Editorial
1 Imagendering II is a continuation of Imagendering I, analyzing visualisations of gender and the gendering of visualisation. This second issue presents target essays which focus on the negotiation of gender and sexuality in contemporary poetry, in the nineteenth-century image culture, and in films of diverse genres, from US and German comedies of the 1950s to The Matrix trilogy.
2 Elizabeth Parsons's "The Body of Work - Dorothy Porter's Akhenaten" investigates the depiction of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten as a hermaphroditic subject in Porter's recent collection of poems. In "Looking at Women Looking: Female Portraits in the Gender Crisis," Renate Brosch explores the increasing observer participation in nineteenth century image culture and discusses the impact of this shift on the constitution of identity, especially in terms of gender, sexuality and power.
3 In addition to these explorations of the interface of gender and visualisation in the fields of poetry and portrait painting, Imagendering II also investigates filmic conceptions of the issue. Katrin Greim's "Discursive Violence in Aimée and Jaguar" focuses on the presentation of lesbianism as an act of anti-nationalist resistance in both Erica Fischer's book and the movie Aimée and Jaguar, arguing that the novel and the film have competing investments in the issue. In her essay "The Performance of Male Subjectivity in The Matrix Trilogy," Christiane König focuses on the figure of Neo to discuss the performative constitution, development and stabilization of the male subject in the trilogy. Massimo Perinelli and Olaf Stieglitz's article "Liquid Laughter. A Gendered History of Milk & Alcohol Drinking in West-German and US Film Comedies of the 1950s" argues that post-war film comedies played an important part in the social re-establishment of heteronormative and patriarchal gender systems after the war, both in Germany and in the USA. Finally, in "Heroines of Gaze. Gender and Self-Reflexivity in Current Espionage Films," Isabelle Stauffer investigates female spy figures in 1990s movies The Long Kiss Goodnight and Shining Through and proposes that their portrayal necessitates the reformulation of Mulvey's analysis of gender-specific ways of looking in Hollywood cinema. In "No one claps at the end of a novel," the British playwright Laura Wade, who has just received the Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright, talks to Christina Wald about her recent plays Colder than Here and Breathing Corpses as well as her new play Other Hands, which has just opened at London's Soho Theatre. The fiction section of Imagendering II presents the first scene of Other Hands.
4 The featured reviews in this issue are on Regarding Sedgwick. Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory (edited by David Clark and Stephen Barber), Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture( edited by Sherrie A. Inness), 50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies (Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan) and Janespotting and Beyond (edited by Eckart Voigts-Virchow).