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"Mennel, Barbara Caroline"
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Women at work in twenty-first-century European cinema
\"Reproducing Europe argues that current European films focus on female characters in order to negotiate the transformations of labor of the last decades. Based on an analysis of approximately two hundred European films made since 2000 that focus on the relationship of women to their work, the book analyzes a cross-section of national cinemas and film genres, clustered according to pertinent topics in the theories of gendered labor. As reproductive labor now also includes the \"donation\" of eggs and organs, and the possibility of outsourcing pregnancy, dystopian narratives tell stories of refugees and clones who become the raw materials for organ harvesting. Farces and comedies exaggerate the habits of the global managerial class, while social realist dramas capture precarious working conditions in narratives about unemployed women. And films from countries affected by the global financial crisis (Greece, Spain, Portugal) emphasize the patriarchal family, a debt economy, and unemployment. Proposing the relevance of key concepts developed in second-wave feminist theory, the book updates categories of reproductive labor and the sexual contract. The postindustrial, neoliberal, and transnational character of Europe, with its decline of heavy industry, rise of service work, increase in migration since the expansion of the EU, and innovation in biotechnology has changed the organization of work. Films respond to these developments with a narrative emphasis on work, embodied by female characters more than ever before\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Spatial Turns
The phrase \"spatial turns\" signals the growing importance of space as an analytical as well as representational category for culture. The volume addresses such emerging modes of inquiry by bringing together, for the first time, essays that engage with spatial turns, spatiality, and the theoretical implications of both in the context of German culture, history, and theory. Migrating from fields like geography, urban studies, and architecture, the new centrality of space has transformed social-science fields as diverse as sociology, philosophy, and psychology. In cultural studies, productive analyses of space increasingly cut across the studies of literature, film, popular culture, and the visual arts. Spatial Turns brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of space by such figures as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. The volume is organized in four sections: \"Mapping Spaces\" addresses cartography in all forms and in its intersection with culture; \"Spaces of the Urban\" takes up one of the key sites of spatial studies, the city; \"Spaces of Encounter\" considers how Germany has become a contact zone for multiple ethnicities; and \"Visualized Spaces\" concerns the theorization of space in film and new media studies.
eBook
Seduction, sacrifice and submission: Masochism in postwar German film and literature
In this dissertation I analyze different aesthetic and psychological formations of masochism in West German film and literature from the 1960s to the 1990s. I outline the aesthetic and psychoanalytic development of the concepts of masochism prior to the twentieth century, beginning with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs (1870). I then highlight key discursive developments in the twentieth century, such as Sigmund Freud's definitions of masochism and feminist debates about masochism from the 1970s to the 1980s, in order to set the stage for the readings of individual texts. In chapter one, on Monika Treut and Elfie Mikesch's film Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985), I analyze how the film rewrites the sex/gender system that underlies Sacher-Masoch's novel and that structures narratives of masochism. In chapter two, I focus on the representation of masochism in Elfriede Jelinek's novel The Piano Teacher (1983), which portrays masochism as part of bourgeois femininity. In chapter three, I analyze how the racialized fetish of the main character Ali in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Ali: Fear Eats Soul (1974) allows for a masochistic fantasy of liberalism offered to a West German audience at that time. In the last chapter, on Ingeborg Bachmann's Das Buch Franza (1965-73), I argue that the fragment's main character, Franza, attempts to mourn the dead of the Holocaust, but that her attempts slip into melancholia and finally result in a masochistic staging of attempted sacrifice. The conclusion summarizes masochism's different aesthetic formations and political functions in West German texts of the 1960s through the 1990s.
Dissertation