Imagendering II

11      Following and expanding her thesis, we want to show that subversive and affirmative elements of comedies are strongly interconnected in a necessary and multi-layered relation of exchange with one another and social discourse. For historians, an analysis of this exchange in periods which where like the post-war 1950s characterized by a dynamically charged gender system is especially rewarding.

Post-War Gender Systems

12      Historiographies dealing with the United States and West Germany take it for granted that in the 1940s certain "traditional," hetero-normative notions of femininity and masculinity lost their hegemonic status and influence due to the effects of the Great Depression and the Second World War.[2]We adopt the term heteronormativity from Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge 1993. One reason for these developments lay in the fact that the social division of labor on both home fronts were to a far lesser degree divided along gender lines than before the war. The spheres of production and social participation and those of reproduction and domesticity became more and more blurred. They no longer reflected a clear binary order of gender.[3]We do not want to suggest that accelerations of gender systems are always caused from its "outside." Here, we want to underscore the enormous importance of depression and world war, which of course were highly gendered phenomena themselves. One consequence of this deterritorializing development was a new class structure in the USA and in West Germany, for in both countries the middle-class segment of society expanded largely and established or stabilized its cultural hegemony.

13      With regard to Germany, this decisive development occurred faster, more directly, and more clearly because National Socialism was overthrown by the allied forces and thus all relevant social constellations were open to immense change. But in the USA as well, concepts of class, status, and social mobility changed or were perceived differently during depression and war.

14      We interpret the accelerated reconstruction of the heteronormative gender order in both countries during the 1950s as the resolute attempt to stabilize the social setting in general. Whereas the new class arrangement was a desired development, the gender notions advocated by the war were not, and the restabilization of heteronormativity was a crucial part of keeping a precarious order working. But this strategy of arresting one social development to accelerate another was contested and difficult to achieve. As we want to show in our sources, achieving a return to heteronormativity as a hegemonic norm not only rested on permanent discourses of exclusion and normalization, but also on permanently citing and displaying deviant notions of femininity and masculinity. "Roll back" was a social fact of 1950s gender systems but in the long run, this decade was much more fractured, contested, and dynamic than is commonly attested. The alternative gender concepts important during war years were remarginalized but remained present as the "other" in popular discourses. They thus formed a basis from which the social revolts and the so called sexual revolution of the 1960s could arise.

15      Film historian Christopher Beach presented an interesting approach to scrutinize class and gender questions in movies relationally. He deals with 1950s Hollywood comedies and puts forward the thesis that economic success and failure as well as upward and downward mobility were to a large degree reflected on women's bodies in an unprecedented amount. Class, according to Beach, was staged as a fetishized female body. Simultaneously, the male body lost its clear signification of class belonging and represented in its physical uniformity the blurring of social stratification in one large middle class; the "Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" epitomizes this image. Through fetishization the woman's body served as the main signifier for both her own class and that of men. Furthermore, economy was itself inscribed onto women's bodies. In naturalizing these effects, this phallic fetishization now constitutes the specific truth we nowadays routinely recognize as a woman. The man as social no-body or invisible-body corresponded to this setting. He seemed to have no characteristic features, he formed the "normal matrix" which for so long remained outside of scholarly attention. It is our aim to make these interrelated processes of both capitalistic and gender production visible in the film comedies we examine (Beach; Cohan).