The Tender Gaze: Compassionate Encounters on the German Screen, Page, and Stage ed. by Muriel Cormican and Jennifer Marston William

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Tender Gaze: Compassionate Encounters on the German Screen, Page, and Stage ed. by Muriel Cormican and Jennifer Marston William Maria Stehle The Tender Gaze: Compassionate Encounters on the German Screen, Page, and Stage. Edited by Muriel Cormican and Jennifer Marston William. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2021. Pp. 232. Cloth $99.00. E-book $24.99. ISBN 9781640140745. The Tender Gaze is an ambitious scholarly and political project. By developing the tender gaze as a theoretical and analytical approach, the coeditors set the stage for a collection of essays that explore applications of the concept in German film and literature. The tender gaze, "an empathetic encounter with others" (3), is a tool to uncover the ways in which narrative, power, and politics are intertwined, within films, performances, and texts and in the process of reception. It further, as Muriel Cormican states, "acknowledges representation as always already implicated in power structures [End Page 392] while simultaneously using representation to question those power structures" (39). This definition connects the tender gaze with theorizing representation as always also political, as a process, and as intricately connected to power, and points to one of the crucial interventions the authors make with this book: in broad terms, they engage affect studies to rethink the political in literature. Cormican's introduction of the tender gaze focuses on examples in contemporary film, including a very perceptive discussion of Maren Ade's Toni Erdman (2016). She defines the concept in opposition to Laura Mulvey's "male gaze" and Ann Kaplan's "imperial gaze," and in conjunction with bell hook's Black feminist perspective, theorized as the "oppositional gaze" (17-20). The tender gaze, Cormican shows, draws attention to the structures of inequality that scholars have pointed out in media reception and attends to a new kind of political sensitivity toward these structures. Increasingly, people have become aware of bias and stereotypes in media representation. The tender gaze "resists objectification," "decenters the gaze," and opens up space for compassionate and tender ways of looking, understanding, and acting (see 20). Cormican argues that the tender gaze is set in motion by narrative and aesthetic form and that it operates regardless of whether consumers are aware of it or not. It, however subtle and relationally, shifts norms and opens up new political perspectives. Turning from cinema to live performance, Jennifer M. William offers close readings of contemporary theater productions that elicit the tender gaze. William evokes Brecht's political theater but against the assertion that in order for theater to "work" politically it needs to disengage emotionally, William shows that politics are deeply intertwined with affect. Disentangling the two might not only be impossible but it is theoretically flawed. In addition to Brecht's idea that political theater should aim to spur people into action, William presents case studies of contemporary German stage productions to explore "the potential of theater . . . to foster empathy and compassion . . . even in nonconventional, nonidentificatory performances" (45). These first two chapters, written by the coeditors of the volume, set the tone for the following essays; they also set the bar high. Both convincingly show how the tender gaze not only offers new analytical insights, but they also express the hope that it might "motivate us as a society to continue co-creating performance and embodying politics together, so that the urgency of addressing our shared social dilemma is kept foremost in mind" (44). These aims summarize the explicitly political and deeply theoretical project that the book sets out to undertake. The following ten essays offer examples of reading the tender gaze in film, theater, and literature. The topics range from contemporary anti-racist documentary films (see Nancy Nenno's essay on Mo Asumang) and discussions of films from the last few decades (Nikhil Sathe, Erika Nelson Mukherjee, Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien, John Blair, and Gary Schmidt) to analyses of nineteenth-century literature and poetry (Lorna Martens, Anna-Rebecca Nowicki, and Joseph D. Rockelmann). The book concludes with an essay on a contemporary literary example (Christina Weiler's essay on Birgit [End Page 393] Vanderbeke). Among these chapters, the essays on films offer the most convincing application of the analytical framework; the tender gaze, however, also...