Illuminating Gender 12(2005)

-> detailed table of contents
Introduction
Illuminating Gender examines the interface of gender and disease, a thematic concern that will be taken up again in Illuminating Gender II next year. Two of the contributions to our first issue consider the interaction of medical theory and German literature in the eighteenth as well as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while the third target essay focuses on the Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome that troubles notions of normative femininity.
      Elisabeth Strowick's article "The Infectious Performative. Contagion between Bacteriology and Literature" examines Robert Koch's groundbreaking research on tuberculosis in the late nineteenth century and Thomas Mann's literary presentation of the disease in The Magic Mountain. Emphasising issues of gender, Strowick analyses Mann's writing as a poetology of the "infectious performative" and in turn investigates the importance of language and script for Koch's science.
      In "Foreboding Forefathers: Cross(br)ed Desire, a Child and Dubious Parenthood. Goethe's Elective Affinities," Tanja Nusser analyses the impact of the contemporary discourse on female and maternal imagination on Goethe's writing of Elective Affinities. Nusser's reading of Goethe's novel highlights the importance of maternal imagination and its relation to artistic creative capacity. Studying the "monstrous" child Otto as a product of parental and specifically maternal imagination, Nusser shows how Goethe's novel partakes in but also invalidates a discourse that places maternal imagination in the context of abnormal, monstrous visualization by opposing biological/natural (paternal) and artifical/imaginative (maternal) insemination.
      In her essay ""Too Fat, Too Hairy, Too (In)visible: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and Normative Femininity"", Christina Fisanick deals with the little-known Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and assesses its cultural significance. Fisanick traces the reasons why the syndrome despite its visible symptoms such as overweight and baldness, which transgress normative femininity, is made culturally invisible and considers ways of implementing the transgressive potential of the syndrome.
      The featured interview of Illuminating Gender is "Cripping up is the twenty-first century's answer to blacking up". The British theatre practitioner and playwright Kaite O'Reilly talks to Jozefina Komporály about theatre, feminism, and disability. We would like to remind readers that the interviews we publish are usually not chosen in accordance with the issue's thematic focus and that we do not consider disability a disease. However, the processes of social stigmatization as described by both Nusser and Fisanick and those addressed by O'Reilly share similar concerns. The fiction section of Illuminating Gender presents excerpts from Kaite O'Reilly's Peeling, which was first staged in 2003 at the Birmingham Rep.
      Illuminating Gender also offers reviews of Judith Butler's Undoing Gender, of Butler Matters, edited by Margaret Sönser Breen and Warren J. Blumfeld, and Gender and Qualitative Methods by Helma Järviluoma, Pirkko Moisala & Anni Vilkko.

quick contents
articles

Elisabeth Strowick
The Infectious Performative. Contagion between Bacteriology and Literature.

Tanja Nusser
Foreboding Forefathers: Cross(br)ed Desire, A Child and Dubious Parenthood. Goethe's Elective Affinities.

Christina Fisanick
Too Fat, Too Hairy, Too (In)visible: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and Normative Femininity.

Jozefina Komporály
"Cripping up is the twenty-first century's answer to blacking up": Conversation with Kaite O'Reilly on theatre, feminism and disability

reviews
Review: Margret Sönser Breen and Warren J. Blumfeld, eds., Butler Matters. Judith Butler's Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies.
(Reviewed by Christina Wald)

Review: Helma Järviluoma, Pirkko Moisala & Anni Vilkko. Gender and Qualitative Methods.
(Reviewed by Alyson Tyler)

Review: Judith Butler. Undoing Gender.
(Reviewed by Dirk Schulz)

fiction
Excerpts from Kaite O'Reilly's play Peeling

Requests for permission to print excerpts from articles and reviews should be addressed to gender-forum@uni-koeln.de.