Detailed Table of Contents
- Editorial
- Hedwig Fraunhofer: Gender and the Abject in Sartre
- Abstract: This essay takes Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection as a starting-point to explore the relationship of the French nation to German fascism in the twentieth century — a relationship marked by an othering of fascism as foreign. To investigate this relationship, the essay specifically analyzes the discussion of fascism and the phobic abjection of the feminized (female or homosexual) Other in the early work of France's leading philosopher of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre. In contrast to Sartre's claims to an unequivocally antifascist ideological stance, his early work demonstrates the historical continuity between the modern European patriarchal tradition and fascism, and the dialectical implication even of antifascist philosophy and art in fascist thinking.
- Author's Bio: Hedwig Fraunhofer is an associate professor of German and French at Georgia College & State University (USA). She has published on Brecht's early dramatic work, as well as on Strindberg and gender. A comparatist by training, she is working on a book manuscript on fascism, gender and sexuality in modern European drama.
- Martina Mittag: The Obscure Subject of Desire: Lucretia Borgia in Nineteenth-Century Literature
- Abstract: This article focuses on new representations of Lucretia in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the many existing versions, those of Bulwer-Lytton, Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo reveal different contextualizations of gender while discussing the poisoner as non-subject, a poisoner whose desire corresponds to collective ideals while her methods reflect the dark side of that same configuration and at the same time comment on the secret workings of money and murder. Non-subjecthood here is what Kristeva's term of the abject points to, as it is produced by the same logic as the subject herself, but reveals that logic in its negatory rather than affirmative power. Whereas the abject can manifest itself in any form of "uninhabitable zone" (Butler 3) that challenges the borders of the self, the female poisoner is a more complicated phenomenon as she reaches out for the status of subject, claiming free will, autonomy and reason as her defining features.
- Author's Bio: Martina Mittag teaches English and American literature and culture. She is the author of Nationale Identitätsbestrebungen im englischen Pamphlet, 1558-1630 (1993) and Gendered Spaces: Transformations of the Feminine in Early Modern Discourse (2001) and numerous articles on gender in relation to scientific discourse, utopia, virtual reality. As a visiting scholar/professor she worked at UC Irvine, CA, Brandeis University and the University of Milwaukee, and has taught at the universities of Giessen, Paderborn and Saarbrücken in Germany. She is now working on a larger project on secrecy.
- Fintan Walsh: The Erotics and Politics of Masochistic Self-Abjection in “Jackass”
- Abstract: This paper examines the role of masochistic self-abjection in the construction and operation of heteronormative masculinity in Jackass: The Movie (2002) with reference to the Jackass series, offshoot series, and Jackass: Number Two (2006). The paper begins by analysing how masculinity in constructed through masochistic acts, presented as if rites of initiation that involve the abjection, figurative castration and penetration of the male body. It also considers how males performatively control their 'abject others' in the service of affirming a stable masculine core. The paper continues to assess the role played by comedy in the film, and questions whether Jackass, and its associated films/series, merely signifies the triumph of low culture or if it highlights a deeper problem with Western masculinity.
- Author's Bio: Fintan Walsh holds M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in Theatre, Performance and Film from the Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College, Dublin. His main research interests include queer theory, psychoanalysis and constructions of masculinity in contemporary drama, live art, film and television. Currently, he teaches courses in Critical Theory, Film and Theatre at the School of Drama, Film and Music at Trinity College.
- Review: Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum, eds. “Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W.E.B. Du Bois.” University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
- Abstract: Gillman and Weinbaum's collection offers a broad range of perspectives on Du Bois's use of literary genres, his view of history and historical process, the place of the erotic in his life and writing, discursive constructions of masculinity embedded in and emerging from his work, and his manipulation of material culture. In bringing these varied perspectives to bear on Du Bois's work, the editors enable "a reading practice that deals with the unspoken, disrupted, or unfinished synergies that emerge among and between parts as often as with manifest content and stated import of the text" and make its continued relevance apparent (8).
- Review (Review): Tina Campt. “Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
- Abstract: In Other Germans. Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich, Tina Campt offers a significant and timely contribution to German Studies, Holocaust scholarship, and research into the function of memory within a greater historical and cultural context. Beginning to make the case for the value of her scholarship, and in order to set herself apart from other research into Germany’s National Socialist past, Campt endeavors to demonstrate the degree to which the totalitarian government was actually “generative,” although the period of National Socialist control is most often considered only or at least primarily for its “destructive capacity” (1-2). Campt’s work arrives at a quite productive time in the studies of the experiences of Black Europeans, in light of ongoing international, collaborative scholarly work.