New Women, New Men, New Objectivity (original) (raw)
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Using the well-known work of the artist Hannah Höch (b.1889 d.1978, German) as a springboard for discussions about the experiences of the German ‘Neue Frau’ (New Woman), this thesis will explore and unveil the work of other artists who explored similar themes or had similar experiences to further contribute to revisionist feminist and LGBT art history. Utilising a collection of primary sources in addition to secondary sources and existing research to explore the contents of artworks, placing them within a social-historical context. The artworks will also be discussed and placed within the wider framework of visual culture via comparisons with the covers and content of lesbian weekly magazine Die Freundin. Weimar Germany, Berlin in particular, was known for being a hotbed of liberalism. They offered women unprecedented freedoms within Europe; this was expressed through access to work and women’s participation in politics as well as through a brand of modernity and style unique in the city, women’s dress influenced and was influenced by urbanity through a fashionable osmosis. Part of the style was an appropriation of typically male styling: women took up traditionally male pass times and sported shorn hair; shirts and smoking were just some of the monikers of the Neu Frau. In the lesbian and transsexual communities too, with thanks to the social liberalism of the city and the influence of research from sexologists presented in public papers, were also afforded greater freedom of expression. Even within these ‘subversive’ groups however the entrenched power paradigms of archetypical gender dynamics infiltrated and were translated into hierarchies of dress code and typecasting and rating women based on how apparent their ‘male attributes’ were. Why was the ‘Mannweib’ (translation: virago- ‘a woman of masculine strength or spirit’) so adorned? Was this an expression of ‘learned misogyny’ within the queer community? How did the lesbian press support and squash preconceived ideas about sexuality and gender identity? This thesis will therefore examine Höch, with her celebration of femininity in the context of her artistic peers to investigate whether they confirmed or cracked down on sexism and preconceptions about womanhood in their artworks.
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Socialist ideals of womanhood produced new tropes which embodied the attempts to release women from bourgeois notions of femininity. At the same time, the feminine and sexualized figure retained currency through its long tradition within mainstream Western art which continued to exert influence in the GDR, in part because gender and identity were not part of the Marxist ideological framework which determined artistic policy. The chapter identifies where “the feminine” can be observed in established codes of stance, gesture, expression, clothing and hair, and ask where it may have sought to resist or conform to expectations of socialist womanhood as this struggled with its own internal contradictions of seeking both equality and maintaining difference.
History of Psychology, 2015
This article addresses the roles women and gender played in the production of sexological knowledge in the early 20th century, particularly in German-speaking Europe. Although existing scholarship focuses almost exclusively on the work of "founding fathers" such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld, women in fact made important contributions to the field. Based on analysis of texts written between 1900 and 1931, this article shows how women were able to successfully mobilize their gender as a privileged form of "situated knowledge," and thereby assert their authority over and superior insights into certain subject areas, namely, female sexualities and sexual difference. At the same time, however, this article also highlights the constraints upon women's gendered standpoint. It shows that women's sexological writing was not just informed by their gender but also by their class and race. Moreover, because gender threatened to cast their work as insufficiently objective and scientific, women cleaved to sexology's rules of evidence and argumentation, and adopted the field's ideological trappings in order to participate in discursive contestations over sexual truths. By interrogating gender, this article introduces much-needed nuance into existing understandings of sexology, and reframes sexology itself as a site wherein new sexual subjectivities were imagined, articulated, and debated. However, it also raises fundamental questions about women sexologists' capacity to create knowledge about women and female sexualities that was truer, more correct, and more authentic than that produced by men.
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Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945
Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed key developments in LGBT history, including the growth of the world's first homosexual organizations and gay and lesbian magazines, as well as an influential community of German sexologists and psychoanalysts. Queer Identities and Politics in Germany describes these events in detail, from vibrant gay social scenes to the Nazi persecution that sent many LGBT people to concentration camps. Clayton J. Whisnant recounts the emergence of various queer identities in Germany from 1880 to 1945 and the political strategies pursued by early homosexual activists. Drawing on recent English and German-language scholarship, he enriches the debate over whether science contributed to social progress or persecution during this period, and he offers new information on the Nazis' preoccupation with homosexuality. The book's epilogue locates remnants of the pre-1945 era in Germany today
An Awkward Predicament: "The German Man" and Feminized Modernity in the 1840s
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This article examines self-disparaging representations of "the German man" in humorous middle-class visual and textual publications of the 1840s. Considering contemporary notions of German national character and the emergence of contradictory masculine ideals, the analysis traces the dual representation of the German man as either an emasculated philistine or a hypermasculine quixotic hero. Based on this analysis, it argues that just as a German national movement was acquiring unprecedented political potency, a highly gendered sense of German national ineptness was widespread among the German bourgeoisie. Both the philistine and the quixotic German were cast as inadequate in the face of a corruptive, feminized modernity that was unfairly advantageous to the French. These findings underscore how gender and national stereotypes in nineteenth-century Germany were mutually destabilizing and repeatedly negotiated, profoundly shaping contemporaries' understanding of the world changing around them.
Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2014
W hat is "woman"? What could-indeed should-she become? Such questions preoccupied an array of social actors at the turn of the twentieth century throughout much of the modernizing world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, political upheaval, profound demographic shifts, and above all middle-class feminist activism had put pressure on hegemonic understandings and ideals of womanhood and helped incite the so-called woman question ðOffen 2000Þ. Public debate on the woman question peaked at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly between the 1880s and the 1910s-notably a period of expansion for organized women's movements around the world ðRupp 1997; Offen 2000Þ. During this time, diverse members of the public exchanged their ideas regarding womanhood in lectures and print media. That the woman question was constituted by an exchange of ideas is important to stress, as the diverse visions of womanhood put forward drew upon, and were rationalized by, existing knowledge.