Crossing Central Europe

This volume studies elements of Austro-Hungarian or Central European culture that were common across linguistic, national, and ethnic communities, and shows how some of these commonalities survived or were transformed by the turmoil of the 20th century: two world wars, a major depression between the wars, Stalinism and the Iron Curtain

Digital Feminisms and the Impasse: Time, Disappearance, and Delay in Neoliberalism

This collaborative essay considers the way feminist activism takes shape in the context of time-based feminist performance art. We argue that the formal and aesthetic interventions into digital culture of Noah Sow, Chicks on Speed, and Hito Steyerl articulate political resistance within feminist impasses and neoliberal circularities. Our analysis focuses on how these artists engage digital platforms to make visible otherwise imperceptible aspects of the present, including consumerism, wellness, imperial warfare as crisis ordinariness, and modes of digital hypervisibility, perception, and representation. Not only do these works uncover, grapple with, and potentially dissolve the bind of feminism, but they also work against the imperceptibility of neoliberalism as second nature or common sense. In the form of this essay (with comment bubbles and hyperlinks), we highlight our process of thinking about these works and expose the collaborative process of feminist academic writing in the digital age as yet another form of searching for spaces of political resistance and solidarity. Should be viewed with current versions of Firefox, Safari, or Adobe PDF viewer/reader

“Knaller-Sex für alle”: Popfeminist Body Politics in Lady Bitch Ray, Charlotte Roche, and Sarah Kuttner

Germany has seen a recent upsurge in publications proclaiming that feminism is again an urgent matter for a new generation of women. Faced with the reactionary demography debate and the hegemony of second-wave feminism, young writers, musicians, journalists, and critics call for new models of feminism relevant to women today. As one of these viable models, popfeminism draws on dominant trends in mass culture, on pop’s forty-year history as a cultural prefix in Germany, and on traditional feminism in order to create a new, ostensibly apolitical, feminist subculture based in self-stylization and individual autonomy. Shared by many popfeminist sources is the depiction of negatively coded female corporeality. This article begins with a theoretical analysis of writings on sexuality and the body in recent (pop)feminist nonfiction. It then examines the negative corporeal self-stylizations in Turkish-German rapper Lady Bitch Ray’s performances since 2006, in former music video host Charlotte Roche’s novel Feuchtgebiete (2008), and in media personality Sarah Kuttner’s novel Mängelexemplar (2009). Ultimately, these negatively coded bodies are shown to uncover popfeminism’s political intent

“Knaller-Sex für alle”: Popfeminist Body Politics in Lady Bitch Ray, Charlotte Roche, and Sarah Kuttner

Germany has seen a recent upsurge in publications proclaiming that feminism is again an urgent matter for a new generation of women. Faced with the reactionary demography debate and the hegemony of second-wave feminism, young writers, musicians, journalists, and critics call for new models of feminism relevant to women today. As one of these viable models, popfeminism draws on dominant trends in mass culture, on pop’s forty-year history as a cultural prefix in Germany, and on traditional feminism in order to create a new, ostensibly apolitical, feminist subculture based in self-stylization and individual autonomy. Shared by many popfeminist sources is the depiction of negatively coded female corporeality. This article begins with a theoretical analysis of writings on sexuality and the body in recent (pop)feminist nonfiction. It then examines the negative corporeal self-stylizations in Turkish-German rapper Lady Bitch Ray’s performances since 2006, in former music video host Charlotte Roche’s novel Feuchtgebiete (2008), and in media personality Sarah Kuttner’s novel Mängelexemplar (2009). Ultimately, these negatively coded bodies are shown to uncover popfeminism’s political intent

Introduction: Crossings and Encounters

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Crossing Central Europe

This volume studies elements of Austro-Hungarian or Central European culture that were common across linguistic, national, and ethnic communities, and shows how some of these commonalities survived or were transformed by the turmoil of the 20th century: two world wars, a major depression between the wars, Stalinism and the Iron Curtain

Crossing Central Europe: Continuities and Transformations, 1900 and 2000

info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Awkwardness and Assemblage: Digital Schemes for Feminist World-Making

14 pagesIn this essay, we develop the concept of awkward assemblages to describe feminist digital activism that is multidirectional in its political effects and interpretive legibility, built of uneasy bedfellows and ill-suited coalitional partners. We exemplify the way in which activist practices, developing out of the tensions in which contemporary feminisms find themselves, complicate the genealogy of feminist protest. We focus on feminist responses triggered by the sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve 2015/16, particularly the work of Swiss-German performance artist Milo Moiré. This example allows us to highlight the complex ways in which local and contemporary feminist interventions intersect with the history of feminist protest art and how they link to transnational movements—among other examples, the #MeToo movement. We then turn to digital-feminist coalitional possibilities by thinking through assembling, along with coding and hacking, as performative labor that emphasizes the potential of inventing and visualizing political forms that (however awkwardly) materialize different worlds

Introduction: Contemporary German-language literature and transnationalism

Transnationalism is “not new and has been around since ancient times,” Michael Howard reminds us.¹ Yet in the contemporary era the “ties, interactions, exchange and mobility” that connect across and between nations, Steven Vertovec argues, “function intensively and in real time while being spread throughout the world.”² Economic globalization, instantaneous electronic media, and the movement of millions around the globe today appear to be rendering national borders—and the cultures, polities, and frameworks of understanding that they are imagined to contain—more porous than ever before