Lecture by Stefan Brandt (Universität Siegen) followed by the presentation of „In a Different Light: An Anthology of Students‘ Projects on Queer Theory.“ Organized by Dr. Astrid Fellner
Date: Thursday, 13.12.2007, 19.00, Venue: Unterrichtsraum Inst. für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitätscampus Wien
»America,« Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, »is the one country where the most consistent care has been taken to trace clearly distant spheres of action for the two sexes where both are required to walk at an equal pace but along paths that are never the same.« If Tocqueville is correct with his observation regarding the ›separate spheres‹ in American society, how can it be explained that the dominant cultural imagery is so obsessed with ambisexual and trans-gendered images? A famous example is the visualization of America’s guiding figure, Columbia, in John Gast’s painting American Progress (1872). Columbia is shown here as a gigantic, powerful, and domineering figure who seems, nevertheless, also feminine in her appearance. Her mere name, Columbia, bespeaks of this gender ambiguity, being borrowed from the discoverer Christopher Columbus. In American visual culture, we can find many instances of a conflation of gendered spaces. Cultural constructs such as the ›feminized landscape‹ or the ›manly pioneer‹ are often subverted by elements that contradict their inherent messages. Visualizations of America as a »virgin land« or »Garden Eden« (both images indicating a sense of female reproductiveness) are matched in this rhetoric with representations that stress America’s »manly virtues« or »moral vigor.« American self-concepts are teeming with such paradoxes. My talk will discuss the effects of ›transgendered‹ and ›queer‹ imagery on processes of transculturation and national self-fashioning in the U.S. Elaborating on a variety of examples from the visual arts and literature, I will examine in how far sexually ambiguous representations of the individual and cultural self in America offer themselves as venues of resistance to the discourses of homogenization and social conformity. How can it be explained that the dominant culture in the U.S. is so fond of images of hermaphroditism as a virtual and symbolic phenomenon while, at the same time, that culture seems to reject and suppress the materiality of alternative forms of sexual identity? And, finally: in what way are these ›trans-gendered‹ images, despite their apparent ambiguity, deployed in hegemonic culture to corroborate traditional assumptions about national and cultural identity? Examples will include visual and literary images of America’s guiding figure ›Columbia‹ as well as excerpts from Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Edgar Huntly (1799), William Wyler’s melodrama Wuthering Heights (1939), and pictures of baseball players Babe Ruth and Minnie Miñoso.
Eine Veranstaltung im Rahmen der Reihe „Queere Interventionen. Gespräche zu Kulturwissenschaft und Kunst“
Eine Kooperation von Institut für Germanistik (Susanne Hochreiter), TFM
Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft (Andrea B. Braidt),
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (Astrid Fellner)
und der ÖH, Referat für HomoBiTrans Angelegenheiten.