USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Visibility and Representation of Queer Artists in German Club Culture. An Analysis of the Influence of Venues such as the “RoteSonne” Club in Munich.: (03/2025)
No full textDiese Arbeit untersucht die Sichtbarkeit und Repräsentation queerer Künstler*innen in der deutschen Clubkultur. Im Fokus stehen die strukturellen Herausforderungen und Machtverhältnisse, die Einfluss auf die Einbindung marginalisierter Gruppen haben. Im Rahmen dieser Forschung wird analysiert, wie Clubs als ‚Safer Spaces‘ (vgl. Hansen 2012, o.A.) fungieren und inwiefern sie zur Förderung von Diversität und Empowerment beitragen. Durch qualitative Interviews und theoretische Einbettung in Subkultur- und Queer-Theorien wird aufgezeigt, dass trotz wachsendem Bewusstsein für Inklusion queere Künstler*innen, insbesondere FLINTA-Personen, weiterhin unterrepräsentiert sind. Die Arbeit plädiert für eine bewusste Auseinandersetzung mit internen Machtstrukturen, um eine nachhaltige und umfassende queere Repräsentation in der Clubszene zu ermöglichen.This thesis explores the visibility and representation of queer artists in German club culture. The focus lies on the structural challenges and power dynamics that influence the inclusion of marginalized groups. The research analyzes how clubs function as safer spaces (cf. Hansen 2012, n.p.) and to what extent they contribute to promoting diversity and empowerment. Through qualitative interviews and theoretical framing within subcultural and queer theories, it becomes evident that, despite growing awareness around inclusion, queer artists—particularly FLINTA individuals—remain underrepresented. This study advocates for a critical reflection on internal power structures in order to enable sustainable and comprehensive queer representation within the club scene
Civic statistical literacy in times of fake news: challenges, concepts and implementation in teacher education
No full textDigitale Medien und die Verfügbarkeit von Daten in nahezu unbegrenztem Umfang verändern unseren Zugang zu Informationen radikal. Während einerseits mehr und mehr Information öffentlich zur Verfügung stehen, weisen andere Trends im öffentlichen Diskurs auf eine postfaktische Welt hin, die empirische Evidenz zu ignorieren oder falsch darzustellen scheint. Basierend auf dem von ProCivicStat entwickeltem Rahmenkonzept zivilstatistischer Datenkompetenz wird im folgenden Beitrag ein innovatives interdisziplinäres Lehrkonzept vorgestellt mit dem Ziel, kritisches Denken im Umgang mit Daten und Resilienz gegenüber Fehlinformationen zu stärken. Das Konzept wurde für Lehramtsstudierende der Fächer Mathematik und Politikwissenschaft umgesetzt.Digital media and the availability of data on an almost unlimited scale are radically changing our access to information. Given the abundance of data, people (students, citizens, ...) need to be aware of their limitations and potential biases as well as the limitations and potential errors of the statistical models and methods used. In order to increase resilience to misinformation, manipulation and fake news, we need to design our teaching in such a way that it supports the critical and informed use of data and models. The following article presents an innovative interdisciplinary concept and its implementation in teacher training program
Review: L.H. Stallings: Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
When describing his approach toward funk music, one of its most famed contributors, Rick James reflected in a 1981 “Creem” interview, that funk allows him to traverse taboo societal topics that make powerful statements on vice, criminality, and law enforcement (DiMartino). For L.H. Stallings in Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Culture, revolutionary funk is multi-faceted and structurally disruptive. Its revolutionary power radically transforms politics, sexuality, erotica, energy, technology, and artistic expression. Funk’s multi-sensory and multi-dimensionality complements black political consciousness and subsequent activism. Throughout this colorful, unconventional, and lively text, Gender Studies researcher, L.H. Stallings explores how “funk” operates to inform black social movements, culture, and music. Funk is effusive, an effervescent Foucauldian biopolitical energy transfer, a force without being forced. Stallings deconstructs how funk is a manifestation of “African diasporic philosophy about transition, movement, and embodiment that relates to art, work, sex, gender, and national boundaries” (Stallings 6). Funk has a multi-purpose agenda, complicating rigid social constructs, hierarchies, and limitations
Effects of Usenet on Discussions of Sexual Assault in the BDSM Community in the 1990s
No full textUnequal roles in sexual and erotic practice are sometimes thought of as inherently abusive, especially to women. Although informed consent between adults is a mainstay of BDSM— bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and sadomasochism—its practitioners have had to fight accusations to the contrary. Though BDSM practices are generally consensual, assault undoubtedly occurs within the BDSM community. This paper focuses on how the idea of assault has been handled by BDSM community members; how survivors and perpetrators have been treated, how assault and consent have been defined, and how communities have approached preventing future assaults. In order to explore these issues, this paper historicizes the issue of rape in the BDSM community by examining academic and activist writing from BDSM focused community organizations and online forums throughout the 1990s. The growth in participation in online BDSM communities had a huge impact on social violence awareness within these communities. Community books, newsletters and conference materials from the 1980s suggest that prior to the existence of groups such as alt.sex.bondage on Usenet, nearly all conversations around rape and BDSM came from a subset of the feminist community (particularly kink organizations focused on queer women) interested in proving the consensual nature of BDSM practices. In the 1990s, for BDSM practitioners who were able to access the Internet, forums such as Usenet provided a new opportunity for anonymous and safer spaces in which to process and discuss assault within the community. Specifically, the alt.sex.bondage newsgroup was home to some of the first documented conversations about trigger warnings, BDSM specific anti-domestic violence resources, and community wide conversations about the existence of rape and abuse in BDSM. This paper will document the evolution of these conversations from the advent of BDSM specific newsgroups on Usenet through the late 1990s
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an article, here is the first paragraph of the editorial:
In a 2016 music video, “Borders”, the ever-controversial M.I.A., herself a Tamil refugee, comments on the gendered aspects of Western anxieties in the on-going refugee ‘crisis’: images of endless masses of all-male refugees of colour resonate with right-wing myths of uncivilized brown invaders, stealing jobs, raping white women and undermining Euro-American gender progressivism. In fact, gender issues are a constitutive force not only in refugee status and immigration law, but also in media discourses and popular knowledge production about refugees. “[T]reated as interruptions, intermittent presences” (Said 1986), the Othered gendered practices of refugees are fused into a negative dispositive against which Western host countries can repeatedly rework their gender and sexual exceptionalism. Headscarf debates, “saving brown women from brown men” narratives (Spivak 1988), as well as affective slippages between refugee masculinities, terrorism and perverse sexualities (Puar 2007) are coming to a new head. They hint at the ‘truth’-producing power of neo-Orientalist, neo-liberal vocabularies of gender, family and sexual norms in negotiations of refugee integration, cultural clashes, our and their values. This issue engages with this subject that is wide as it is controversial and persistent
Migrant and Refugee Women, Scaremongering and Afterthoughts on Female Genital Mutilations
No full textIn the last decade European governments have formally committed to preventing female genital mutilation (FGM). These practices have been tackled with specific laws and projects, but scaremongering has also been rife. In Italy, prevention has partly relied on sensationalist and top-down approaches that don\u27t help ethnic communities understand the problem. A survey involving migrant women revealed misunderstandings, conflicts and ambivalent attitudes towards the norms and values these practices are based on and the laws introduced to put an end to them. Women thus face an impossible choice (between their family or the host society), while both entities exploit similar bio-political processes to activate either social inclusion or exclusion policies. For the community to which they belong, a mutilated body guarantees identitarian acknowledgement, but the host country refuses it and holds their community responsible. If the abuse is reported or the practice rejected, one may be guaranteed international protection but will probably be ousted by one\u27s family and community. Culturally targeted communication, based on tailor made and peer-mentoring exchanges can create bonds of trust between victims, institutions and services, helping women who share FGM values, beliefs and meanings to overcome these conflicting values they have to come to terms with
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first pararaph of the editorial:
Cliteridectomy denotes the partial or complete amputation of the clitoris. It is one of three variants of Female Genital Mutilation. Female genital mutilation (FGM), also known as female genital cutting and female circumcision, is the ritual removal of some or all of the external female genitalia. The practice is found today in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and elsewhere within immigrant communities from countries in which FGM is prevalent. UNICEF estimated in 2016 that 200 million women living today in 30 states had undergone the procedures (UNICEF). The applied procedures differ according to the country or ethnic group. They include removal of the clitoral hood and clitoral glans; removal of the inner labia; and removal of the inner and outer labia and closure of the vulva, called infibulation. Here and in this special issue, we will primarily address cliteridectomy, i.e., the removal of the clitoral hood and clitoral glans. We shall not deal with the removal of the inner and outer labia or with infibulation since both procedures were rare in the West. By “West”, we refer to an imagined culture that is “absolutely different” from the “Orient,” that Edward Said described in Orientalism (Said). The “West” therefore necessarily is a form of essentialism since it reduces complex entities (Carrier 3). The “West” is a simplification that we conscientiously use as a “strategic essentialism” or “mimesis” (Abraham, Gaard, Irigaray 76) since in the literature on FGM the discussions revolve primarily around the alleged ‘non-Western’ practice of female genital cutting. The ‘pre-history’ of cliteridectomy in the West, however, shows that a clear distinction between the Occident and the Orient is impossible since systems of knowledge about the body were free-floating between these abstractions. ‘Western’ doctors had learned from Arabic sources what they supposedly knew about female bodies. Arabic sources, in turn, went back to Greek antiquity
IN VULVA VANITAS – The Rise of Labiaplasty in the West
No full textSince the turn of the 21st century, more and more women choose to undergo Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery (FGCS) to fit a vulvovaginal aesthetic ideal. With a focus on reduction labiaplasty as the currently most widespread of these procedures, this article examines FGCS through a critical cultural studies lens to position it within larger feminist debates about body image, consumer culture, and female agency. A central question is where our Western ideal of female genital appearance comes from that incites the desire to undergo surgical body modification? Against the backdrop of post-colonial criticism, the article challenges the distinction between FGM in non-Western cultures and FGCS in the West through questioning the notion of informed consent associated with the latter. By bringing together otherwise separate voices from various disciplines, the overall aim is to present FGCS as an intricate interface between biology, psychology, culture, and media discourse
Performing Queer Time: Disrupting Heteronormativity with Representations of Working-Class Sexual Minorities in Michelle Tea’s Valencia (2000)
No full textThis article argues that Michelle Tea’s Valencia (2000) advocates for sex-positivity and queer ways of being to resist heteronormative life markers and capital accumulation that fuel hypergentrification which, in turn, displaces queer communities and people of color (and those at the intersection of these identities) from their neighborhoods. In the first section, I posit that Tea, through her documentation of working-class sexual minorities in the 1990s San Francisco Mission District, uses the feminist tradition of memoir writing to form social and political community. I then utilize Jack Halberstam’s notion of ‘queer temporality’ to demonstrate how Tea constructs queer spaces occupied by sexual minorities who, removed from financial wealth and inheritance, inhabit a temporality that insists on the present moment. Employing queer time, Tea’s work encourages sexual minorities to imagine alternate life possibilities that subvert heteronormative institutions. To underline the significance of queer spaces, I conclude this paper by interrogating Tea’s inclusion of an interlude outside of the Mission District when Michelle (the narrator) and her lover, Iris, visit Iris’s Georgia family. Examining heteronormativity’s limits and highlighting the importance of spaces in which queer sexual minorities can perform and imagine lives outside of heteropatriarchy, I offer Tea’s Valencia as a text that disrupts the idealization of access to heteronormative institutions and the rise of homonormativity to push for a transformational politics that critiques capitalist power structures
Review: ‘People of Colour’ and the Metropolis: Politicizing Berliner Farben (2017-2018)
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
In an interview, filmmaker Poliana Baumgarten provides the reasons for which she started the web-series Berliner Farben (2017-2018), which is freely available on Youtube and depicts the lives of racial and sexual minorities living in Berlin, Germany. In Baumgarten’s words, “I started Berliner Farben out of desperation. As a teenager, I realized that in Germany PoC [People of Colour] are rarely presented in the media. And if they are then it is done in a very stereotypical way. That’s why I wanted to create a platform where PoC [People of Colour] are portrayed and their individual stories and voices count” (Interview). Baumgarten’s project, thus, purports to render greater representation to ‘people of colour’ by embracing “the diversity of Berlin” (Description, Trailer). With nine episodes that resemble the format of a documentary but are equally ethnographic in nature, Baumgarten’s lens meets an activist, poet, journalist, rapper/singer, and female disk jockeys in order to capture their efforts towards visibility in Germany. While each episode stands out on its own, they remain disconnected given the scope of the project itself, which although ambitious, remains unclear