Berlin Stool: Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism, Affective Pessimism and Abjection in Dogs of Berlin

Against the backdrop of an insurgent far right and numerous deadly neo-Nazi attacks, various cultural practitioners have written far-right violence into Germany’s collective memory and imagined more inclusive futures in its wake. This volume explores contemporary examples from literature, music, theatre, film, television and art that respond to this situation. They demonstrate that, alongside the ways in which art expands the public sphere in terms of what is said and who is heard, aesthetic questions of how artistic works are presented are a crucial part of how they open up new perspectives.</p

The Ethics of Difference: Masculinity and Foreignness in Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann (2016) and Valeska Grisebach's Western (2017)

This article explores the convergence of masculinity and foreignness in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016) and Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017). Identifying a growing focus on masculinity in recent works by women directors around the world, I argue that both films express an urgent need in feminist film culture to understand and challenge patriarchal oppression as necessarily connected to other forms of social hierarchy based on difference. Engaging with Luce Irigaray’s ethics of difference and her theory of wonder, I view these films as feminist efforts to go beyond solely exposing hegemonic masculinities in order to denaturalize gendered subjectivity primarily through the experience of foreignness. Wonder, I suggest, is not only the ethical or relational basis through which Ade and Grisebach articulate and denaturalize hegemonic masculinities, but also the basis on which the protagonists engage with alterity (including their own) in these films.</p