Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies
Subject group
Law, Economics and Social Sciences
Subject classification
History
Start
2012
Status
Ongoing
Keywords
Artusliteratur; Europäische Integration; Internationale Beziehungen; Prosa der Romantik und Aufklärung; Zeitalter der Aufklärung
Short description
Im Zuge des vorangeschrittenen Prozesses der politischen Integration haben sich in Europa in vielen wirtschaftlichen, politischen, aber auch sozialen Bereichen neue Formen grenzübergreifenden Denkens und Handelns herausgebildet. Die Arbeit analysiert basierend auf dieser Annahme die gegenseitige Einflussnahme zwischen der Europäischen Gemeinschaft bzw. deren Organen und nationalen Akteuren wie Regierungen und Sozialpartner so wie deren auf Europaebene agierende Repräsentanten. Am Beispiel der Situation der Frau auf dem Arbeitsmarkt im Zeitraum von 1969 bis 1986 und den ausgewählten Problemfeldern Lohngleichheit, (Anti-)Diskriminierung und Frauenarbeitslosigkeit wird folgenden Fragen nachgegangen: Welche Vorgaben und Diskurse sind im Untersuchungszeitraum in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft und den Nationalstaaten zu identifizieren? Welche Möglichkeiten und Interessen haben die Akteure? Welche Wechselbeziehungen bestehen zwischen den Akteuren mit welcher Wirkung? Welche (weiteren) Einflussfaktoren auf die Problematisierung und Maßnahmen der Situation der erwerbstätigen Frau sind zu erkennen? So wird zum einen für Frankreich und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland die Aneignung supranationaler Diskurse und Maßnahmen auf nationaler Ebene nachgezeichnet und erklärt. Zum anderen soll untersucht werden, welchen Einfluss nationale Politik und Akteure auf den Prozess haben.
In her inaugural address for the opening of the new season at Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, Carolin Emke explains: “Identities are a means of transport but not a home. Identities are something to travel but nothing to live in.” (1)
Postmigration is a controversial term that has found its way into German written press with the arrival of Shermin Langhoff and Jens Hilje as the new directors of the Maxim Gorki Theatre. It is the artists who decline a ‘postmigrant identity’ and propose an alternate concept. As creative actors they design new narratives that reflect German society. Postmigration can be understood as a filter or lens. This perspective is based on certain experiences between different cultures and languages. Hereby the process of moving between a sense of self and a sense of others is especially relevant. Postmigrant representations deconstruct prominent stereotypes and defy the supposed image of “the” Latina or Turkish Immigrant.
But to understand postmigrant self-representations merely as a counter-identification or counterculture is also a simplification. Stereotypes and the sense of others are also being appropriated and processed through self-representations.
José Esteban Muñoz explains “disidentifications” as strategies of marginalized subjects between identification and counter-identification within a hegemonic culture. He describes: "the postcolonial hybrid is a subject whose identity practices are structured around an ambivalent relationship to the sign of empire and the sign of the 'narrative', a subject who occupies a space between the west and the rest.“ (2) Muñoz analyses performance as everyday practice and assumes that certain strategies are being made explicit in Performance Art. This correlation between everyday practice and artistic performance seems to be fundamental for postmigrant representations between cultural spaces.
Stuart Hall describes identities as the product of different interlocking histories and cultures, which at the same time belong to different homelands and can never be homogenous. “Cultural identity (…) is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. (…) Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.” (3) Postmigrant cultural representations bring this play on stage. His- and Herstories about migration are being told and the question is raised: What comes after? Thereby cultural and verbal translations accompany the second and third generations. I assume that in cultural in-between spaces, cultural identities are being negotiated. But how? Which artistic practices and aesthetics play a role? What are the similarities and differences concerning the diversity of culture, race and language? And which utopian moments can be found in Postmigrant Performance Art?
(1) Emcke, Carolin: Rede zur Eröffnung der Spielzeit 13/14, Programmheft Gorki Theater Berlin, S. 3.
(2) Muñoz, José Esteban: Disidentifications, Minneapolis 1999, University of Minnesota Press, S. 78.
(3) Hall, Stuart: Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In: Patrick, Williams and Chrisman (Hg.): Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: a Reader. London 1994, Harvester Wheatsheaf, S. 225.
John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies
Field/Area of work
Sociology
Subject group
Law, Economics and Social Sciences
End
2015
Status
Completed
Short description
The inclusion of women into the labor market, entailing the erosion of both traditional role models and task allocations, constitutes one of the central characteristics of current social change and undoubtedly indicates new mechanisms regarding the distribution of life chances. More controversial than the fact that the rapidly increasing proportion of women in employment assumes a key role in the upheaval of family, economy, and welfare state, is the sociological interpretation of this trend. Employing the example of job market integration of women in the US, this thesis aims at historically retracing a process of dissolution of formerly separate gender spheres. This process will be analyzed and categorized within a context of social theory. The case of the US epitomizes a development characterized by paradoxes and ambivalence, to be construed as an indication of individualistic liberalism as well as exemplary for an overall shift toward neo-liberalism within the modern Western welfare state. The paramount question in this respect is: in which ways have the structural principles of social inequality in the US changed on account of the described shifts in gender relations – and whether at all a significance for the distribution of life chances can be attributed to gender anymore. On the basis of an empirical survey (Pt. I), a comparison and evaluation of two dominant models of interpretation (Pt. II), and a revision of current analytical instruments of feminist theory (Pt. III) the thesis comes to the conclusion that, without considering their interconnections with further layers of inequality, particularly the layer of social class, present-day gender relations in the US cannot be fully understood.
