The Wired Mouth: On the Positionality of Perception in Anne Duden's Opening of the Mouth and Das Judasschaf

This study is part of a comprehensive book project on concepts of identity and body in both feminist theories and modern literature by women in Germany and the USA. Referring to the dispute between Leslie Adelson and Sigrid Weigel (1988) about racist elements in feminist aesthetics, the article examines Anne Duden's Opening of the Mouth and Das Judasschaf. Both are seen to reproduce the idea of a universality of woman and the female body and exclude issues of race, nationality, ethnicity, and class from the concept of identity. My analysis presents a traumatic structure of the protagonist in Das Judasschaf and questions her imago as a surviving memory-body and the position of "responsible sufferer." (AM)