of gender performance. Some feminists have argued that the greater emphasis placed on sexuality in this approach obscures the axis of gender and its specific relationship to women. This particular concern is exemplified in the butch/femme relationship. Whilst gender performance is able to articulate the subversion of the "butch" to heteronormativity, by cross-gender identification, it is unable to conceptualise the dissidence of the lesbian femme leaving her vulnerable to accusations of "passing." This article offers an alternative model for theorising the femme by drawing on French feminists\u27 explorations of the subversive potential of the "feminine" as well as recent queer appropriations of "diaspora" and the politics of borders to the representation of (hetero)normalised (sexual) identity. This model concentrates on the space between "sex" (female) and "gender" (feminine) and suggests ways in which such a framework is able to create an alternative dialogue of both distance and nearness to the "body.
The Infectious Performative: Contagion between Bacteriology and Literature
Full text linkThe following reading of Thomas Mann\u27s The Magic Mountain and Robert Koch\u27s writings on tuberculosis analyzes varying conceptions of infection in the discursive interface of literature and medicine. What is infectious proves to be fundamentally linked to methodological questions: just as Robert Koch works with isolating the bacillus and the cultivation of "pure cultures," the problem of infection within The Magic Mountain is influenced by poetological reflections. An approach based in theory of the performative is suitable for analyzing the poetology of the infectious developed in The Magic Mountain insofar as it leads to a decisively new treatment of the relation between language and body. Against this foil, literary stagings of infection can be theoretically related to the process of writing, which shifts toward the infectious performative, in which the sick body intersects with the matter of language. As I shall argue, Thomas Mann\u27s Magic Mountain stages language as infectious material. The literary and theoretical stakes of infectious illness\u27s treatement in literary modernity lie in the figuration of the act of writing as infectious performative. The epistemological implications of the literary-infectious performative will be worked out in a final constellation that includes Koch\u27s bacteriological notion of infection