Introduction
Introduction to the Special Issue on Gender and Sexuality in German Studies
Guest editors Daniela Roth and Lars Richter
The current rise of anti-2SLGTBQ+ sentiment and various movements that demand a ban of books with content related to gender, sexuality and race (e.g., the Moms for Liberty and recent developments in Florida) have led to increasing polarization when it comes to topics connected to gender identity and expression. This is also visible in Canada (e.g., groups that attempted to force libraries in southern Manitoba to remove sex education books for children), Germany (e.g., controversial discussions related to gender-neutral language), and other countries. As the academic community is shocked by the recent attack on a philosophy professor and students in a class teaching about gender at the University of Waterloo on June 28th 2023, we also have to emphasize that it is more important than ever to teach and critically engage with topics related to gender and sexuality in the humanities. When Dr. Lars Richter (University of Manitoba) and I realized that we were teaching similar courses in the fall term of 2022, we not only agreed on the need to teach courses like this, but also discussed our thoughts about teaching topics in the classroom that could potentially be difficult and uncomfortable for students. The polarization mentioned above finds its echo in our classrooms: While there are students who remain willing to engage with potentially difficult knowledge, others appear less willing to do so.
While it is undoubtedly important to be sensitive when discussing potentially controversial topics and to provide students with content warnings, especially with texts that portray any sort of sexual violence, teaching students theoretical frameworks that provide the necessary vocabulary to give them the tools to discuss these topics is more important than ever. Further, engaging them in literature and culture is still an important way to help students critically reflect on the historical context, public and political discourse and on how our own personal contexts influence how we read, understand and interpret narratives that portray and discuss topics related to gender and sexuality.
The goal of the two courses is to explore a wide range of literary and cultural texts dealing with sex, gender, and cultural politics in the German-speaking world from the 19th to the 21st century. The main focus is the representation of sex and gender in texts and the social and historical climate in which these texts were/are produced. Both courses begin with a short theoretical block that serves as the conceptual foundation of gender theorizing, and then proceed to explore how these ideas were developed and transformed over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st century. Dr. Richter’s course covers texts such as Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Irmgard Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl (1870), N. O. Body’s Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years (1907), and Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands (2008) that deal with the complexities of gender representation as well as movies from different time periods of German-language cinema, such as Different from the Others (1919), Girls in Uniform (1931), and Cloud 9 (2008). My course covered some of the same texts and films (e.g. The Artificial Silk Girl, Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years and Girls in Uniform) and also discussed texts such as Heinrich von Kleist’s The Marquise of O. (1808), Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (1891), Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen (1897), as well as the films Lou (2016) and Scherbenpark (2013).
This special issue showcasing undergraduate essays and other work is based on these two courses, a directed study course based on one of them, and a 4th-year German-language course taught at the Canadian Summer School in Germany (CSSG) 2023. The special issue consists of different sections that show different types of engagement with the topic.
The first section of this publication consists of short essays by Liam Foster, Hailey Glassford, Grace Hall, and Alex Rana based on the assignments for the two culture courses described above.
Liam Foster analyzes the crisis of masculinity in Arthur Schnitzler’s texts Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief, Lieutenant Gustl and Anatol. In his contribution, he focuses on the deficiency of the male honour code of the early 20th century depicted in these three texts.
Hailey Glassford’s contribution focuses on Lou Andreas-Salomé’s text Fenitschka. She argues that the main characters in the story both subscribe to and contradict the assumptions of their sex, and that, in doing so, the text blurs the boundaries between the dominant definitions of femininity and masculinity of the late 19th early 20th centuries.
In her contribution, Grace Hall analyzes the portrayal of prostitution in Schnitzler’s Reigen and Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl. The paper shows that both authors use subversive, and diverging representations of prostitution in order to critique era-specific ideas on sex work and the social status of women in the field of sex work in the early 20th century.
Alex Rana explores how Doris, the protagonist of The Artificial Silk Girl, fulfills the characteristics of the so-called “New Woman” while at the same time analyzing how Doris finds unexpected agency in a patriarchal world by turning Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze” on its head. Rana argues that Doris, at least to some extent, becomes the director of her life-movie by imbuing the narrative with a “female gaze”.
In the second section, there are two creative engagements with Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen. The creative pieces consist of two parts: a reflection in English explaining creative choices, ideas and challenges students had when they created their own texts based on the literary texts discussed in class, and an accompanying text written in German. The objective of these creative pieces was not only to apply class discussions on gender hierarchy, politics and the historical context of Reigen, but also to express their thoughts in creative writing in the target language. Students were free in their choice of topic and how they approached the text (re-write, change of genre, change of setting, change of topic to express similar ideas etc.). When editing the pieces, we attempted to correct grammar mistakes carefully in order to keep as much of the students’ wording as possible. In other words, content was of greater importance to us than linguistic accuracy,
Devoney Ellis’ piece invents two new characters in order to include a queer couple and their perspective, as their story would not have been present in texts written in Schnitzler’s time. The text not only foregrounds queer representation, but also reflects on specific difficulties the characters would presumably experience in the 19th century.
Kyle Foster’s text pairs up two existing characters in the play that are not portrayed together in order to show how this reconfiguration can further subvert power structures and gender hierarchies and underscores the social criticism and the subversion of gender norms in Schnitzler’s play.
The last section contains two essays in German that discuss concepts of masculinity in Johanna Adorján’s Ciao (2021). While both essays discuss a similar topic, Chelsea Lahaie’s contribution focuses on the concept of hegemonic masculinity and its portrayal in Ciao, while Owen Meunier discusses the text as an example for the portrayal of masculinity and contemporary socio-political issues in contemporary German-language literature.
Daniela Roth is an Assistant Professor at Saint Mary’s University. Lars Richter is an Instructor at the University of Manitoba.
Picture: “Portrait of a Woman” by Egon Schiele. Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/389122. Public Domain.
