Katharina Prager, Editing a Scholarly Persona in the New Field of Women’s History. Gerda Lerner’s Integrations and Taboos, in: Johanna Gehmacher / Kirsti Niskaanen / Katharina Prager: When Does the Genius do the Chores?, Special Issue of the European Journal of Life Writing XI, 2022 [peer reviewed] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Poetry and narrative are privileged media of life writing. Poetic and narrative presentations of the self, often related to discrimination and disease, interact with psychotherapeutic or medical treatments. In an ideal situation, the cooperating agents of life writing and narrative medicine yield an ulterior form of communal knowledge with a transnational reach transcending individual self-realization and creating a framework for integration. In my presentation I will focus on Audre Lorde's poetic and narrative account of breast cancer (Cancer Journals, 1980) which precedes her Berlin years as a guest professor in the 1980s when the knowledge derived from her own experiences as "a black lesbian feminist mother lover poet" provided the basis for discriminated Afro-German women to come out and claim their African heritage. Discussions in and out of the classroom led to the joint publication of their individual stories of diversity (Farbe Bekennen, 1986; Showing Our Colors, 1992) and to full-length autobiographical recollections. The shared experience of diversity between the American poet and the German women as outsiders, including social and medical stigmas, remembered and recollected in individual and communal narratives became the prerequisite for integration. The documentary about Audre Lorde's liberating work in Berlin, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984-1992 (dir. Dagmar Schultz, 2012), presents the fellow feeling of the poet and her new partners in the common cause and adds a performance aspect to forms of life writing. At the same time, it reveals the status of diversity before and after the Fall of the Wall in 1989 and the differences in the political Regine STRÄTLING Regine Strätling is a Research Associate (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Bonn. She completed a PhD with a thesis on the autobiographies of Michel Leiris at the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature, Free University of Berlin. Currently, she is working on a book project on the fascination with Maoism among European artists and intellectuals from the 1950s to the 1970s. Recent publications in the field of life writing and the history of subjectivity: the articles "Referentiality," "Michel Leiris: La Règle du jeu (1946-1976) [The Rules of the Game]," and "Roland Barthes: roland BARTHES par roland barthes (1975) [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
Women's Studies International Forum, 1999
In this article, the authors use the example of a schoolteacher and lifelong feminist activist born in Vienna in the late 19th century to discuss questions of biographical writing and the representation of feminist agency. They analyze the ambivalent status of a woman who can neither be conceptualized as a political leader or pioneer nor just as a nameless representative of a social group. In this way, they aim to challenge hidden paradigms in feminist history that make it difficult to represent types of biography that do not fit into conventional models of feminist agency. They propose to look at the archive that is the material background of biographical research as a strategic and symbolic space to discuss questions of memory and the ways in which past and present strategies of narrating and documenting women's lives are intertwined. They argue that collecting and storing 'facts' always has strong imaginary aspects despite the realistic appeal of documents. By discussing two biographical models-the pioneer of women's education and the political activist-as two possible ways to see the biography of their protagonist, they draw attention to the dependency of any biography on the biographer's perspectives as well as the contingencies and limitations of any biographical model.
Літературний процес, 2021
The subject of the study is the system of reticence techniques in the women’s autobiography of Oksana Ivanenko, the Ukrainian writer of the 20th century. Western theorists of women’s autobiography (Mary Mason, Estelle Jelinek) considered relativity, fragmentation, nonlinearity to be its defining qualities. However, the concept of Leigh Gilmore, who considered autobiography as a writing strategy that constructs its object, allows us to raise the question of the potential functions of constructive techniques in this text. These and other studies analyse the autobiographies of women in the Western world, leaving aside the writings of Eastern Europeans, however, the works of those who had to live under Soviet conditions are of particular interest for various reasons. The aim of the proposed study is to show the peculiarities of the creation and functioning of the women’s autobiographics (Gilmore’s self-representation) in ideological societies on the example of Ivanenko’s memoirs “Always in Life”. As a result of the study, it has been found that in Ivanenko’s memoirs the theme of creative selfrealization and literature in general pushes aside the narrative that Western theorists consider to be the main one for women’s biography: comprehending their own female experience (first of all, love, marriage, motherhood). The relativity, embodied in the genre of the essay, allowed the author to talk about oneself, when she wanted it, and at the right moment to return to the pseudo-object. The nonlinearity of the narrative helps emphasize advantageous moments and avoid coerced chronology. However, fragmentation and heterogeneity allow the woman writer not to build a holistic narrative about oneself, but to offer “flickering” content to readers. Thus, feeling ideological pressure, the author escaped memories not only of the difficult period in Ukrainian history, but also of important events in her life, ignoring her true experience. This means that an autobiographical work may be called upon not to record a true experience but to create a socially acceptable version of the writer.
Johanna Gehmacher: Im/possible Careers. Gendered Perspectives on Scholarly Personae around 1900
European Journal of Life Writing, 2022
prompted the reframing of the social field of knowledge production. Taking the case of the women’s rights activist and writer Käthe Schirmacher, who publicly campaigned for women’s access to higher education, I explore the motivations, social transformations and socially available life plans behind her path. To this end, I draw on the concept of the scholarly persona as a mediating instance between individual aspirations and social relations and examine its potential for a gender-sensitive intellectual history. Here I argue that a differentiated analysis of knowledge production in the sciences and the humanities is only possible if non-institutional and, therefore, less obvious gender regimes are also addressed. The institutional and private arrangements that enable academics, intellectuals, and also artists to concentrate on their work play an essential part in their production of knowledge and artistic work. Therefore, the key argument of this paper is that questions about genderspecific (as well as class-specific) life plans in various creative social fields can only be examined in a differentiated way if this support is systematically included in research on the scholarly, intellectual, or artistic persona.
In Cavarero's (2000) philosophical conceptualization of the narratable self, narration, both biographical and autobiographical, is a political act in its capacity to expose the fragile uniqueness of the self in its constitutive relation with others. Drawing on the notions of the narratable self and the relational character of stories, in this paper I am sketching out a genealogy of relating narratives by focusing on an early twentieth century document of life: Rosa Bonheur's auto/biography written by her companion Anna Klumpke. This rare blend of biography and autobiography brings forward in a unique way what Cavarero has defined as the desire of the narratable self to listen to her story being told by others. It further highlights the political and ethical responsibility of the listener to retell and rewrite the story disclosed to her. What I suggest is that there is an urgent need for narrative driven researchers not only to bend over the timely necessity of listening to stories being told by others, but also to problematize their listening and dig deeper into the political and ethical effects of the stories they write and tell.
In the form of memoirs, autobiographies, diaries or correspondence, or given a literary spin as autofiction and biofiction, the experiences of East and SouthEast European women during wartimes and under the oppressive regimes of the twentieth century (a period laden with contrasts, which in the West was hailed as "a century of women", Rowbotham 1997, but also framed as an "age of testimony", Felman and Laub 1992) have been surfacing in the past two decades. The transmission of these narratives followed sinuous paths, taking both verbal and non-verbal forms, relying on both "filial" and "affiliative" networks (Hirsch 2012), and coming from both female victims and female perpetrators (Schwab 2010). If deciphering most of what came to light requires the careful eye of a literary or cultural studies scholar, the broad perspective of a historian, or the attentive ear of a psychoanalyst, some phenomena of resurfacing bring back not only traumatic legacies, but also extremist ones, pushing towards repeating a history of perpetrations (Pető 2020), a concerning tendency which calls for a political scientist's perspective. The persistence of women's psychic wounds, passed on through "postmemory" (Hirsch 1997 & 2012) has generated "haunting legacies" (Schwab 2010) as it shaped the next generation's unconscious reflexes, and has found a forceful outlet in works of life writing coming either from second-generation witnesses or from the publication of previously censored works by victims of totalitarian regimes. The transmission of these narratives happened against the backdrop of an uneven social progress, which created gender gaps and accentuated women's vulnerabilities, despite the presence of emancipation movements, which received official support from some political regimes. This issue will look at how traumatic memories (lived, inherited, or transmitted) are transformed through the aesthetic agency of literature (sometimes with additional support from photography or visual art), thus building a safe space where the revisiting of the past allows room for both reflection and learning. The volume focuses on a triad of aspects of life writing: witnessing (following distinctions made by Derrida and Agamben, and recently refined by van der Heiden 2019, between the Latin testis, superstes, martyrderived from the Greek martusand auctor), enduring (which brings together suffering and duration or survival), and recovering (connoting healing in the intransitive form, but also rescuing or preserving in the transitive). We also want to take into account the influence of censorship and self-censorship on the process of witnessing and the way "missing memory" (Schwartz, Weller, and Winkel, 2021) finds a compensation in fictional forms of life-writing. Contributions should cover the large life writing spectrum (biographical and autobiographical narratives, memoirs, diaries, letters, biofiction, or autofiction), including posthumously published or retrospectively written accounts.
1. Introduction: Biography, Biofiction, and Gender in the Modern Age
Authorizing Early Modern European Women, 2022
Focusing attention upon early modern European women as creators and practitioners, the essays in this volume examine women from saints to midwives, visual artists to writers, who authored their own visions and who have in turn been authored and authorized by modern writers interested in telling their stories in biographies and through fictionalizations. This opening chapter introduces the contemporary scholars and creative writers who are grappling with the challenges of recreating early modern women from Spain, Flanders, Scotland, England, Italy, the Netherlands, and Mexico (then New Spain); and provides a framework for their assessments from the emerging field of biofiction, or fictionalizations of actual figures.
Introduction: Biography, Biofiction, and Gender in the Modern Age
Authorizing Early Modern European Women: From Biography to Biofiction, 2022
Focusing attention upon early modern European women as creators and practitioners, the essays in this volume examine women from saints to midwives, visual artists to writers, who authored their own visions and who have in turn been "authored" and "authorized" by modern writers interested in telling their stories in biographies and through fictionalizations. This opening chapter introduces the contemporary scholars and creative writers who are grappling with the challenges of recreating early modern women from Spain, Flanders, Scotland, England, Italy, the Netherlands, and Mexico (then New Spain); and provides a framework for their assessments from the emerging field of biofiction, or fictionalizations of actual figures.