ATTITUDES TO FUTURITY IN NEW GERMAN FEMINISMS AND CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION

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.

Keywords:

• German feminism
• German literature
• narrative
• rhetoric
• futures
• queer disruptions
• agency
• subjectivity
• individualism
• social construction

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It is troubling that the new feminists all focus on Butler and not on any feminists of colour, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw or bell hooks, who intervened in debates concerning the universal female subject before Butler.

2 Helene Hegemann has publicly distanced herself from feminist debate, claiming: “[i]ch habe mich mit so etwas nie beschäftigt, weil ich in einer Generation – naja, verankert bin ich eigentlich in keiner Generation – aber in einem Jahrzehnt groß geworden bin, in dem sich Fragen nach Geschlechterrollen kaum mehr stellten” (I’ve never really thought about stuff like that because I’m of a generation – well, actually, I’m not really rooted in any generation – but I grew up in a decade when questions about gender roles were no longer relevant). Nevertheless, she acknowledges that members of the literary industry “sind mit anderen Standards sozialisiert worden, da wird mir dann ab und zu dieses Biologie-Intuitions-Monster-Ding angehängt und jede Form von Rationalität aberkannt, mit der ich an meine Arbeit herangehe” (were socialized with different standards and so occasionally I get lumbered with this biology-intuition-monster-thing and denied the rationality with which I go about my work). Furthermore, she is able to identify continuing gender bias inherent in literary institutions, acknowledging: “Trotzdem, wenn Hamlet auf die Bühne kommt, vertritt der ein Menschheitsproblem, und wenn Medea auf die Bühne kommt, ist sie eine Frau, die schwerstneurotisch ist” (Nevertheless, when Hamlet comes on stage he embodies the human condition, whereas when Medea comes on stage, she’s a crazy neurotic woman). She nevertheless refuses to be drawn on the issue, claiming: “ich rede da total ungern drüber, weil ich denke, je mehr darüber gesprochen wird, desto mehr bestätigt es einen darin, sich weiter in solchen Mustern wohlzufühlen” (I don’t like talking about it because I think the more it gets talked about, the more you feel justified in staying in those kinds of roles). See Hegemann in Cosima Lutz, “Helene Hegemann beraubt ihre Freunde schonungslos,” Welt Online 10 Feb. 2010, available <http://www.welt.de/News/article6329626/Helene-Hegemann-beraubt-ihre-Freunde-schonungslos.html> (accessed 5 Sept. 2016).

3 This statement can also be read, of course, as an ironic authorial aside regarding Hegemann’s intertextual strategies.

4 For a full discussion of the paradigms of “freedom from” and “freedom to,” see Grosz.