Detailed Table of Contents
- Editorial
- Jürgen Martschukat: Men in Gray Flannel Suits. Troubling Masculinities in 1950s America
- Abstract: This essay deals with American family life in the 1950s. In its first part, the text scrutinizes how the corresponding gender stereotypes were culturally shaped by an array of discursive enunciations and a vast number of social and political practices. A closer look at the 1950s focus-on-the-family will reveal that the breadwinning father was not at all the undisputed hegemonic male stereotype of the age. A conflict between differing norms of masculinity has to be attested: On the one hand, after World War II the restoration of the father to the leading position in the family promised to stabilize post- and cold war-America, on the other hand critics bemoaned a loss of virility among the fathers of the 1950s. A fear of masculine decline permeated American society, caused by the conformist urge and the obviously limited options of suburbanized and corporate life. Talk about a “crisis” among heterosexual white men was everywhere, and this supposed crisis was perceived as a crisis of America at large. The troubling masculinities in 1950s America will take center stage in the second part of my essay. This will be exemplified by an analysis of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a 1950s book and movie, whose protagonist Tom Rath (Gregory Peck) epitomized the American suburbanite who felt overpowered by the requirements being addressed to him as a man.
- Author's Bio: Jürgen Martschukat is Professor of North American History at Erfurt University. His research focuses on the history of violence, gender, race, and families. He is currently completing a book on the history of fatherhood in the United States.
- Kristoff Kerl: The Pure and the Sodomite. Masculinity, Sexuality and Antisemitism in the Leo Frank Case.
- Abstract: By examining the Leo Frank case in respect to the perceived crisis in white premodern manhood, the article demonstrates the connection between changes in gender relation, as a result of industrialization and urbanization, and the rise of antisemitism. The environment of urban regions and the increasing number of female wage laborers undermined the male mastery of women which was an important component of premodern white manhood. Especially, the changes regarding sexuality, which resulted from growing autonomy of women, evoked a sentiment of emasculation among white men. This anger and bewilderment about losing control over subordinated women played an important part in the Leo Frank case. By attributing this loss of male mastery to “Jewish power,” which was symbolized through ”Jewish lusts,” Jews became responsible for this development. This alleged responsibility contributed to the conviction that Leo Frank, and not Jim Conley, was the murderer of Mary Phagan. Since, in the antisemitic discourse, “the Jews” became responsible for the emasculation of white men, antisemitism was considered as a defensive measure against the perceived Jewish activities to reconstitute white manhood.
- Author's Bio: Kristoff Kerl is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cologne. After studying German studies, history, educational science and social sciences in Cologne and Wuppertal, he started his dissertation in October 2009. His PHD thesis deals with the connection between the perceived crisis in white premodern manhood, caused inter alia by industrialization and urbanization, and the spread of antisemitism in the South of the USA in the Progressive Era and during the New Deal. Since the summer term of 2010 Kristoff Kerl has been a lecturer at the University of Cologne.
- Norbert Finzsch: Masculinities. The Million Man March
- Abstract: Norbert Finzsch analyzes the Million Men March (MMM) of 1995 as an alleged attempt to redefine African American masculinities in the context of the exclusion of other forms of non-hegemonic masculinity. As a relational category, masculinity invokes and implies definitions of femininity and of other categories that support the dominant paradigm of the patriarchal, racist, heteronormative and capitalist order. It is Finzsch’s contention, therefore, that mascu-linity should be defined in concordance with theoretical models based on the model of inter-sectionality, despite the fact that this notion was developed by women of color in the context of a feminist critique of liberal (white) feminism. He also believes that the MMM should be contextualized in the history of different marches on and in Washington DC, since the MMM evoked images and myths of previous mass demonstrations in the capital.
- Author's Bio: Norbert Finzsch (born 1951 in Cologne) teaches North American and Australian History at the University of Cologne. He has held the position of Deputy Director at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC from 1990 to 1992, was appointed Professor of History at the University of Hamburg (1992 to 2001) before coming to Cologne. Finzsch has published on the history of African Americans, Gender History, Queer Theory and the histories of racisms and genocides.
- Isabel Karremann: "The Sea Will Make a Man of Him?" Hypervirility, Effeminacy, and the Figure of the Queer Pirate in the Popular Imagination from the Early Eighteenth-Century to Hollywood.
- Abstract: The figure of Captain Jack Sparrow, charismatic rogue and best pirate ever, has captured the cinema audience like no other pirate before him, it seems. Ask anyone what they think about Pirates of the Caribbean, and their response will very likely be centred on Johnny Depp's flamboyant performance. Sparrow's insistence on status ("It's Captain Sparrow!"), on physical prowess, his skills in navigation and his having a bride in every port seem to mark him out as the typically virile pirate familiar to us from so many pirate movies of the twentieth century. Yet from the start, Sparrow's virility sits oddly with his other signature character traits: his failure as a leader, his preference of negotiation to open fight ("Why fight when you can negotiate? All one needs is the proper leverage."), his slightly drunken swagger and mannered gesticulation, his mixture of elaborate wordplay and slurry pronunciation, let his demonstrative virility look like an act. Indeed, his performance of pirate manliness forever hesitates – almost uncannily, always hilariously – between hypervirility and effeminacy. This essay traces the ”queer” pirate figure to the eighteenth-century popular imagination and explores the fascination its ambiguous gender performance holds for audiences, then as now.
- Author's Bio: Isabel Karremann read English and Comparative Literature at Munich University, Germany and the National University of Ireland, Galway, from 1997 to 2002. After a year as research assistant at Tuebingen University she returend to Munich where she completed her doctorate on masculinity in the eighteenth-century novel in 2007. She taught English Literature at the Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main before she joined the collaborative research centre "Pluralization and Authority in Early Modern Europe" at Munich University as a post-doc research-fellow. Her main project at the moment is a book-length study on practices of forgetting in early modern history plays.
- Christiane König: Not Becoming-Posthuman in the Ultimate Postfilmic Posthuman Male Fantasy. Queer-Feminist Observations on James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)
- Abstract: This article examines mainly the following: In what way is the digital mobilized in Avatar and in what complex ways are the filmic and the digital mutually constitutive? If one ever assumes, that cinema has some kind of (historically changing) specificity, if not an essence, but as a medium, and if one further assumes that cinema is a cultural technology, then what types of images, what kind of narratives and discursive strategies are enabled through the digital in conjunction with the cinematographic in Avatar? Furthermore, if cinema is supposedly, in a Deleuzian fashion, a system with specific features to reflect on, to show and to tell mainly about time, movement and their cognition, then what does Avatar tell us about the relation to the real, about lived, embodied time proper and therefore about subjectivity in general? What kind of subjectivity is addressed here? Closely related to this question is the last one, very seriously raised, if Avatar can ever be called a serious reflection on the philosophy of the subject brought to the fore by Rosi Braidotti as Zoëism. This article will, finally, answer this question negatively in showing that Avatar is the ultimate postfilmic posthuman male fantasy in the spirit of capitalism’s schizophrenic spectral logic.
- Author's Bio: Christiane König, Ph.D., is assistent professor at the Anglo-American Institute of the Department of History at Cologne University. Her core themes of scientific interest are Film Theory and History, Media Theory and Archaeology, biological and informational Cybernetics, Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Gender and Queer Studies. See more on http://www.christianekoenig.de