Hegemony, Marginalization, and Feminine Masculinity: Antje Rávic Strubel’s Unter Schnee

Postunification German culture has been marked by its ambivalent fascination with masculinity in crisis. Films and literary texts as diverse as Sönke Wortmann’s Der bewegte Mann ( 1994), Benjamin Stuckrad-Barre’s Soloalbum (2001), Helmut Dietl’s Rossini (1996), Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir (1995), Caroline Link’s Nirgendwo in Afrika (2001), and Feridun Zaimoglu’s Liebesmale, scharlachrot (2000) have presented multifaceted spectacles of weakness, confusion and the hyperbolic reassertion of power. While this trend attests to the de-authorization of clear-cut gender boundaries and heteronormative assumptions, it also suggests that the egalitarian discourses of feminism and queer activism have not fully succeeded in resolving anxieties about gender identity and difference. Apart from the often ridiculed “Softie,” alternative figures of masculinity seem slow to emerge, and instead well-known heroic templates are reactivated (Bogdal).

This apparent need for masculinity gains its cultural significance as part of a broader configuration of “identity longing” in contemporary Germany. Beyond national borders, the 1990s registered as an era of “categorical disorientation and historic reorientation” at the transition from the Cold War into today’s world of globalization, and in Germany specifically the process was dramatized through the “rocky transition from national division to unification” (Adelson 15). In its aftermath, the increased public presence of national rhetoric has underlined intense negotiations of collective identity in the face of troublesome historical memories and contemporary challenges. While ongoing attempts to “normalize” Germany’s relationship to the memories of fascism encountered the split resonances of half the country’s socialist past, the accelerating process of European integration included, not least, controversies on the membership candidacy of Turkey, the country of origin of Germany’s largest minority. The events of 11 September 2001 and the following debates on Islam merely highlighted ongoing conflicts about cultural identity in a society still hesitant to accept the realities of its immigration. In this ongoing quest for identification, masculinity has functioned as a crucial site. For example, Brussig’s parodic investigations of East German heroism respond to, and reiterate, prevailing moves of gendering German unification as a (hetero)sexual union, with the GDR in the role of the female (see Carstens-Wickham), and a novel like Zaimoglu’s Liebesmale, scharlachrot playfully rearticulates ethnic stereotypes through theatrical stagings of “poetic,” Werther-inflected German emasculation and Turkish masculinity.

Critical investigations into these contemporary processes of cultural gendering are much needed. At the same time, it does not seem altogether far-fetched to wonder whether the recent growth of masculinity studies attests to contemporary culture’s fascination with masculinity as well. After a belated start in comparison to Anglo-American developments, the analysis of masculinities has become a dominant paradigm in German gender studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century (e.g. Bosse and King; Brandes; Döge and Meuser; Erhart; Jerome; Schmale; Steffen; Stephan and Benthien). For some feminist critics, this recent trend confirms fears that were articulated early on, when the study of men and masculinities first gained momentum in the 1980s, The study of masculinities could turn into a new strategy of marginalizing women, usurping gender studies resources and venues for a potentially antifeminist focus on masculine identities and experiences (Brod).

Of course, matters are much more complex than such a wording suggests. At least part of the current academic fascination with masculinity can be attributed to the long-term academic neglect of this “other” gender. Eventually, this neglect was challenged by a fuller realization that gender works as a relational category, requiring a comparative look at the mutual constitution of masculinity and femininity in specific texts and contexts. Furthermore, the belated start of masculinity studies has turned into a methodological advantage: Building on several decades of academic discussion in women’s and gender, queer, and postcolonial studies, the paradigm established itself in the Anglo-American realm in the 1990s as a highly sophisticated approach. Critical masculinity studies have begun to investigate, for example, the performative character of apparently “unmarked,” naturalized masculinity, relations between hegemonic and marginalized identities, and female masculinities (e.g. example, Connell, Masculinities; Halberstam; Sedgwick, “Gosh, Boy...