Book Review: Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe. By Robert Tobin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 240 pp., ISBN 0-8122- … (original) (raw)
Related papers
Outsiders and Others: Queer Friendships in Novels by Hermann Hesse
2022
This dissertation explores how characters who embody outsiderness and/or otherness intersect with and connote queerness—such as, for instance, homoeroticism and nonconformism—in the novels Peter Camenzind (1904) and Der Steppenwolf (1927) by German-language author Hermann Hesse (1877–1962). In most of Hesse’s novels, the narrative revolves around a male protagonist who is characterized as an outsider. This outsider comes to know himself through friendship with another man. The friend is desired by the outsider and tends to embody some form of otherness; he is almost always portrayed as different—rebellious, beautiful, enigmatic, and inspiring—and he comes to play a key role in the protagonist’s personal development and journey through life. The hypothesis in this study is that the friendships formed by these characters are queer friendships, that is, that they challenge heteronormative conceptions of relationality, sexuality, and desire. The study’s main theoretical apparatus encompasses a selection of queer theories and concepts, including (among others) José Esteban Muñoz’s conceptualization of the horizon as a signifier for “queer utopia” as well as Heather Love’s thoughts on “backwardness.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s early queer-theoretical work on male homosocial desire and Jack Halberstam’s recent theorizing about sexuality and wildness are also drawn on. The study begins with an overview chapter on Hesse’s authorship that provides historical context followed by two parts (one on Peter Camenzind and one on Der Steppenwolf) with three analytical chapters each. The overview chapter revolves around certain norm-challenging aspects of Hesse’s time and reception. Hesse was active alongside the German homosexual emancipation movement and emerging field of sexology in the early 1900s, and his work was embraced by contemporary countercultures such as the German Wandervogel groups and by later anti-conformist movements like beatniks and hippies. Despite these connections, however, Hesse’s novels have rarely been interpreted with an ambition to emphasize queerness. The common thread in the study’s six analytical chapters is depictions of queer friendship. In each chapter, one character is in primary focus. This character’s portrayal as an outsider or Other (or both) is examined. In some instances, the protagonist is the key person of interest; at other times, the protagonist’s friend is in focus. Chapter one, “Romantic Friendship in a Bildungsroman,” centers on Peter, the outsider-protagonist in Peter Camenzind, and his homosocial bond with the character Richard. The chapter examines how defining traits of the Bildungsroman (novel of formation) and the concept of romantic friendship intersect in the novel. Chapter two, “Without Leaving Children Behind,” explores heterosexual ambivalence, which Peter conveys in his interactions with women, which is interpreted as a manifestation of queerness. While the chapter concerns a number of female characters, Peter’s friend Elisabeth is the key character. Chapter three, “Facing the Other,” focuses on Peter’s friend Boppi. The otherness ascribed to Boppi through his disability is examined, as well as the ways that disability works as a catalyst for expressions of “queer/crip kinship” in the text. Chapter four, “Tracing the Wolf,” examines a key expression of otherness in Der Steppenwolf, namely, the animality of its protagonist, the wolf-man (and outsider) Harry Haller. This chapter is different from the others in that it does not revolve around queer friendship per se. Rather, it emphasizes the antithesis of friendship, that is, a bond built on animosity, a major characteristic in the relationship between the human part and the wolf part of the protagonist. Chapter five, “The Function of Hermine,” explores the fluid gender expressions and queer characteristics of Harry’s friend Hermine. Hermine is a character whose otherness mirrors the protagonist’s dual nature. Chapter six, “Queer Sounds, Times, and Places,” puts the spotlight on Pablo, another of Harry’s friends, and examines how the novel’s portrayal of sounds (such as jazz music), times (the conflict between the old and the new), and places (like the dance floor) connote queerness in various ways. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that Hermann Hesse’s stories include queerness both in the shape of nonconformity in the characters, and in norm-challenging sexuality and the prevalence of homoeroticism. In addition, Peter Camenzind and Der Steppenwolf convey that queerness is essential to their protagonists’ longings to become whole and in the ways that the novels portray completeness.
The Textuality of Sexuality: Interpreting Homosexuality in Two European Inter-War Narratives
Comparative Literature Studies, 2021
This article is a comparative reading of the novella Verwirrung der Gefühle (1927) by the Austrian author Stefan Zweig and the novel Følelsers forvirring (1937) by the Norwegian author Borghild Krane. While both titles translate as Confusion of Emotions, and both deal with the fates of homosexuals, this is the first study to ask how the connections between the two works create literary meaning, and what this might imply for the textual mode of existence of homosexuality. Employing poststructuralist theories on the textuality of sexuality, this article argues that interpretation of linguistic and cultural signs is fundamental to the idea of homosexuality in the European inter-war years. Positing the existence of a homocultural code, the article explores in depth how the ability to understand and reproduce a particular system of references is depicted as vital in understanding same-sex attraction. Moreover, the article argues that the way Krane intertextually connects her novel to Zweig's novella should be read as symbolic of how the homosexual condition is marked by the mastering of various codes.
What does it mean to queer German history? More provocatively, how might queering it move us to ask new and different questions of our work, regardless of whether we write about matters of intimacy, eros, sexuality or love? This special issue presents five articles that, in unique and different ways, critically reconstruct the lifeworlds, struggles and intimacies of same-sex desiring men, women and gender variant people over the longue durée. At the same time, in the spirit of two decades' worth of scholarship that sees queer as much as a methodological intervention as an epithet, it seeks to go a step further. If the ultimate point of a queered German history is not simply to chronicle the exploits of same-sex identified people over time for an audience already open to the history of sexuality, then this introduction aims to suggest ways in which queering German history might aid us in thinking more critically about how conventions, ideals, norms and, above all, practices gain traction and resonance in our history writing, often as unquestioned truths. As I'll show, a critical approach drawing on the insights of 'queer theory' sheds light on the processes by which hierarchies of meaning and experience generally are made and remade in different spaces and places, including how it is that they sometimes come to be regarded as unchanging and immutable. A queered history questions claims to a singular, linear march of time and universal experience and points out the unconscious ways in which progressive narrative arcs often seep into our analyses. To queer the past is to view it sceptically, to pull apart its constitutive pieces and analyse them from a variety of perspectives, taking nothing for granted. Keenly attuned to how power manifests as a subject of study in its own right as well as something we reproduce despite our best intentions to right past wrongs, a queer methodology emphasizes overlap, contingency, competing forces and complexity. It asks us to linger over our own assumptions-individual as well as societal-to interrogate the role they play in the past that we seek out, discover and recreate in our writing. To queer history, then, is to think about how even our best efforts of historical restitution might inadvertently limit what is in fact discernable in the past despite attempts to make visible alternative ways of being in the world in the present. How might history look if we were to render historical categories strange instead of assuming they apply more or less uniformly across time, to all people? To queer history instead of just writing histories of queerly situated or queer identified people is to draw on a wide array of conceptual tools-often from other disciplines-to lay bare common assumptions about the world in which our subjects lived. When we do this, we begin to write histories that chip away at the progress narrative with its overwhelming focus on the twentieth century as that moment when sexual knowledge and practices evolved out of repression and shame to enlightenment, making space for tolerance and diversity. Instead, by taking up one of Laura Doan's arguments in her 2013 book * I wish to thank the journal editors, who have championed this special issue and given unending support in shepherding it through to publication.
Frank Wedekind's late play Franziska (1912) has long been read primarily as a female version of the Faust myth. I argue that it is more fruitful to regard Franziska as a critical elaboration of predominant gender norms of the Wilhelmine era. Central issues that are at stake in the play include the discussion of the possibility of marriage, the natural differences between the sexes, the gender discourse of post-idealist philosophy, censorship of discussions related to the topic of sexuality and patriarchal imaginings of gender-related features. Setting Franziska in its socio-historical context will expose the play's subversive potential and enable a new evaluation of its significance within Wedekind's œuvre. Frank Wedekinds spätes Stück Franziska (1912) wurde lange Zeit primär als eine weibliche Version des Faustmythos gelesen. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird dargelegt, dass es produktiver ist, Franziska als eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit dominierenden Geschlechternormen der Wilhelminischen Ära zu betrachten. Die thematischen Schwerpunkte des Stückes umfassen die Auseinandersetzung mit der Haltbarkeit des Ehekonzepts, die natürlichen Unterschiede zwischen den Geschlechtern, den Geschlechterdiskurs der postidealistischen Philosophie, die Zensur von Äußerungen zum Thema Sexualität sowie patriarchalische Imaginationen geschlechtsspezifischer Eigenschaften. Durch die soziohistorische Verortung von Franziska wird das subversive Potential des Werkes evident werden und sich die Möglichkeit einer neuen Bewertung des Stückes innerhalb von Wedekinds Œuvre ergeben.
On Love, Women, and Friendship: Reading Nietzsche with Irigaray
Nietzsche-Studien, 2017
‘On Love, Women, and Friendship: Reading Nietzsche with Irigaray’, Nietzsche-Studien 46.1 (2017): 135–152. This essay examines Nietzsche’s accounts of love and the gender troubles of friendship. In many passages, Nietzsche situates love as an impairment to friendship. In particular, he believes that erotic or sexual love, understood as a drive that seeks to possess and control the other, prevents two people from entering into the shared project of friendship. Nietzsche implies that gender roles, and the cultural expectations associated with these types, make friendship very difficult between women and men. The reason why women in Nietzsche’s account cannot move from love relationships into friendship is because they are primarily esteemed for their fulfillment of gender stereotypes. In order to avoid the perils of assimilation, pointed to by Nietzsche, it is imperative to develop an ethics of friendship that changes the way people approach and love one another. Luce Irigaray present such an alternative with her account of wonder. She argues that recognition requires a negative movement in which one acknowledges one’s limits in understanding the other. Irigaray designates a transformative and activist potential to love, as a benefit to friendship in its erotic and practical qualities. She claims that when love is expressed alongside the passion of wonder there is a stronger potential for recognition between two people. With the assistance of Irigaray, this essay questions Nietzsche’s assessment that love is an impasse to friendship by asking if love need be as assimilating as Nietzsche proposes.