Gender Roomours II

Detailed Table of Contents

Editorial

Stefan Brandt: Astronautic Subjects: Postmodern Identity and the Embodiment of Space in American Science Fiction

Abstract: This essay will deal with the embodiment, or more precisely, the gendering of space since the 1950s. My focus will be on the figure of the astronaut, which I interpret as a continuation of the cowboy and pioneer character in the context of Western, and more specifically, American culture. In the postmodern age, the astronaut is endowed with an important cultural function: Through the image of the spacewalker, gender can be simultaneously negotiated as a fragile construct - given the fact that the 1950s also marked the establishment of new gender roles and new ideas about sexual identity - and restored as an affirmative category in which issues of national and masculine identity are symbolically merged.

Author's Bio: Stefan Brandt teaches American Literature and Culture at the University of Siegen. He received his education at the Freie Universität Berlin, University of London, Cornell University, Ithaca, and UC Berkeley. He spent several years as a visiting scholar and teacher at universities in the USA and Germany (UC Irvine, UCLA, USC, TU Chemnitz) and worked as a Guest Professor at the John F. Kennedy-Institute in Berlin from 2004 to 2005. He has written two monographs, Reading as a Man: Constructions of Masculinity in the American Fin de Siècle (1997) and The Culture of Corporeality: Aesthetic Experience and the Embodiment of America, 1945-1960 (forthcoming), and edited an anthology on Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life. He has also published widely in the fields of literary and film theory, gender studies, and American cultural history.

Luminita Dragulescu: Into the Room and Out of the Closet: (Homo)Sexuality and Commodification in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room

Abstract: David, the narrator protagonist of Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, is teetering on the brink of yielding to his homosexuality when, as an American tourist in the Paris of the fifties, he meets the tragic Italian immigrant, Giovanni. The circle of acquaintances that the raconteur frequents spins to propel him to one location that would challenge his self-representation: Giovanni's room - the metonym of his newly appropriated sexual identity. Once David enters Giovanni's dilapidated room, he virtually enters a realm of no return, a social inferno, yet also a heaven and haven of unrepressed sexuality. When the protagonist leaves his lover's lair, he escapes the closet he has inhabited, consciously or not, for most of his life and accepts the truth of his sexuality. Furthermore, "the closet" objectified, Giovanni's room stands not only for the recognition of David's homosexual identity, but also for the social and political oppression that comes with it, being that the closet, as theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick evinces, "is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century" (71).

Author's Bio: Luminita Dragulescu specializes in American Literature of the 20th Century with a focus on both fictional and non-fictional narratives. Her research interests include issues of collective and individual memory, traumatic memory in particular, in texts produced by whites and African Americans and which revolve around racial, economic, and political tensions.

Christian Lassen: "In the dark camp," Or:  Straight with a (Pastoral) Twist. American Western Masculinity in Brokeback Mountain.

Abstract: Tracing both the fascination and the discomfort that tend to engulf a mainstream audience confronted with "Brokeback Mountain," this article contends that the major source of controversy concerning both the short story and the movie resides in a yet unacknowledged generic crisis rather than in the scarcely innovative postulation of a gay American Western masculinity as such. In a line of reasoning that explores the potentials of generic camp, this crisis is shown to result from a subversion of the Western itself whose conventions have been infiltrated and thoroughly undermined by the sentimental homoeroticism of an altogether different genre, the pastoral elegy. In "Brokeback Mountain," then, this camp invasion of normative generic traditions eventually culminates in the polarisation of two dissimilar stereotypes of masculinity, namely that of the anti-sentimental American Western cowboy, Ennis del Mare, and that of the sentimental pastoral shepherd, Jack Twist.

Author's Bio: Christian Lassen is a research assistant at the University of Tübingen, Germany. His research interests include queer and gender theory, with a main focus on contemporary literature. He has completed an MA thesis on Alan Hollinghurst and is currently working on a PhD, exploring the functions of camp in representations of homosexual, frequently AIDS-related, loss and mourning.

Hedwig Wagner: Places and Spaces: The Public Sphere and Privacy in Lina Wertmüller's Love and Anarchy

Abstract: Making use of scenic and literary techniques, that is, means of strong intermedial, calculated cinematic construction, Lina Wertmüller's film Love and Anarchy succeeds in bringing the private-public binarism into play in a way which oscillates between the two poles. Wertmüller subverts the traditional demarcation of the private and public, which has long served as an instrument of power in patriarchal societies, and mounts a discursive challenge to the pre-defined division of the spheres of public and private.

Author's Bio: Dr. Hedwig Wagner is a post-doctoral fellow at the Graduate College "Cultural Hermeneutics: Reflections of Difference and Transdifference" at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen. She completed her doctoral thesis on the representation of prostitutes in films in 2005 at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. In her post-doctoral research project, which deals with medial aspects of European identity construction, she examines the representation of the border in European film.

Review: Liz Conor. “The Spectacular Modern Woman. Feminine Visibility in the 1920s.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Abstract: Contrary to what the catchy title of her study suggests, Liz Conor in The Spectacular Modern Woman argues for a reconsideration of women's 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's 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." Conor maintains the ambivalence of the "appearing woman" as objectified spectacle and as agent of her own identity, and carefully moves back and forth between visibility's two-fold potential.

Review: Nancy Copeland. “Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre: Women's Comedy and the Theatre.” Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

Abstract: Nancy Copeland's staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre goes beyond the dramatic texts themselves and explores issues of intertextuality and intertheatricality in comedies by Behn and Centlivre: by tracing the adaptations made possible by a vast web of recurrent dramatic motifs, and by dealing with the performance history of each of the plays, the study illuminates what is lost by neglecting the performance aspect of a play. The various productions, alterations, adaptations shed light on changing cultural contexts and especially the plays' engagement with shifting ideas of gender roles and appropriate behaviour for men and women.