Courses :: CULS C701 Topic: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Modern European Culture: Cold War Genders and Beyond
When the Berlin wall came down in 1989, and Germany found itself in the geo-political center of a much broader, transnational transition from the Cold War order into the contemporary age of globalization, questions and tropes of gender shaped the contested process of unification on various levels. Thus, contemporaries discussed not only in which ways socialist society (with, for example, its extensive daycare systems and relatively liberal abortion legislation, but virtually invisible queer subcultures) could – or could not – be called more progressive in matters of gender and sexuality, but also whether the Eastern working class ideologies and lifestyles had generated a concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ qualitatively different from its Western counterpart. On yet another plane, political commentaries as well as 1990’s literature and film multiply figured the process of unification as a (hetero-)sexual union between a masculine West and a feminine (as well as often Orientalized) East.
Looking more closely at the emergence and development of postwar societies and cultures since the mid-twentieth century, this course explores these multi-faceted gender matters by studying films, literary fiction and (to the degree possible, given the English- language availability restriction) socio-political materials from both sides of the wall as well as post-unification society (with an emphasis on Germany, but excursions onto larger European terrain). The inclusion of a range of gender and queer theory materials from the 1970s through the 2000s, as well as selected background reading on film and literary aesthetics, will help us to unpack, and conceptualize, the different ways in which gender matters – in their multifaceted overlaps with sexuality, race and class – have played out as a key element of the ‘differential modernities’ constructed in the East and West – not least through images of each other, as indicated by socialist representations of ‘dark’ effeminate Nazis and excessively masculine cowboy capitalists or Western media reports on masculinized female athletes and de-sexualized workforces in the East. Against the background of the (shared) legacy of the bourgeois gender order of European modernity, we will focus on complexities and changes, for example through the formation of women’s and sexual emancipation movements in the West and their (more individualized, but not necessarily less radical) echoes in the sex change stories of East German feminists, as well as the re- assemblages of gender(ed) identities in today’s post-Cold War world.
Films and literary texts discussed could include (very tentatively; for the moment in historical order): Wolfgang Staudte, The Kaiser’s Lackey (1951), Wolfgang Koeppen, The Hothouse (1953) ; Heiner Müller, Correction (1957), Frank Beyer, Trace of Stones (1966); Joachim Hasler, Hot Summer (1968), Rosa v. Praunheim, It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1970), Ingeborg Bachmann: Malina (1971), Rainer Heiner Carow, The Legend of Paul and Paula (1972), Christa Wolf, Self-Experiment (1972); Irmtraud Morgner, Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatriz (1974; excerpts), Werner Fassbinder, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Wim Wenders, Kings of the Road (1976), Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Player (1983), Heiner Carow, Coming Out (1989), Ingo Schulze: Simple Storys [sic, 1998], Antje Ravic Strubel, Snowed Under (2001), Dorota Maslowska, Snow White and Russian Red (2002). This course is offered for students in Germanic Studies, Gender Studies, Communication and Culture and Cultural Studies. All materials are available in English or with English subtitles; thus, German language skills are not required. However, students in Germanic Studies (or fulfilling graduate language requirements) are asked to read literary texts in the original German.
