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  • Wîplich man. Formen und Funktionen von ‘Effemination’ in deutschsprachigen Erzähltexten des 13. Jahrhunderts
  • Karina Marie Ash
Wîplich man. Formen und Funktionen von ‘Effemination’ in deutschsprachigen Erzähltexten des 13. Jahrhunderts. By Andrea Moshövel. Aventiuren Bd. 5. Göttingen: Vanderhoek & Ruprecht Unipress, 2009. Pp. 563. € 64.90.

Andrea Moshövel’s work, as the title suggests, explores the forms and functions of effeminacy in thirteenth-century Middle High German narratives. Three main premises guide this exploration and shape its direction. First, effeminacy is defined as feminine attributes or behavior adopted by male characters that affects literary representations of masculinity (p. 13). Secondly, it is understood as a sign of weakness and undesirability that reflects “einen misogynen und homophoben Ausdruck vor Ängsten um die Auflösung der Geschlechtergrenzen” (p. 15). Thirdly, the boundaries between a desirable masculinity and an undesirable femininity should be delineated with Thomas Laqueur’s One-Sex-Model (pp. 16–17) and Judith Butler’s performativity theories (pp. 28–45). After clarifying her premises, Moshövel focuses her study on two vivid expressions of effeminacy in medieval German literature: the cross-dressing man and the presumed-to-be pregnant man.

This focus enables Moshövel to buttress her first chapter with a number of provocative questions, such as: To what extent are cross-dressing and pregnancy related to a loss in status for male figures (p. 53)? Are there manifestations of the One-Sex-Model in the bodies of these figures (p. 53)? Which perceptions of masculinity and femininity are expressed in the texts (p.54)? How do language, gender, and bodies act on each other reciprocally (p. 54)? Before beginning her wide-ranging investigation, Moshövel points out that all of these questions do serve a unifying purpose: “um das wechelseitige Zusammenspiel von sex, gender und Begehren unter dem Vorzeichen des heterosexuellen Begehrens besser in den Blick nehmen zu können” (p.54).

The subsequent chapters consider the phenomena of male figures cross-dressing and experiencing imagined pregnancies according to broad genre categories. Examples from the Sangsprüche of six poets (Walter von der Vogelweide, Heinrich von Meißen, Bruder Wernher, Reinmar von Zweter, Der Meißner, and Konrad von Würzburg) lead Moshövel to argue that this genre incorporates speech acts to support a concept of a divine and natural order in ways which reinforce male dominance to uphold a norm of masculinity and heterosexuality (chap. 2). The legend of Jerome in Das Passional and the legend of the Virgin of Antioch in both Das Väterbuch and the Legenda aurea provide examples of cross-dressing in hagiography that Moshövel interprets as a type of effeminacy that either discredits a male saint or exposes the faults of his community (chap. 3). Moshövel then examines the legend of Nero across a number of genres in Das Passional, the Legenda aurea, Die Kaiserchronik, Jan von Enikels Weltchronik, and Mauritius von Craûn, along with the Legend of Galla in the Legenda aurea, to elucidate the influences of genre conventions on literary representations of imagined male pregnancy and homoerotic acts between men (chap. 4). Pregnant and cross-dressing characters from six Mären (“Friedrich von Antfurt,” “Der Schreiber,” “Irregang und Girregar,” “Der schwangere Müller,” and “Des Mönches Not”) may point to ambivalent fates in this genre but, according to Moshövel, these works are united in promoting the insurmountability of masculine heterosexuality and its regulating drive toward stabilizing society (chap. 5). A final analysis of three thirteenth-century epics (Wolfdietrich B, Konrad von Würzburg’s Trojanerkrieg, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst) allows Moshövel to further consider stories of romance and [End Page 553] seduction between cross-dressing men and their comparatively inadequate women and to conclude that these epics reveal misogynistic constructions of femininity which threaten to undermine heterosexual masculinity through categorical crises of gender orientation in the fictional representations of politics, war, and violence (chap. 6). In the final chapter, Moshövel summarizes her findings and acknowledges that the preceding chapters comprise but a small snippet of the complexity of premodern literary constructions of gender (chap. 7).

Moshövel’s concession that her work offers...

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