TY - JOUR

T1 - Attitudes to futurity in new German feminisms and contemporary women's fiction

AU - Spiers, Emily

N1 - 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

PY - 2017/4

Y1 - 2017/4

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - German feminism

KW - German literature

KW - narrative

KW - rhetoric

KW - futures

KW - queer disruptions

KW - agency

KW - subjectivity

KW - individualism

KW - social construction

U2 - 10.1080/0969725X.2017.1286001

DO - 10.1080/0969725X.2017.1286001

M3 - Journal article

VL - 22

SP - 183

EP - 196

JO - Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities

JF - Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities

SN - 0969-725X

IS - 1

ER -