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    Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on 17 March 2017, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1286001

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Attitudes to futurity in new German feminisms and contemporary women's fiction

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>04/2017
<mark>Journal</mark>Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities
Issue number1
Volume22
Number of pages14
Pages (from-to)183-196
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date17/03/17
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Drawing on Clare Hemmings’ work on feminist narratives, this article explores attitudes to the future in recent German-language pop-feminist volumes, including, amongst others, Meredith Haaf, Susanne Klingner and Barbara Streidl’s Wir Alpha-Mädchen: Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht [We Alpha-Girls: Why Feminism Makes Life More Beautiful] (2008) and the feminist memoir Neue deutsche Mädchen [New German Girls] (2008) by Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether. After analysing the rhetoric of linear progress deployed in these texts and the ways in which their authors consign second-wave feminism to the past in the name of a normative future, I go on to examine future-thinking in two complex first-person novels: Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill (2010) and Antonia Baum’s Vollkommen leblos, bestenfalls tot [Completely Lifeless, Preferably Dead] (2011). I demonstrate how these novels invoke a sense of disorientation and asynchronous temporality that is productively queer. Their disruptions of time and space, of language and form, combine with decentred central protagonists to throw doubt on the figure of the coherent sovereign subject who lurks persistently behind the new German feminists’ configuration of the self-empowered “individual.” Finally, this paper contends that the queer refusal of normative futures enacted by the novels allows the opportunity to imagine alternative modes of being that are potentially politically transformative.

Bibliographic note

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on 17 March 2017, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1286001