Gender – Merely a “Social Fact”? : The Construction of Neo-Authoritarian Us/Them Dichotomies

That gender cannot be reduced to an ahistorical fact is a widely researched insight of multidisciplinary gender studies. In theory as well as in political practice gender is thus generally understood as a post- essentialist, reflexive, and contingent concept. Against this backdrop the essay asks for the German context in what way and with which intentions, neo-authoritarian discourses and movements explicitly not only reject, attack and defame gender as concept, but also reclaim it. I will argue that under the cipher ‘anti-genderism’, a discourse has been formed that can first be described as a neo-fundamentalist discourse and that is secondly explicitly used to construct racist, neo-authoritarian us/them-dichotomies. The so called anti-gender forces become thus identifiable as the element of a dispositif, which is at the core and subject to further clarification of anti-democratic nature

Disputed Territory : Feminist Studies in Germany and Its Queer Discontents

When Judith Butler's Gender Trouble appeared in German translation in 1991, the book launched a heated debate among German academic feminists about the status of gender as a category of analysis, and about the future of feminist theory. Tue anxieties were quite fundamental. Is "gender" a category of "nature" or "culture"? And if its "nature" is entirely cultural, a social construction, how can we then speak and act in the name of a gender, i.e., in the name of women? Much of this debate was coded as a conflict between different feminist generations. This trope of "generation" served as a strategy of displacement: "queer issues" figured as a kind of absent/present threat haunting the coherence of Gender Studies as a legitimate field of knowledge, but they were hardly made an explicit subject of discussion. This essay will look at the conscious and unconscious levels of discourse: What is the "positive unconscious" of the socalled "Butler debate"? Who gets to say what and how? What defines an "intelligible" object of study? Who gets to define it? In short, what is the "order of things" that frames discourse? Even if queer theory has had no manifest impact on the definition of Women's and Gender Studies, how did the specter of "queer" structure feminist theory on an unconscious level? And above all, what does all this mean for the future of German academic feminism(s)