USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Looking at Women Looking: Female Portraits in the Gender Crisis
Get PDFIn this paper I want to look at nineteenth century image culture to show a historical trajectory which gradually favoured increased observer participation. Going back into the historical development of specific images can delineate the evolution of the conditions of perceiving and codes of depicting to ultimately throw light on how these conditions correspond to subject positions and expose power relations. Ways of seeing and their concomitant constructions of spectatorship, the gaze and the glance, practices of viewing, observation and visual pleasure are constantly being reorganized. And because questions of perception and seeing reach into the constitution of identity, investigating vision and visual representation necessitates a central focus on how issues of gender, sexuality and power are inextricably connected (Pajaczkowska 1
Review of Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark (eds.): Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the interview:
Reviewing Regarding Sedgwick, it is somewhat ironic to see that this eminent scholar and her exceptionally influential rediscovery of shame with regards to identity (trans-)formation should be so shamelessly ignored by large parts of academia. In certain quarters one still seems to assume that one can do without the groundbreaking insights that this remarkable and controversial thinker has produced over the last two decades. As a matter of fact, none of her works have been translated into German.1 And that is a shame! As it is, we can only hope that this dubious condition will soon come to an end; meanwhile, we can turn to publications that do recognize the outstanding impact Sedgwick has had on Gender Studies in general, and on Queer Studies in particular. One such study is Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory
Property: White Gender and Slavery
Get PDFThe article will focus on the problematic workings of white women\u27s function as allegorical embodiment of white dominance and their subjective agency, their involvements in the violence and desire of the racial divide of slavery. Of course, this requires a theoretical grounding which the space of this article permits to sketch out only in roughest form. The first part of the article therefore means to frame what is actually an extensive project of study as a kind of opening, a suggestive plea for debate, discussion and cooperative results. Its second part engages a cross reading of Judith Butler and Hortense Spillers by way of clearing mental space for a re-reading of the complexly charged scene of race/gender and gender/race as conditioned by slavery. In its third part, I will engage a literary text by a contemporary white female writer which tries to come to terms with the legacy of an inextricable connection of white femininity to slavery
Review of Liz Conor: The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Contrary to what the catchy title of her study may suggest, Liz Conor in The Spectacular Modern Woman argues for a reconsideration of women\u27s increased public visibility in the 1920s which does not relegate women to the object position of the "spectacle," but probes into the ways in which visibility invests women with a "newly emerged subject position" (16) that is based on modern woman\u27s new agency to "execut[e] [...] [her] visual effects and status" (2). Her term for this new formation of feminine subjectivity, produced by the "visual conditions of modernity" (2), is the "Modern Appearing Woman." To buttress and structure her argument, Conor extends Butler\u27s notion of the "scene" of linguistic performativity to the modern visual scene and proposes "that in a cultural field that privileges the visual, the visual itself might become privileged in repetitive signifying acts that constitute gendered identity." (6) Hence, her study is divided into six chapters that focus each on women "appearing" in one modern visual "scene." As "[i]mages of women were increasingly homogenous" (30) due to the technologized and commodified visual field, she focuses on visual "types" within these scenes: "The City Girl in the Metropolitan Scene," "The Screen-Struck Girl in the Cinematic Scene," "The Mannequin in the Commodity Scene," "The Beauty Contestant in the Photographic Scene," "The \u27Primitive\u27 Woman in the Late Colonial Scene," and "The Flapper in the Heterosexual Leisure Scene." Through the term "appearing" she effectively describes a new, and ambivalent, practice of the female self and investigates whether and how this new female subject position may challenge the gendered subject/object and spectator/spectacle divide
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the frontmatter and editorial:
The five articles assembled in Working out Gender explore the nexus between gender and work from a variety of different angles, focusing on areas and issues as diverse as the U.S. strip trade, the legal profession and discrimination against women lawyers in England and Wales, maquiladoras and femicide on the border between Mexico and the United States, contemporary British film, and male childcare workers in Germany
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the frontmatter and editorial:
Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature as well as contemporary film and TV-series, the contributions featured in Gender Disgussed: Gender and the Abject employ Kristeva\u27s concept of abjection and the abject in order to analyze the gender politics and rhetorics of the texts with which they engage
I and I: Elizabeth Alexander\u27s Collective First-Person Voice, the Witness and the Lure of Amnesia
Get PDFBlack women\u27s writing is characterized by expressive multiplicity in three major ways: intertextuality, intergeneric textual strategies and the collective first person. In this essay, I show the ways in which in The Black Interior and Power and Possibility Alexander speaks in the tongues of many genres and at times uses the first person collective or, "I and I," in a radical depth of identification between a reader and the text. I find that Alexander\u27s anthological or collective first-person voice is analogous to the Rastafarian (imperfectly realized) ideal of unity among people, which is expressed through the collective first person pronoun, I and I
Sisterly (Inter)Actions: Audre Lorde and the Development of Afro-German Women\u27s Communities
Get PDFAudre Lorde and her work as writer-activist have had a strong influence on the development of Afro-German women\u27s communities, especially with regard to fostering solidarity among these women and creating a distinct group identity. However, the interactions between the "warrior poet" and her "Black German sisters" have not been one-directionally influential. Rather, traces of her connection with and impressions of Germany and Afro-German women can be found in Lorde\u27s work and call for a reading of her writings in this context. The women she connected with personally or via her (literary) work have been transformed or at least affected by their mutual exchange(s) with her. This essay analyzes these transatlantic dialogues and interactions which are primarily based on gender and black solidarity and outlines Lorde\u27s seminal role for Afro-German women as individuals and as an identifiable and visible group in German society. In the first part of this article, I, therefore, put Audre Lorde\u27s works in the context of her relationship to Germany and particularly Afro-German women. The second part primarily focuses on Lorde\u27s influence on Afro-German women\u27s communities and the final part of this paper works towards an understanding of the overall conditions and consequences of this mutual exchange as well as its meaning within the context of the African Diaspora
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the frontmatter and editorial:
Face to Race — Gender, Ethnicity and the Media is the fourth issue of gender forum to address the nexus of race and gender, this time with an emphasis on audiovisual media. Television and film have been of key concern for cultural studies, and certain strategies in media representation have been shown to apply across dimensions of ethnic, sexual, economic or religious difference. This issue addresses the question whether diversity transcending discreet categories of difference does and can find representation beyond the fringes of our mediascapes. Frequently, media representations seemingly progressive in regard to either race or gender turn out to be deplorably heteronormative or eurocentric
A Balancing Act: How Women with a Hidden Disability Perform Femininity
Get PDFThe word “disability” carries strong cultural and social symbolic meaning. The impact of these meanings is entrenched in the storied experiences of either embracing or repelling “disability” as a self-characteristic. Persons with a “hidden disability,” one that is unapparent to the unknowing observer, make daily decisions about when, where, why, and how to disclose and adopt the disability identity or to “pass” and give society the impression of able-bodiedness. These decisions are heavily influenced by the bodily and social performance expectations of a given gender. Such gender expectations have reverberating effects on self-concept, relationships, and the way one interacts with the world. This study used a narrative research methodology to understand the identity processes of four women ranging in age from 21 to 46 years who have a hidden disability. Victoria has Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis; Angela has Epilepsy, Mary has Mitochondrial Myopathy, and Rosalina has Celiac Disease. In this essay, I also reflect on my own experiences as a woman with a hidden disability, Muscular Dystrophy. Through these personal, emotional, and insightful self-narratives, each woman relays the complexity of self-disclosure and disability identity.