- Editors’ Introduction
As we prepare volume 27 for production, yet another anniversary approaches. Fifty years after the Berlin Wall was built, we have witnessed its fall and contemplated the consequences of its half-century function and ultimate collapse. In The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005), Thomas L. Friedman designated the fall of the Wall as the first “flattener,” linking it to the opening of “windows” (as PC operating systems) and paving the way for a new economic geography for those from the other side of the Wall. Walls now seem to have many sides, not just two. Friedman, in identifying the Wall’s fall as the inaugural flattening force, clearly connects the historical fact of the German-German border’s demise with the rise of technologies that enable widespread modes of communication, new approaches to work, and the expansion of e-commerce. Given the intricacy of contemporary politics, culture, and economics with global scope, a worldview with Germany at its center might strike us as remote and anachronistic.
Yet it falls into the purview of German and gender studies scholarship to pay attention to shifts in real and imagined boundaries as the headlines fade into history. As the essays in this volume demonstrate amply, there remains a feminist imperative to examine borders that continue to define the human experience, from both a historical and a contemporary perspective. While we must attend to discussions of the postnational, we must also reconceptualize the relationships among place, identity, and citizenship. Women may, to invoke the work of Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, 2009), live beneath and hold up “half the sky,” but gender as a category of both academic inquiry and the human condition continues to fall through the cracks of consciousness. Or, it persists as the object of critique. A recent Google search for “feminism in Germany 2011” yielded first and foremost a blog entry on a website about an anti-feminist [End Page ix] movement in German-speaking Europe. The blog links to the Interessengemeinschaft Antifeminismus Deutschland (IGAFD). A news article reporting on the appointment of an outspoken feminist, Susanne Baer, to the Federal Constitutional Court came up third (Mast-Kirschning) in the search engine’s list. Often the use of digital research tools can have its own flattening effect, but the hierarchy in this regime of knowledge points to a continuing, even urgent need for feminist scholarship grounded in an academic discipline but with global scope and consequence.
We continue to be impressed by the range and depth of the topics represented in the submission pool and in the final product. In two articles on the literature of the early nineteenth century, we encounter issues of cross-dressing, spatial transgression, and musical agency. In her contribution to this volume, “Revolutionizing Domesticity: Potentialities of Female Self-Definition in Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin (1801),” Liesl Allingham takes another look at Schlegel’s intervention into a discourse about gender complementarity that purportedly maintains the boundaries between a feminized private and masculinized public sphere. Allingham offers an interpretation of the novel predicated on the scene of cross-dressing in which the female protagonist, Juliane, is humbled by getting caught in the rain while dressed as a man. Boundaries created by bodies, clothing, and the projection of ideals onto material culture are negotiated in the course of the novel and, as Allingham persuasively argues, lead to a radical redefining of the domestic sphere. Allingham reads Schlegel’s female characters as they both inhabit bourgeois gender roles grounded in the private sphere and assume greater agency by extending their range through acting—within the boundaries of the prescribed feminine—in the public sphere.
In “‘Make Music, Women, Music!’: The Amazonian Power of Music in Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea (1808),” Amy Emm explores the centrality of music and its implications for the construction of gender in Kleist’s persistently controversial tragedy. Her judicious reading, especially of the hymn in scene 14, explicates the hitherto “overheard” connections between music making and gender in a play that continues to challenge any stable notions of gendered identity. Emm...