Table of Contents
~ Articles
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~ Fiction
~ Outlook
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Articles |
The Author |
Abstract |
| Renate Brosch is professor of English Literature at the University of Potsdam. She has published a book on Henry James in the context of changing visual culture (Krisen des Sehens: Henry James und die Veränderung der Wahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert), on neglected female authors in the modern period, and a book on short story theory is in the printing press. Text-image-relations have been a major field of research and teaching (R. Brosch, ed. Ikono/Philo/Logie: Wechselspiele von Bildern und Texten), as well as the relationship of image and spectator in various discourses. Her continuing interest in visuality has recently expanded to include visualization as part of reception processes. She is speaker and co-ordinator of the graduate school "Visualisierungen/Visuelle Kulturen" at the University of Potsdam. | "In 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)." | |
| Katrin Greim is finishing her MA in Women Studies at San Francisco State University. She is currently conducting first-person interviews with self-identified femmes living in the San Francisco Bay Area for her thesis, "The Politics of (In)Visibility: Articulations of Femme Gender and Sexual Identity." | "The story of Aimée and Jaguar can be read on multiple levels. Indeed, it comes to us already in two incarnations. Erica Fischer published her novel Aimée and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 in 1994. In 2001, Max Färberböck's movie, Aimée and Jaguar: A Love Greater than Death was released. Though these two different representations reveal oppositional and competing sociological, political, and cultural agendas, what emerges is that there is no ultimate, objective 'truth.' This story, as is it is told by Fischer and Färberböck, represents lesbianism as a site of resistance to the National Socialist eugenicist agenda. But finally, this story reinscribes the racist and classist dynamics it sets out to critique. What emerges from close readings of both the novel and the film is that non-heteronormative relationships are not inherently revolutionary, but instead often reproduce (whether consciously or not) hegemonic power relations and discursive violence." | |
| Christiane König has studied German, French and Spanish literature and linguistics as well as Film Studies at the universities of Tübingen and Salamanca, Spain. She received a PhD degree with a thesis on constructions of femininity and practices of resistance in contemporary cinema at the University of Tübingen (publ. 2004). Since April 2005 she holds an assistant's position in gender and media studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Among her research interests are feminist film theory, theories of cultural apparatuses and suture, gender in the media theories, biological and technological cybernetics, and simulation. In cooperation with the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen she has undertaken a critical analysis of the cinema-dispositif that takes into account the impact of digitally simulated images and has been involved in the development of a new aesthetics of psycho-physics. She is currently working on a book-length study on constructions of maculinity in contemporary cinema, which she discusses in dialogue with the forming and authorizing conditions provided by the media and by culture. A list of publications can be accessed at http://gender.khm.de/ | "The trilogy of The Matrix essentially speaks of, indeed demands, the constitution, development and stabilization of a male subject. [...] In the figure of Neo as the Chosen One the trilogy permanently reproduces a consistent concept of active masculinity in the form of male heroism by means of the formal principle of recursive (presup)position as an ongoing process. That this male subjectivity is a performance is one of the trilogy's most essential, constitutive messages, which the films never acknowledge openly but keep producing on a formal level. [...] At first glance, the films thus seem to represent a stabilizing trend of the Hollywood cinema dispositif. At the same time, however, the trilogy is perilously situated on the brink of an abyss when the production process of this masculinity exposes its own constitutive dependence on a femininity whose visible and representative manifestation could hardly be more energetic, nimble and clever. Thus, the trilogy of The Matrix figures as the prototype of contemporary manifestations of a dispositif that seeks to (re)consolidate the severely shaken status of male heroism by employing strategically its whole array of technological possibilities." | |
| Elizabeth Parsons teaches in Literary Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. She is both an interdisciplinary feminist scholar and a text artist producing scripts and conceptual designs for contemporary music theatre performances. Recent works include Narcissus and Echo: "echo is no answer" (Chamber Made Opera 2001) and the large-scale collaborative performance/installation, Revelations (Organs of the Goldfields Festival 2003). She publishes in varied fields including Australian Literature, Performance Studies, and Children's Literature. | "This article stages an 'imagendering' of Akhenaten, a contemporary collection of poems by Australian poet Dorothy Porter. Surviving sculptures of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten depict a hermaphroditic subject who is, for Porter, a muse of transgression. Her fascination is with his challenge to long-held creative conventions of Egyptian art, depicting himself with a combination of breasts, swollen belly, rounded thighs and a penis. This collection of poems is thus a site of gendered reinscription made possible by the death of Akhenaten's physical body. His bodily absence allows for Porter's textual presence. Operating in this speculative historical space, a space in which the body of work physiologically cross-dresses and engages in sexual play across the boundaries of masculine/feminine, history/poetry, symbolic/semiotic, this poetry demonstrates that language itself can never evade embodiment." | |
|
Olaf Stieglitz teaches North-American History at the University of
Cologne, where he also received his MA degree in 1993. He conducted
graduate studies at Hamburg University and got his Ph.D. degree there in
1997 with a thesis on male youth during the New Deal period. Among his
main areas of interest and research are gender history, the history of
youth and film history. His current book project is a cultural history
of informers and informants in the United States.
Massimo Perinelli teaches North-American History and Film History at the University of Cologne. He studied history, anthropology and political sciences at the University of Hamburg where he also received his MA degree in 1999. In 2000 he published his thesis on gender in German postwar rubble films. Among his main areas of interest and research are gender history, material history and film history. His current PhD project is a history of bodies in Italian neorealist movies. |
"This 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." | |
| Isabelle Stauffer studied German Linguistics and Literary Studies, Film Studies and Philosophy at the University of Zurich and the Humboldt-University Berlin. Since October 2003 she has a doctorate scholarship from the University of Zurich's research fund for her PhD project in German Literary Studies Ironic Performance. On the Ironization of Gender-Specific Topoi in Annette Kolb and Franziska zu Reventlow. Teaching and Organisation of scientific events in German Literary Studies and Film Studies. Publications in the fields of Gender and Literature in early modern times, the fin de siècle and about Gender and Self-Reflexivity in current Hollywood cinema. | "The two female spies central to the movies The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin, USA 1996) and Shining Through (David Seltzer, USA 1992), indicate that it is time to re-scrutinize Laura Mulvey's now famous analysis of gender-specific ways of looking in Hollywood cinema. Spys - male or female - need to be good observers and usually they are also in possession of optical devices extending their visual capabilities and hence their visual power. Psychoanalytical approaches, however, fail to explain such a character: the female spy provided with optical devices and weapons cannot be explained away as a phallic and therefore 'false' woman, but transgresses the binary logic by means of her ability to form assemblages with weapons, special devices and things found." | |
| Christina Wald has studied English and German Literature, Drama, TV and Film Studies at the University of Cologne and at the University of Warwick. She is currently working for gender forum as an editorial assistant. Apart from writing her PhD thesis on Hysteria, Trauma, and Melancholia in Contemporary Anglophone Drama, she teaches at the English department of the University of Cologne. | "No one claps at the end of a novel. It is the liveness of theatre that excites me. You can't have two hundred people sitting in a room all reading a novel at the same time and experiencing it together. I think that's the aspect of it that excites me the most — and the collaborative nature. Writing plays is lonely enough, really. Because it takes months and months to write something before you have that gorgeous month when you are in a rehearsal room and you've got actors around and a director and you get to see everybody making it into a 'real' thing." |
Reviews |
Abstract |
|
| "Regarding Sedgwick is a heterogeneous manifesto whose wide range displays an impressive and inspiring diversity of texts. What makes it exceptional is the fact that this diversity is present not only in what, but moreover in how it is discussed. Eve's 'ueer children" have thus accomplished a worthy tribute to their teacher; a tribute that lastingly portrays Sedgwick herself as "a free radical that […] attaches to and permanently intensifies or alters the meaning of - of almost anything' (Sedgwick 62)." | View this book's entry in the gender Inn database | |
| "Inness's most recent book analyzes images of tough heroines from the last decade, exploring the cultural role these strong women really play in contemporary society. As the essays delineated in continuation corroborate, tough women are still designed to appeal to a primarily male audience, since they are expected to be womanly, physically attractive and heterosexually appealing. On the other hand, their sex appeal is not reminiscent of traditional passivity, as these heroines challenge the patriarchal social structure by defending other women and fighting the men who threaten them. These female protagonists exhibit aggressive behavior, quick wit, and intellectual skills, an array of attributes allotted traditionally to men. They become popular heroines and as such, they shake up women's role in American pop culture." | View this book's entry in the gender Inn database | |
| "50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies provides a comprehensive introduction to the multi-disciplinary field of gender studies. The definitions are even-handed critiques where a range of viewpoints are presented, leaving the reader sufficiently informed to either look further into a concept, or move on depending upon their requirements. Students from different academic backgrounds can explore the discussions and debates central to gender studies, whilst those already possessing knowledge within this field will find new approaches and clear critiques of some of the central concepts in this multi-disciplinary area. The book is rigorously academic yet also highly readable and sufficiently accessible to appeal not only to students but also to those outside of academia." | View this book's entry in the gender Inn database | |
| "With this collection of essays Eckart Voigts-Virchow has brought together an impressive range of perspectives on the British heritage phenomena since its heyday period of the 1980s and early 1990s. Janespotting and Beyond should appeal to various segments of scholarship, as well as be of use to the general reader. Divided into four main sections, each section concentrates on an evolving heritage facet or issue of the ongoing heritage debate in British Culture Studies. Certainly many of the essays reinvigorate heritage and post-heritage discourses. Voigts-Virchow's collection is valuable and timely. Ten years after the famous "Janespotter" versus "Trainspotter" tag, the debate begins to show signs of wear: the Janespotter and the Trainspotter begin to merge into the same entity." | View this book's entry in the gender Inn database |
This issue features an excerpt from Laura Wade's 2005 play Other Hands, which premiered recently
at Soho Theatre in London.
The upcoming special issue on Women
in Power aims at a discussion of female political leadership.
It will present targets articles only and is meant to be updated throughout the year.
Women in Power will instigate this
discussion with two articles by Alice Schwarzer on Angela Merkel and invites scholars to contribute
case studies of other female political leaders, such as Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton.
The next regular issue later this year will be
Rac(e)ing
Questions III.
How to contact our contributors
If you would like to contact our contributors, please send an email to gender-forum@uni-koeln.de. We will forward your message to the person in question.