Genderforschung und Germanistik. Perspektiven von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Moderne von Barbara Becker-Cantarino (review)

In five chapters and an epilogue, gender scholar Barbara Becker-Cantarino presents a combination of critical insights and case-study analyses of how gender perspectives can lead to new interpretations and reveal thematic continuities in German literature. The focus of the study lies firmly in her established areas of expertise in German literature from the sixteenth century through Romanticism, while she also interrogates violence and sexuality in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Drewitz’s Heute war morgen.

The brief preface orients the reader to the critical approach employed in the book and clearly explains that her work is solidly rooted in decades of teaching experience at the University of Texas, Austin; The Ohio State University; and the Freie Universität Berlin; and therefore reflects a pronounced practical bent. Thus, Becker-Cantarino’s critical perspective is determined by her pedagogical experience and delineates her distrust of theoretical superstructures: “mein Misstrauen gegenüber abgehobenem theoretischem Überbau” (9). Her attention strictly focuses on constructions of gender as represented in the actual literary texts—and not on esoteric theoretical constructs. Her critical point of departure is sociological: Pierre Bourdieu’s Die männliche Herrschaft (Masculine Domination, French 1998; German 2005) and Claudia Honegger’s Die Ordnung der Geschlechter. Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen und das Weib 1750–1850 (1991). Building on these two perspectives, Becker-Cantarino mines German literature for representations of the subordinate role of women in society from the early modern period through modernity.

The first chapter, “Gender: Zur Genese eines Forschungsfeldes,” opens with the question “What is gender?” and very quickly moves to an overview of the development of gender studies as a field of academic research, including its trajectory from feminism and women’s studies to gender studies, with a particular focus on the American political and academic systems, especially as they derive from the Civil Rights Movement (19–29). There is an unfortunate typographical error in this section, where the feminist writer Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice, 1982) is subsequently referred to as “Jessica Gilligan” (26). This chapter outlines a trajectory of the field that is well known to American feminists and GermanistInnen, noting the discrepancy between tiny, elitist seminars in deconstruction theory that looked down on the large-enrolment courses in women’s studies concerned with political and practical feminism as non-intellectual and passé (27). Here the author characterizes German universities and American ivy-league and private universities as too fossilized to have embraced women’s studies, while liberal arts colleges and the large state universities—such as the institutions where she has spent her entire, highly productive career—were institutions more open to new directions in women’s studies. Becker-Cantarino is also openly critical of more modern critical approaches to gender as seen in queer studies in general and Judith Butler’s work in particular (37–38), summarizing approaches concerning gender identity and performativity as a dead end (“Sackgasse,” 43). The first chapter prepares the reader well for the literary-critical approaches that shape the next four chapters, which treat different thematic clusters of gender discourses.

Chapters Two through Five offer model readings of literary texts from the early modern period through early twentieth-century German literature. Chapter Two, “Geschlechterdiskurse,” centers on symbolic femininity and masculinity with close readings of the Faust figure (1587) and Grimmelshausen’s Courasche, both subjects covered by Becker-Cantarino in the past. She also includes here Eichendorff’s Marmorbild as well as representations of the “new woman” from around 1900 as portrayed by Carl Hauptmann. Chapter Three focuses on discourses of the body with demonization, sexuality, and violence. Here the texts include comparisons of the early Faust figure with the Walpurgisnacht scene in Faust I, also as read against contemporary visual portrayals of the witch, such as Hans Baldung Grien’s Vorbereitungen zum Hexensabbath (1510). While there is a reproduction of this engraving (90), there are no images...