Marcia Klotz | University of Arizona (original) (raw)
Papers by Marcia Klotz
Genders, 1994
The child will be stillborn in any case, of course; Eckenbrecher is no more able to save the pati... more The child will be stillborn in any case, of course; Eckenbrecher is no more able to save the patient's life than was her rival. This brings me to a second movement within the text, one that does not pit the author against the healing woman but develops an identification between the two. If the author cannot rely on the patient's ultimate recovery to demonstrate the superiority of a European technology of the body, then the contest between the two women can only be decided by their relative abilities to manipulate words and images --by playing one form of magic off against another. Eckenbrecher's triumph over her rival lies only in Lydia's confession of faith: "Your practice is more powerful," in itself nothing more than a magical incantation. She follows suit with a prophecy, delivered in a style that is noticeably incongruous with the rest of her narrative ("Before the moon stands above the Huk [corner] of the river, the child will be dead"). This sentence is emphasized by the fact that she does not simply paraphrase her own speech for the reader, but quotes herself directly. Yet these, her own words as she reproduces them, are already quoting someone else, imitating what she considers to be --or tries to pass off as --authentic native speech. She signals this by marking time according to the passage of the moon across the sky, rather than by reference to the movement of hands across the face of a clock, and leaves a marker of the linguistic barrier that separates her speech from theirs in the Dutch word "Huk" (corner), for which she must offer her readers a translation. This leads into a hall-of-mirrors game of mimetic regression, with Eckenbrecher quoting herself as she imitates native speech, which is to say, she imitates the Herero's imitation of her own speech, with a single mocknative word thrown in, actually a reproduction of African speech reproducing the voice of a different colonizer. Yet it is through the very multiplicity of mimetic mediations that the statement dialectically tries to appropriate the authenticity of a magical language. As Homi Bhabha suggests, "The desire to emerge as `authentic' through mimicry --through a process of writing and repetition --is the final irony of partial representation."(16) Substantively, these words mark the point at which the author abandons all hope of saving the child's life. It is significant that she proceeds to care for the patient anyway, again according to a logic of mimetic magic. Just as the old woman had removed her bandages, so she now washes off the magic salve. Each woman simply negates the work of her predecessor. This completed, there is nothing left but to "make the child's death easier," with which act the narrator fulfills her own prophecy --and she makes a point of telling us that the child dies before the moon goes down. She thus proves herself to be the more powerful magician, usurping the identity of the shaman she has ejected from the pontok.In this anecdote one sees a feminized version of two tropes that appear quite often in colonial texts written by men. In her role as representative of European medicine, Eckenbrecher personifies the civilizing mission, bringing the power of European knowledge to superstitious natives as she penetrates, opens up, and illuminates the mysterious spaces of African darkness. And in her role as healing woman, she discovers a feminized version of the quest for regeneration in the colonies. In more masculinist examples of colonial discourse, this quest generally pertains to the opportunity to prove soldierly courage in battle with rebellious natives.(17) Lieutenant Stohlmann, a German officer in the Herero war, provides a good example of such masculine rhetoric: "I was convinced over there that the German soldier, despite the long period of peace, hasn't lost his courage, and that the softening influence of modern civilization has not yet harmed the mass of our people....it was worthwhile to show all of those people who lack faith in the army, who don't believe in its courage and put down its representatives, that our sword is still sharp."(18)
Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2001
New German Critique, 1998
... world view: [T]he love letters addressed to a corrupt Jew, but a Jew portrayed by an Aryan ac... more ... world view: [T]he love letters addressed to a corrupt Jew, but a Jew portrayed by an Aryan actor, can be read as an instance of rebellion against the denial and sacrifice of the female self demanded by the regime .... During this ...
The German Quarterly, 1997
The three essays in this volume all agree that the intersection between queer theory and Marxism ... more The three essays in this volume all agree that the intersection between queer theory and Marxism constitutes a productive field for theorizing sexual politics. Rosemary Hennessy's article argues that capitalism produces human affect and human need that get bound up with various forms of identity, made fungible both within and outside the workplace. She focuses on a case study to show how sexual identities have been instrumentalized to extract additional surplus value from the maquiladora system. Kevin Floyd shows that Lukács's misreading of Marx led him to condemn sexuality, because it involves objectifying another human being as a means to an end. Marcia Klotz argues that Marx's critique of alienation, as it applies to labor, could be fruitfully applied to sexuality as well.
JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital... more JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.
Genders, 1994
The child will be stillborn in any case, of course; Eckenbrecher is no more able to save the pati... more The child will be stillborn in any case, of course; Eckenbrecher is no more able to save the patient's life than was her rival. This brings me to a second movement within the text, one that does not pit the author against the healing woman but develops an identification between the two. If the author cannot rely on the patient's ultimate recovery to demonstrate the superiority of a European technology of the body, then the contest between the two women can only be decided by their relative abilities to manipulate words and images --by playing one form of magic off against another. Eckenbrecher's triumph over her rival lies only in Lydia's confession of faith: "Your practice is more powerful," in itself nothing more than a magical incantation. She follows suit with a prophecy, delivered in a style that is noticeably incongruous with the rest of her narrative ("Before the moon stands above the Huk [corner] of the river, the child will be dead"). This sentence is emphasized by the fact that she does not simply paraphrase her own speech for the reader, but quotes herself directly. Yet these, her own words as she reproduces them, are already quoting someone else, imitating what she considers to be --or tries to pass off as --authentic native speech. She signals this by marking time according to the passage of the moon across the sky, rather than by reference to the movement of hands across the face of a clock, and leaves a marker of the linguistic barrier that separates her speech from theirs in the Dutch word "Huk" (corner), for which she must offer her readers a translation. This leads into a hall-of-mirrors game of mimetic regression, with Eckenbrecher quoting herself as she imitates native speech, which is to say, she imitates the Herero's imitation of her own speech, with a single mocknative word thrown in, actually a reproduction of African speech reproducing the voice of a different colonizer. Yet it is through the very multiplicity of mimetic mediations that the statement dialectically tries to appropriate the authenticity of a magical language. As Homi Bhabha suggests, "The desire to emerge as `authentic' through mimicry --through a process of writing and repetition --is the final irony of partial representation."(16) Substantively, these words mark the point at which the author abandons all hope of saving the child's life. It is significant that she proceeds to care for the patient anyway, again according to a logic of mimetic magic. Just as the old woman had removed her bandages, so she now washes off the magic salve. Each woman simply negates the work of her predecessor. This completed, there is nothing left but to "make the child's death easier," with which act the narrator fulfills her own prophecy --and she makes a point of telling us that the child dies before the moon goes down. She thus proves herself to be the more powerful magician, usurping the identity of the shaman she has ejected from the pontok.In this anecdote one sees a feminized version of two tropes that appear quite often in colonial texts written by men. In her role as representative of European medicine, Eckenbrecher personifies the civilizing mission, bringing the power of European knowledge to superstitious natives as she penetrates, opens up, and illuminates the mysterious spaces of African darkness. And in her role as healing woman, she discovers a feminized version of the quest for regeneration in the colonies. In more masculinist examples of colonial discourse, this quest generally pertains to the opportunity to prove soldierly courage in battle with rebellious natives.(17) Lieutenant Stohlmann, a German officer in the Herero war, provides a good example of such masculine rhetoric: "I was convinced over there that the German soldier, despite the long period of peace, hasn't lost his courage, and that the softening influence of modern civilization has not yet harmed the mass of our people....it was worthwhile to show all of those people who lack faith in the army, who don't believe in its courage and put down its representatives, that our sword is still sharp."(18)
Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2001
New German Critique, 1998
... world view: [T]he love letters addressed to a corrupt Jew, but a Jew portrayed by an Aryan ac... more ... world view: [T]he love letters addressed to a corrupt Jew, but a Jew portrayed by an Aryan actor, can be read as an instance of rebellion against the denial and sacrifice of the female self demanded by the regime .... During this ...
The German Quarterly, 1997
The three essays in this volume all agree that the intersection between queer theory and Marxism ... more The three essays in this volume all agree that the intersection between queer theory and Marxism constitutes a productive field for theorizing sexual politics. Rosemary Hennessy's article argues that capitalism produces human affect and human need that get bound up with various forms of identity, made fungible both within and outside the workplace. She focuses on a case study to show how sexual identities have been instrumentalized to extract additional surplus value from the maquiladora system. Kevin Floyd shows that Lukács's misreading of Marx led him to condemn sexuality, because it involves objectifying another human being as a means to an end. Marcia Klotz argues that Marx's critique of alienation, as it applies to labor, could be fruitfully applied to sexuality as well.
JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital... more JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.