Women In German Research Articles

An ERP-based comparison of gender representations elicited by generic masculine role nouns and the German gender star form

There is an ongoing debate about the linguistic gender forms that should be used to elicit fair mental representations of all genders. While most languages with grammatical gender traditionally use the masculine form to refer to people in a gender-independent way, numerous empirical studies have demonstrated that this form leads to a male bias in mental representations. In German, the so-called gender star form has been proposed as an alternative to the masculine form, aimed at better representing persons with nonmale gender identities. To provide empirical data on this claim, we compared the neural processing mechanisms elicited by the gender star form with those elicited by the generically intended masculine form during reference resolution. Participants in the present ERP study read sentence pairs in which a group of people was introduced with a role noun in one of the two gender forms and then revealed to be partly comprised of men or women. Following the masculine form, anaphoric references to women (vs. men) resulted in an increased ERP amplitude in the P600 range. In contrast, following the gender star form, the P600 amplitude was increased for references to men (vs. women), albeit in a slightly different spatio-temporal range. The present data thus indicate that the gender star form and the generically intended masculine form impose partially different demands on the syntactic operations performed by the brain during reference resolution but that, in the end, neither form elicits gender-balanced mental representations of men and women in German.

Intersectional solidarity, empathy, or pity? Exploring representations of migrant women in German and British newspapers during the pandemic

ABSTRACT This research examines migrant women’s representation in British and German news during the COVID-19 pandemic, paying particular attention to expressions of solidarity. While previous research has focused on the representation of women and migrants, studies have largely treated these groups as distinct entities. Combining topic modelling with informed grounded theory, this research compares the representation of migrant women, including women from ethnic minorities, across a diverse corpus covering 2020–21. This two-step methodology facilitates intersectional analysis at the macro and micro level, revealing the salience, topical concentration and context of migrant women’s coverage. Findings show that solidarity emerged through the platforming of migrant women’s voices, and connected to discourses of class, poverty and precarity. Representations containing empathy and pity – less likely drivers of social change – were more prevalent. This research contributes to our understanding of migrant women’s coverage during the pandemic and provides a granular and intersectional lens for analysing minoritized group representation.

Höflichkeit von Personenbezeichnungen in historischen Wörterbüchern und die Pejorisierung von Frauenbezeichnungen

Many terms denoting women in German have undergone a diachronic process of pejoration. While Keller (1995) argues that this is due to polite speech regarding women, leading to an excessive use of higher ‚woman‘-terms and a subsequent devaluation, Nübling (2011) sees the cause in a societal depreciation of women which is mirrored in language. This paper investigates this semantic change by analysing historical dictionaries with regard to two aspects: Firstly, whether men and women are evaluated more positively or more negatively in example sentences, and secondly, how the meaning components of social standing and evaluation of the lexemes have changed. The topic of politeness is addressed by dictionary authors, especially in the 18th century, with regard to which terms are appropriate to use for which group(s) of men and women. While women tend to be evaluated more negatively in language examples, for certain lexemes politeness does seem to play a role in the fading of their ‘high social status’ meaning.

Neutering neuter – grammatical gender and the dehumanisation of women in German

Grammatical gender in German has traditionally been described as a rather arbitrary system (Helbig and Buscha 1988). This is not the case in regard to terms of person reference, where natural gender assignment is the norm: Masculine and feminine grammatical gender largely correlate with the extralinguistic assignment of male and female gender. Neuter gender predominantly denotes inanimate entities (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). The use of neutral gender in reference to women nevertheless has a long history in German, usually with pejorative connotations (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). Historically, this can be illustrated in relation to nouns, pronouns and articles: 1 By neuter nouns denoting ‘socially incomplete’ women, e.g. das Weib ‘woman (archaic), hag, n.’, das Luder ‘hussy, n.’ and in the increased use of neuter eliciting diminutives in reference to female individuals, e.g. das Mädchen ‘girl, n.’, das Fräulein ‘miss, n.’ (Nübling 2017). 2 Through the use of neuter pronouns and neuter articles in combination with female names in a number of German dialects, e.g. das Emma, es ‘the (n.) Emma, it’ (Busley and Fritzinger 2018). In contemporary standard German, the use of neuter articles and pronouns instead of feminine ones seems to be used as a discursive tool to denigrate and dehumanise women whose gender performance does not conform with hegemonic concepts of femininity. This paper focuses on the intentional manipulation of grammatical gender in reference to women as a tool of degradation and dehumanisation and outlines the historical development of neuter forms of reference in contexts where feminine would be expected.

Underweight in Nursing Homes: Differences between Men and Women

Objective: In Germany, there is an ongoing concern about the high prevalence of underweight on admission to health-care institutions. In order to assess possible sex-specific differences, the aim of this study is to provide valid figures about the prevalence and risk factors of underweight of men and women in German nursing homes. Material and Methods: A secondary data analysis of 8 annual consecutive cross-sectional studies of 19,686 residents from 280 nursing homes was conducted from 2009 to 2016. Underweight was defined as BMI < 18.5 (<20) for individuals <65 years (≥65 years). For statistical modeling, we used classification and regression trees (CRTs) and random forest in “R.” Results: Average prevalence of underweight in nursing home residents was 13.7% (13.2–14.2). Initial descriptive results showed that the prevalence of underweight among women was 15.6% (15.0–16.2) and the prevalence of underweight among men was 7.5% (6.7–8.2). The CRT-based modeling indicated that “loss of appetite” as the most important indicator for low BMI. If “loss of appetite” was present, prevalence of underweight increased from 13.5 to 39.1%. Other important indicators were “very large institutions” and the “resident/nurse ratio.” The random forest analysis confirmed the importance of the CRT approach. Discussion/Conclusion: The multivariate approach revealed that the role of sex for being underweight in nursing homes is marginal. To avoid higher morbidity and mortality in this group, nutritional intervention by clinical practitioners to increase appetite should be given high priority, especially in large long-term care institutions.

“Something is Immensely Rotten in the Media Republic”. The Information Dimension of the Refugee Crisis in Europe

Abstract The article analyzes the reaction of German media to the assaults on women in Cologne and other German and European cities on New Year’s Eve 2015/2016. Nationwide TV channels and newspapers, with rare exceptions, did not report about the events till January 4 or even 5, causing outrage in social networks. This is serious evidence of deep problems in German and Western journalism. Due to the abundance of information resources, the mainstream media hold no monopoly on news delivery anymore. If they continue to compromise themselves, there is a danger of reorientation of the Western audience towards alternative sources of information: extremist Internet resources and foreign media, first of all the Russian ones.

Film and Media Studies

Film and Media Studies Gerd Gemünden (bio) Since its beginning in the mid-1970s, the German Studies Association has actively promoted embracing cultural studies in order to take leave of a more traditionally minded notion of Germanistik, particularly its branding as “Auslandsgermanistik,” a term still widely used when I first entered the University of Tübingen in 1980 as an aspiring student of German and Philosophy. As Sara Friedrichsmeyer states, together with Women in German (WiG), the German Studies Association has “infused immense energy into the study of German literature and culture.”1 As a result, areas of research and teaching such as critical theory, particularly of the Frankfurt School variety, feminism, Jewish studies, studies of the Holocaust, and studies of the history and culture of the German Democratic Republic have become prominent disciplines that both benefitted from and contributed to a dramatically changing field of German studies in North America. Among these disciplines, perhaps no other has experienced a more dynamic development than the study of film and media. As Sabine Hake, the editor of the German Studies Review (GSR), noted in this journal in 2013, German film studies has seen a remarkable growth over the past three decades, a growth that can be measured by the number of scholarly publications and presentations at conferences, and that is most obvious in the full integration of film in the teaching and research agenda of German departments in North America and Great Britain.2 It must be stated that the purpose for Hake’s assessment was not self-congratulatory but rather to take issue with a series of problems that have come with success, a point I will return to later. For now, however, I want to briefly chart the trajectory of this growth since the mid-1970s, as well as my own position within it, which is very much shaped by the developments of the field and probably representative for many scholars of my generation. I can date my own entry into the world of German film and media studies rather precisely—it was the fall of 1983, and I had just arrived as an exchange student from [End Page 541] Tübingen at the University of Oregon as a graduate teaching fellow in the German Department. Scouring the course offerings of the various humanities departments, I came across the Department of Rhetoric, which for someone from the University of Tübingen meant the Department of Walter Jens, but here it was an umbrella term for housing the programs in speech, theater, and film studies. This was a real discovery—the academic study of film as a medium with its own history, theory, and methodology hardly existed anywhere in Germany at the time. The Film Program’s small core faculty included its charismatic founder, Bill Cadbury, and Ellen Seiter, an expert in television studies and in children and visual media who would later become part of my dissertation committee. While the dual demands of being both a student and a language teacher in the German Department were considerable, I managed to audit a number of courses in the Film Program—an experience that ultimately had a formative influence for my post-PhD areas of interest and research. It was in Cadbury’s classes that I discovered Italian neorealism, Godard, Bertolucci, and the films of the New German Cinema, a term I had never heard in Germany. Particularly memorable were Bill’s lectures on Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s History Lessons and Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, both films whose titles I was familiar with but had never seen. (One of my first published scholarly essays would deal with Kings of the Road.) As the year of my exchange visit drew to a close, I decided to apply to the PhD Program in Comparative Literature, at the time Oregon’s most vibrant department in the humanities, and the rest, as they say, is history. Indeed, the mid-1980s were a time when the study of film within German studies began to develop some traction. By then, a number of English-language monographs on German film had already been published, predominantly devoted to Weimar cinema and...

A Provocation to Listen to and Give Voice to Difference

In this essay, I reflect on the ways the Women in German Yearbook has changed over the past thirty years and consider how the publication and its host organization can and should change in the next three decades. While I envision ever more fragmented feminist approaches to researching women’s literature, I hope that the work of the Coalition of Women in German will find cohesiveness in the organization’s commitment to listening to and making heard other voices.

Redoing Feminism within and outside the Neoliberal Academy

This essay reflects on the “undoing” of feminism in the era of neoliberalism, focusing specifically on the feminist epistemological problem posed by the dismantling of collective politics and the privatization of the political today. After considering how the pressures of capitalism dovetail with feminist theoretical developments to remove the basis for a feminist politics within and outside the neoliberal academy, I suggest that contemporary transnational feminist protest movements are redoing feminism by laying bare neoliberalism’s privatization of experience. I argue that these protests pose a provocative challenge for feminist scholars to resist the reduction of the political to the personal and to resignify solidarity and collectivity. In the final section of this essay I consider how the Coalition of Women in German is uniquely poised to take up this challenge, and I offer a few thoughts on how we might proceed.

The Childless Woman as Failure; or, the “Spinster Aunt” as Provocation for the Future

One of the great strengths of Women in German as an organization is that it creates a space within academic and political work for personal experience, for one’s experiences as scholar, colleague, student, teacher, friend, and son or daughter. It was my daughterly perspective that I brought to my scholarship on Julia Franck and motherhood, including the motherhood/demography debate from 2008. My mother died at the beginning of my graduate studies, and my research was inspired, at least in part, by the desire to give voice to her subjectivity (a desire repeatedly frustrated, as I found that I only have my words to tell her story).

Luise Büchner: A Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary Feminist. (Women in German, 9) by Cordelia Scharpf

MLR, 105.4, 2010 1181 killing as an erhabene Wende' (p. 201). While Greiner's reading operates at a high level of abstraction and assumes a systematic understanding of idealist philosophy on Kleist's part, it is a suggestive and powerful contribution to the understanding of the play, not least because ithelps to explain certain obscure turns of phrase. A number of other essays view the play in the context of discourses of gender, sexuality, and politics. In her contribution, Katrin Pahl criticizes the assumption that Achilles and Penthesilea embody normative ideas of gender and sexual orientation, and argues that Penthesileas 'homosexuellets] Begehren furOtrere' (p. 173) drives her relations with Achilles. While the play undoubtedly offers scope forqueer approaches, Pahl's argument relies on some rather forced readings of the work, while also underplaying the cosmic proportions of Penthesilea's ambition. Christian Moser considers the motif of cannibalism in Penthesilea in the context of eighteenth-century models of political organization, inwhich cannibalism connotes a transitional stage in the civilizing process, which cannot definitively be overcome. While Moser's argument?that the play questions the teleological belief of the Enlightenment in human progress?is not new, his essay makes a genuine contribution by demonstrating how the play is embedded in awider network of eighteenth-century politico-cultural discourses surrounding cannibalism, barbarism, and civilization. Gerard Raulet also reads the play as a reflection on political legitimacy, pointing out, inmy view correctly, that this question is considerably complicated by the fact that the play does not pit desire against duty, but rather dramatizes the inability to choose between desire and duty in the person of theAmazon queen. While the essays are of a generally excellent quality, it is regrettable that there is such limited dialogue between them. Given that they all examine a common theme, within a volume whose avowed intention is to overcome a supposed lack of dialogue between critical approaches, this seems like amissed opportunity. University of Birmingham Elystan Griffiths Luise Buchner: A Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary Feminist. By Cordelia Scharpf. (Women inGerman, 9) Oxford: Peter Lang. 2008. 391 pp. ?47. ISBN 978-3-03910-325-6. This study of the lifeand work of Luise Buchner (1821-1877), based on aUniversity ofWisconsin-Madison dissertation, sheds new light on the evolution of the German women's movement. An influential, pioneering writer and organizer who played a significant role at local and national level in advocating and propagating women's education and training at a time of legal, political, social, and educational disempowerment, Buchner's contribution has until recently been largely lost fromview. The surviving documentation, partly because of World War II damage, is relativelymeagre, but Cordelia Scharpf's extensive archival research and sifting of untapped periodical and newspaper sources have enabled her to put together a substantial and persuasive picture of a life'swork of singular energy, practicality, and devotion to researching, analysing, and disseminating information in order to 1182 Reviews serve the greater social good. The author has traced some forty letters and draws productively on Buchner's lifelong correspondence with Gutzkow for insights into her personal and professional life.Although frequently obliged to record gaps in information, or reportwhat her subject might' have experienced, Scharpf assembles enough evidence to give the reader a clear idea of the educational and social context, particularly in Darmstadt, where Buchner worked tirelessly with Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt, to improve women's educational and employment opportunities. Chapters 2-4 and part of Chapter 8 are devoted to presenting and elucidating four editions ofDie Frauen und ihrBeruf (1855, 1856, i860, 1872; English trans., i999)> a treatise that Buchner latterly expanded into a 272-page monograph. This accessible, systematic study signally influenced debate on educational reform. Buchner's stance was moderate and practice-oriented. She argued for equal status forwomen and men, while maintaining the separation of their spheres of activity. At the heart of the project lies the primacy ofwork, whether unpaid in the home or paid beyond it, and?in order to be able towork effectively?of training and education. Unusually, she addresses the needs of unmarried women and ignores religion. Buchner also delivered courses of history lectures,whose 1875 publication...

Aural Topographies of Migration in Yamina Benguigui's Inch'Allah dimanche

Angelica Fenner is an assistant professor of German and cinema studies at the University of Toronto. Her research explores migration in European cinemas, with previous articles and reviews appearing in Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, German Studies Review, Women in German, as well as in several anthologies. With Eric Weitz she also coedited the volume Fascism and Neo-fascism: Critical Writings on the Radical Right (2004).

Ruth Angress Kluger: To the Writer and Scholar on Her 75th Birthday

The following reminiscences trace the career of Ruth Kluger in commemoration of her 75th birthday and celebrate her contributions to German Studies in the United States and the international scholarly and literary scene. Both authors offer an account of personal contacts with the scholar and writer in appreciation of the mentorship she has so generously granted, especially to future women scholars and members of the Coalition of Women in German. The last section features two of Ruth Kluger's poems, both in the original and in translation. (HK)

Yellowed Pages, Virtual Realities: Publication in Women in German's Past, Present, and Future

The first two presidents of WiG reflect on the history of the organization and the Yearbook , take stock of the present, and speculate about the future. WiG began as a supportive community for feminist Germanists isolated in their departments from like-minded scholars. The Yearbook has come to embody the ethos of the organization in certain ways: feminist process and academic rigor; scholarly and creative writing side by side. Despite the high quality and rich variety of the contributions, the Yearbook has not yet found a substantial readership beyond WiG itself. The authors explore the promises and perils of e-publication as the likely future of the Yearbook .

Musing Together at Year Twenty

two editors pool their reflections at Year 20 of the Yearbook, address ing, variously, questions of: Who am I to be editing the Yearbook? How does one go about co-writing an essay? What can a glance at the twenty volumes tell us about how the Yearbook started and what it has become? What is its job? How well is it doing its job? What ideas might we entertain to make it more responsive to our needs in this new century? editors' questions and answers diverge and come together, but both heartily endorse these sentiments: happy birthday, Yearbook! L'chaim, Women in German! (R-EBJ and MG) Marjorie: I have often wondered what, exactly, lies behind the fin ished product of a piece of writing with multiple authors: too often, no body is saying who wrote what. preface to last year's Yearbook, for instance, by The Coeditors, was actually written entirely by Ruth Ellen. For that matter, so was this year's preface. When she and I first began talking about writing a piece together for this year's volume, I began to wonder again how that would work. And as we started running ideas past each other, I became uneasy, because they weren't meshing well. Ruth-Ellen was looking toward where the Yearbook lies in the grand scheme of things, and I was inclined toward a modest close-up. If we couldn't find a topic that both of us could endorse enthusiastically, the chances that the piece would end up being genuinely co-written were poor. But also the ways that each of us writes did not look easy to yoke together: her leaping from peak to peak of abstraction, me sniffing at the

Autobiography by Women in German by Mererid Puw Davies , Beth Linklater , Gisela Shaw (review)

MLRy 98.1, 2003 255 Autobiography by Womenin German. Ed. by Mererid Puw Davies, Beth Linklater, and Gisela Shaw. Oxford, Bern, and Brussels: Lang. 2000. 310 pp. ?46; ?30. ISBN 3-906766-30-6 (pbk). Autobiography by Womenin German comprises a careful selection of essays addressing ideas about women's autobiography, which, as stated in an editorial note, emerged from a conference of the organization Women in German Studies. As outlined in the introduction by Mererid Puw Davies, particular problems in conceptualizing women's autobiographical writing reside in the fact that it frequently does not fit criteria set by traditional male-defined autobiography, because of women's different social role. This perspective underlies both the theory and practice of subsequent es? says. Michaela Hollenried advocates a comparative methodology, situating women's autobiographical writings within their cultural and historical context and revealing where women's texts contrast with canonical male autobiographies. Organized largely chronologically, subsequent essays cover a range of writing from the fourteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Two essays on writing by nuns in the fourteenthand seventeenth centuries (Ben Morgan, Charlotte Woodford) discuss the demarcation between public and private spheres and the question of whether diaries and log books were intended fora particular readership or fornone, as well as the purpose they fulfilled for the writer herself. Further contributions on pre-classical writ? ing include an examination of the motivation forautobiographical writing by widows (Helga Meise) and the related topic of notions of subjectivity in seventeenth-century writing (Eva Korman). The subsequent chronological gap, with no representation of eighteenth-century writing, seems to testifyprecisely to a problem enunciated in the introduction, the domination of the Enlightenment (male) subject in classical auto? biography. Thereafter a contribution on the nineteenth century discusses the social context of autobiography (ChristinaUjma). A linguistic and pragmatic approach (Angelika Linke) interprets the diary form, a private medium, as an 'Ort der Gegenwelt im Kontext des weitgehend mannlich-fremd bestimmten weiblichen Lebensalltags' (p. 109). The large proportion ofthe volume devoted to twentieth-century writing suggests how the autobiographical category has been extended in this period. Two articles address writing by authors better known forother work: Vicki Baum and Gina Kaus, who faced the problem of being regarded as Trivialautorinnen, wrote autobiography as a means of self-assertion (Andrea Capovilla); while the actress Emmy Hennings's fictionalized autobiography is described as an 'Inszenierung des taglichen Lebens' (p. 166: Christiane Schonfeld). Comparative strategies provide insights into women's accounts of the Second World War, including differing perspectives of women writing about the persecution of the Jews, according to their position as exiles, moralists, or internees (Helmut Peitsch). Two fictionalized autobiographies of the late twentieth century reflecting on the war display a conflict between generations (Carmel Finnan). Birgit Dahlke considers writers' motivation for largely suppressing the topic of rape in 1945 and explicitly discusses differences between women's and men's writing of the time, as well as contrasting East and West German perspectives. GDR issues also emerge in the loss of identity in women's poetry since unification (Karen Leeder). Two articles argue fora writer's oeuvre to be read as autobiography: an account of Ruth Rehmann shows that certain perspectives in her work can productively be read autobiographically (Gisela Shaw). Georgina Paul pushes the boundaries of autobiography to the limit, arguing foran autobiographical reading of Anne Duden's work, on the grounds of the position of the subject. This volume brings together a wide range of women's autobiography in German 256 Reviews and suggests how farboth genre and interpretation have developed beyond the canonical field. University of Salford Juliet Wigmore Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: Ein Handbuch. Ed. by Carmine Chiellino. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. 2000. X+ 535PP. ?30. ISBN 3-476-01618-8 (hbk). This exceedingly useful volume has five sections. The firstconsists of a historical, a political, and an economic and social survey of the various groups who settled in the Federal Republic in the period 1955-2000. The firstgreat population movements towards the end of the war and in the immediate post-war years are therefore not part of the project, nor is German-Jewish writing included in the literature section. This section traces an...

The Measure of Our Words, or Taking How We Talk to Each Other Seriously

����� This paper argues that at the heart of our work as Women in German has been our work on and with language, including the way we use language among ourselves. Using as a paradigmatic example the way in which we have negotiated the use of German—which has meant coming to terms with the significantly different meanings it holds for us, depending on our historical relationship to German culture—it proposes that our willingness to engage the politics of language within Women in German, in our institutional practices and personal relationships, has constituted a fundamental commitment to a transformative politics of and within language. (AB)

Autobiography by Women in German

Autobiography by Women in German

Mererid Puw Davies, Beth Linklater, Gisela Shaw Hg., Autobiography by Women in German

Mererid Puw Davies, Beth Linklater, Gisela Shaw Hg., Autobiography by Women in German

Experiencing Democracy: Women in Rural East Germany

This article discusses the experiences of rural women in East German), in light of the transformation front a socialist regime to a market-oriented democracy, Drawing on a study carried out in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania between 1996 and 1999, the article details women's positive recollections of local politics in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and contrasts them with the problems women face with their integration into political structures in the new Germany. The conclusion is that today's lack of participation by women can be related to legacies from their socialist past as well as to narrow definitions of the political that offer few mechanisms and incentives for integrating rural women into local politics today.