Editors’ Introduction

In recent years, feminism has increasingly found its place in popular culture and has been featured in popular debate in Germany and across the English-speaking world. Political actions such as Pussy Riot, femen, and SlutWalk have brought visibility to gender-related violence, at times sparking great controversy. Popular figures such as Beyoncé and Emma Watson proudly have claimed the title of “feminist,” leading to heated discussions in mainstream and feminist media sources alike, such as in the German magazine emma.¹ Feminism, feminist causes, and the label “feminism” continue to fuel political debates with controversy, as we undoubtedly will witness again this election year of 2016 in the United States.

If popular culture and politics are sites where discussions about feminist activism, representation, and theory have gained renewed prominence, what role does or must feminism play in academia? A recent position paper authored by a group of geography scholars in Canada and the United States called for a “feminist model of slow scholarship” in order to counter the neoliberalization of the academy that demands ever more output from scholars and devalues pastoral or care work and service, activities often coded as female.²

The Women in German Coalition and the Yearbook, too, have engaged in an ongoing assessment of feminism and its role in the academy. Indeed, last year’s anniversary volume, “Provocations for the Future,” provided historical overviews and dialogues on where we understand ourselves to be right now, as well as offering visions for the future. These provocations, much like the position paper, can be seen as a recognition of the greater urgency of keeping feminism at the forefront of the debate in all of academia (and not just in the humanities or in gender-study departments), particularly at a time when research and teaching positions have become ever more precarious and when tenure and promotion practices continue to be persistently gender-determined.

One year on from these “provocations,” we continue to see the function of WiG and of the Yearbook as playing this critical role; the academy remains an essential site for feminist work, which includes all struggles to make visible inequities and adversities faced by many, whether due to race, ability, sexuality, or gender. The Yearbook authors and editors, and all members of WiG, must continue to be vigilant in supporting and representing feminism—and provoking—now and in the future, which the scholarship presented in this volume demonstrates. Although the eight pieces included here approach feminism from different angles, a common thread exists among them in the way they engage with literature, film, theater, and theory as sites at which feminism can be viewed, analyzed, and inserted, even as those sites themselves become rewritten in the process.

The volume opens with Karen Baumgartner’s article, “Packaging the Grand Tour: German Women Authors Write Italy, 1791–1874.” Using the specific term “sight” (as opposed to the more standard “site”) to reference the visuality and visual experience of travel locations, Baumgartner traces the narratives created by Friederike Brun, Elisa von der Recke, Theresa Artner, and Fanny Lewald on their visits to Italy. These women, she argues, utilize conventional tropes set up by their male counterparts; however, they adapted these to open the travel industry to both women and men. In Baumgartner’s analysis, these authors go against the norms of past narrative and travel structures and shift the experience of travel (and travel writing) from one of edification to one of pleasure.

Next, in her article addressing E. Marlitt’s popular nineteenth-century novels, Lauren Nossett shows how this greatly admired author deviated from the societal expectations of her own time. In “Bad Mothers and Good Virgins: Gender, Identity, and Maternity in the Novels of E. Marlitt,” Nossett shows how the domestic sphere as portrayed in literature becomes a site for the transformation of the understanding around women’s roles. She shows that, in Marlitt’s novels, women are not bound by nature to have maternal instincts—as was a societal assumption. As an alternative, Marlitt portrays virginal women who have better mothering instincts than the negatively portrayed biological mothers and thus provocatively...