Queer Femininity Research Articles

Queering the Pinup

In 2006 a group of women decided to launch the “I Heart Brooklyn Girls” calendar, a celebration of queer femininity. Their initial concept—twelve months, twelve decades of pinup—gave way to a focus on 1950s pulp aesthetic in later calendars, but the link between Brooklyn and femme agency remains consistent. Yet the ways in which time, place, gender, and race meet are not straightforward. Through the various iterations of the calendar, we can see that these contemporary performances of femme-ness are part of a particular affective attachment to the 1950s. This essay interrogates this conglomeration of femme visibility, historical play, the politics of location, and the invisibility of racial difference that these historical fantasies produce.

A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee

This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues that Minaj's complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as “straight” or “queer,” while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj as yet another pop diva, the author proposes that Minaj signals the emergence of the femmecee, or a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextricably linked to the production and reception of their rhymes. This article engages a pair of music video releases that reflect the range of Minaj's gender performances as cinematic lenses into the strategic moves that Minaj is able to make from her femmecee stance. King Nicki's hypervisibility as a black femmecee and refusal to cede to any regime of recognition confound the multiple common senses that seek to produce her as a compliant subject.

White gloves, feminist fists: race, nation and the feeling of ‘vintage’ in femme movements

This article raises the question of how the cultural politics of race and nation manifest within contemporary queer femme movements, performances and aesthetic practices. Focussing on the feeling of ‘vintage’, I specifically examine symbols, icons and aesthetics used in projects to queer femininity that invoke ‘the 1950s’. Grounded in femme-inist multi-sited ethnographic research in a movement to which I also belong, I draw on interviews and participant observation in queer subcultural spaces and analyse two examples of ‘vintage’ iconography within contemporary femme organizing where ‘vintage’ is a form of archival activism that also relates to a broader cultural imaginary of racialized femininity. Then I turn to an example of queer performance where ‘vintage’ is used as a critique of imperialism and whiteness. In closing, I discuss how the feeling of ‘vintage’ relates to whiteness and to a form of imperialist nostalgia.

Preface

Preface Helga Kraft (bio) and Maggie McCarthy (bio) As Volume 23 goes to press, we're happy to report that the Women in German Yearbook continues to adapt to the electronic age. In recent years we transitioned to paperless editing, and as of 2008 the Yearbook's visibility will increase dramatically when it becomes part of Project Muse. Available online and in their entirety, our essays will be in the company of many other excellent journals of the humanities, arts and social sciences. Please alert your libraries and encourage them to subscribe. While the current volume also reflects advances in scholarship on gender, film and media studies, and Germanic studies, it begins with the voice of Esther Dischereit, last year's invited speaker at the Women in German Annual Conference at Sunbird, Utah. Lest we start feeling too smug about our progress on the electronic front, Dischereit keeps us grounded in the animism of everyday objects, like a piece of bread in a toaster, in a highly industrialized world. She also reflects on the complexities of writing from a Jewish identity, whether willingly or of necessity. Our film studies section features other kinds of thorny identities, born of the need to work through larger historical events and cultural anxieties. Cathy Gelbin's "Double Visions: Queer Femininity and Holocaust Film from Ostatni Etap to Aimée & Jaguar" offers a comprehensive overview of lesbian sexuality in Holocaust films, initially employed to underscore Nazi perversion and later to rewrite women's historical role as either victim or resister. Barbara Hales argues in her essay on the femme fatale in film noir that exiled German film directors in Hollywood used the female criminal and double to assuage the existential distress they experienced in the early days of the Weimar Republic. Christina Gerhardt's analysis of Hito Steyerl's film Die leere Mitte (1998) tracks several centuries of shifting historical boundaries around Potsdamer Platz and their implications for Germany's more liminal identities. Other kinds of concrete historical circumstances impacting women's lives and psyches emerge in a range of essays spanning the 18th to the 20th [End Page ix] centuries. Laurie Johnson's "The Romantic and Modern Practice of Animal Magnetism: Friedrich Schlegel's Protocols of the Magnetic Treatment of Countess Lesniowska" addresses Schlegel's investment in the psychiatric practice of "animal magnetism," its enactment on one woman's body, and its larger implications for philosophy and religion. Ritchie Robertson's essay on 19th-century Austrian writer Caroline Pichler argues that her conflicted notions of women's gender identity vis-à-vis both family and nation provide an important backdrop to her novel The Swedes in Prague. Twentieth-century women's expanded economic, intellectual, and political possibilities brought their own assorted consequences, evident in several essays that take journalism, political activism, and novels as their starting point. Julia Karolle-Berg's essay "Creating a Maidservant Community through Newspapers: The Berliner Dienstboten-Zeitung, 1898–1900" traces a newspaper editor's efforts to foster professional consciousness and community among female domestic employees not otherwise professionally organized. German-Jewish pacifist writer Clementine Krämer, the subject of an essay by Elizabeth Loentz, used both journalistic and literary outlets to promote her own brand of anti-war activism in the early twentieth century, while simultaneously negotiating her identity as a German/Jewish/feminist/pacifist. In a more personal realm, New Women struggled with the psychic downside of expanded choices, like the independent but melancholic heroines of novels by Franziska zu Reventlow and Gabriele Reuter that Lisabeth Hock an-alyzes, who nonetheless use their temperament to expand the creative possibilities associated with (single) motherhood. In a more conceptual rendition of emancipated lives, Lou Andreas-Salomé's novel Fenitschka, the subject of Laura Deiulio's essay, traces one academic woman's movement through the "forward" and "backward" spaces of Paris and St. Petersburg respectively, with the latter, paradoxically, offering a neue Frau more possibilities. Finally, Dagmar Lorenz's essay "Transatlantic Perspectives on Men, Women, and Other Primates: The Ape Motif in Kafka, Canetti, and Cooper's and Jackson's King Kong Films" expands our gendered frame to include "interspecies" concerns and the status of relations between humans and...

Double Visions: Queer Femininity and Holocaust Film from Ostatni Etap to Aimée & Jaguar

This article argues for a complex consideration of queer iconographies across Holocaust perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and resisters. Looking at the construction of same-sex sexual conduct in Holocaust memoirs, I propose sexual manifestations as an important issue in power relations between women during the Holocaust. From there, I chart the shifting construction of queer femininity and its role in Holocaust representation from early socialist cinema to contemporary film. I show how queer femininity initially assisted in drawing attention to the extreme perversity of Nazism, and how post-1980s lesbian-feminist films draw on the lesbian to rewrite women into victims and resisters. (CG)

Om queer femininitet och iscensättandet av kön

The artide examines the subversive and queer potentials of femininity, through the use of feminist theory and queer theory. The point of departure is an article by Ulrika Dahl, which was published in the official magazine of the National Swedish Federation for Lesbian and Gay Rights (RFSL). Dahl's article opens for the possibility to interpret femininity as something other than an unambiguously patriarchal and heterosexual position. Using the theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler and others, it is shown how gender can, not only be performed incorrectly, but that it is also possible to perform gender "too much". This exaggerated performance of gender fits well with Beauvoir's analysis of femininity without an illusion of transcendence, which hasn't been explicitly analyzed before. This queer femininity can, along with other subversive positions, be used to challenge patriarchal and heteronormative structures.

Listening to the “Wives” of the “Female Husbands”

SUMMARY This article treats two of the central queer texts of eighteenth-century Britain, the autobiographical narrative of Charlotte Charke, a well-known cross-dressing actress who spent a portion of her life as a husband to another woman, and Henry Fielding's pamphlet, The Female Husband. Focusing on these texts, this study moves away from the traditional subject of such work-the female husbands themselves- and instead centers on the wives and lovers of these figures. In this way, the author offers a model of what she calls a project of imaginary coalition-building across time between contemporary femmes and the differ-ently-but still queerly-desiring feminine women in Charke's and Fielding's texts. Tracing two models of queer but gender-normative feminine subjectivity in these texts, the “wife” in a same-sex companionate marriage, and the “duped woman,” this article challenges assumptions by mainstream as well as queer scholars about just who should be our subjects of study and why, ultimately calling into question definitions of both “heterosexuality” and “queer.”