Washington University in St.

Louis

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Electronic Theses and Dissertations

1-1-2011

Topographies of Sexuality: Space, Movement, and Gender in German Literature and Film since 1989
Necia Chronister
Washington University in St. Louis, nnchroni@wustl.edu

Recommended Citation
Chronister, Necia, "Topographies of Sexuality: Space, Movement, and Gender in German Literature and Film since 1989" (2011). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 69. http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/69

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WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Dissertation Examination Committee: Lutz Koepnick, Chair Mary Ann Dzuback Paul Michael Ltzeler Erin McGlothlin Lynne Tatlock Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

TOPOGRAPHIES OF SEXUALITY: SPACE, MOVEMENT, AND GENDER IN GERMAN LITERATURE AND FILM SINCE 1989 by Necia Chronister

A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 2011

Saint Louis, Missouri

Copyright by Necia Chronister May 2011

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures; the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and the Mr. and Mrs. Spencer T. Olin Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis for their intellectual and financial support during my graduate studies and the composition of this dissertation. In particular, I thank Lutz Koepnick for helping me identify many of my intellectual blind spots and work through them, Lynne Tatlock for her professional mentorship and her care in developing my writing, and Paul Michael Ltzeler for helping me learn about the big picture of literary studies. I also owe thanks to Erin McGlothlin, Mary Ann Dzuback, and Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf for their careful reading of my work and generous feedback. Finally, I would like to thank the Graduate School Practices of Literature at the Westflische Wilhelms-Universitt Mnster for initial feedback on my first chapter, as well as the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for providing me with the financial support to develop such a close professional relationship with Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf and the Universitt Mnster. The dissertation is never only an intellectual challenge, but an emotional one as well. I want to thank my husband, Eric Hoffpauir, who has read every academic word I have written in graduate school and who has loved and cared for me throughout; my daughter, Nola, for giving me play breaks; my mom and stepdad, Sharla and Rockey Robbins, for their unrelenting encouragement and emotional support; my dad, Rick Chronister, for having the blind confidence in me that only a parent can have; and my sister, Lindsey Pasley, for giving me perspective when the dissertation seemed like my whole world. Finally, I am indebted to my friends and colleagues, Tracy Graves, Nancy Twilley, and Corey Twitchell for their careful reading of my work, honest feedback, and humor. I couldnt have completed the dissertation without your support.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgements..ii Introduction..1

Chapter One: Reading Queer Space: Theory and Methodology..10

Chapter Two: The Centrality of Queer in Contemporary Representation71

Chapter Three: Queer Heterosexuality and the Spaces of Grotesque/Abject Encounter.....125

Chapter Four: Poetically Queer: Androgyny and the Spaces of Gender Ambivalence..........180 Works Cited.243

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Introduction A queer thing has happened in German literature and film since 1989. Characters in contemporary works by Fatih Akin, Judith Hermann, Bodo Kirchhoff, Christian Kracht, Angela Krau, and Emine Sevgi zdamar, among others, undertake travel within re-unified Germany and abroad with unprecedented frequency and ease. More importantly, this travel almost always entails experimentation with sexual and/or gender expression. Once these characters are set in motion, their gender and sexual identities become unfettered from the ostensibly stable spaces and places of their home nations and communities. What is more, protagonists in travel narratives and films identify more than ever before as gay/lesbian/queer or experiment with these identities while traveling; often these figures lose or double their gender, becoming androgynous. At the end of the narrative, they tend to resist settling into a place or into a sexual or gender identity. By creating characters who engage sexually while traveling, these authors and director imagine a range of possibilities for understanding sexualities and for renegotiating gender in our contemporary globalized world. To be sure, travel and sexuality have been paired themes in literature at least since Homers Odyssey. Literary figures have always travelled abroad and encountered there the sexual Other, the exotic, and the foreign. In some genres, like the Bildungsroman, sexual encounters during travel have served the purpose of heterosexualizing the (usually male) protagonist and thereby helping him become a responsible, (re)productive adult who is prepared to enter society upon return home (though other models and other genres exist as well). In the texts and films I examine in this dissertation, characters do not

become heterosexualized through travel; nor do they return home ready to be responsible, reproductive adults. Rather, characters today are often comfortable in their disorientation and choose to resist settling, even after the trip is long over. This trend in contemporary representation can be contextualized in part by noting the historical developments of post-1989 Europe that put into question long established notions of space and spatial boundaries. The fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification mark a political and geographical destabilization of the East/West binary, and the developments of the European Union have made travel across national borders within Europe virtually effortless. From a global perspective, the developments of advanced globalization and the invention of the internet have created spaces that transcend spatial and political boundaries, as well as the divisions of work, home, and leisure spaces that have traditionally structured European mens and womens lives. With the historical developments of 1989 and the 1990s that reconfigured the European map, as well as the world-wide developments of advanced globalization and the internet, which have flattened space, Europeans have unprecedented access to the globe.1 Indeed, the historical developments of 1989 and the 1990s in Europe give evidence of
1

I use the term advanced globalization here to describe the networking of global communications media and the global distribution of goods and labor that characterize globalization today. Arguably, the world has been global since tribes and Vikings made their ways across countysides and oceans. Today, however, global distances are traversed with unprecedented ease and speed. Goods, services, and practices from across the world are available to its wealthier inhabitants and, in many cases, instantaneously. For this reason, cultures are becoming increasingly hybrid, and local cultures are forced more than ever to negotiate the meaning of local culture while integrating globalized elements. The term flattened space, in the sense I use it here, has been popularized by economist Thomas Friedman in his book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005). In his book, Friedman argues that globalization has created a level playing field for economies of all size, because global networks of personal computers and the creation of specific kinds of software make national economies less beholden to their geographical borders and the particularities of their histories. Friedmans term has been adopted in discussions outside of economics to describe a collapsing of distances through the advent and proliferation of global communications media and global transportation.

shifting conceptions about spatial delineation, the nation-state, and thus perhaps also the viability of identities based on local places. Questions about the role of space in human self-perception have been taken up by geographers, philosophers, historians, and other academic thinkers. As I will demonstrate in this dissertation, this historical situation in Germany after 1989 has prompted new representations of space and mobility in literature and film that destabilize the binaries of East/West, national/foreign, and public/private. Concurrently, intellectual and popular conceptions about gender and sexuality have changed as well. Since Judith Butler argued that gender is not something that one has nor is, but rather that one does, gender has become destabilized as a fundamental basis for identity and reconceived as mutable and in flux. The number of gender and queer studies programs in the United States and abroad have multiplied since the early 1990s, and these major fields of study have been concerned with examining the recent proliferation of gender and sexual identity categories. Over the past two decades, similar questions about identity have occupied thinkers in both spatial and gender/queer theory. It is perhaps, then, no surprise that sexuality and travel have also become strong themes in German literature and film since 1989. I will argue in this dissertation that these destabilizations of both the spatial paradigm and the gender/sexuality system can be understood in tandem with one another and that the connections between the two are evidenced by their pairing in contemporary literature. My dissertation focuses on works by one film director and five authors who thematize travel and sexuality in their respective work: Fatih Akin, Judith Hermann, Christian Kracht, Bodo Kirchhoff, Angela Krau, and Emine Sevgi zdamar. Not all of

the primary texts discussed in my dissertation can be categorized as travel literature or film; however, all feature topoi of that genre: mobility, a heightened awareness of space, the crossing of borders and boundaries, and a keen awareness of the body in the foreign environment. In his films Im Juli (2000), Gegen die Wand (2004), and Auf der anderen Seite (2007), Fatih Akin not only thematizes heterosexuality, same-sex desire, and androgyny, travel between Turkey and Germany, and the cultural (if no longer national) boundaries that place restrictions on sexual object choice, but he also uses landscape and cityscapes to place his characters in precarious situations in which sex and gender are in flux. In the two films I examine here, Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite, Akin uses the topographies of two German cities, Bremen and Hamburg, and of the Turkish city Istanbul, as parallel settings for his characters, thus questioning the validity of the East/West binary. The topographies of these cities are implicated in the problematic relationships between his leading couples. In Gegen die Wand, he introduces androgyny into the hetero-normative framework of the relationship of the protagonists, forcing them to renegotiate their own heterosexual gender identities established in Hamburg and put in flux in Istanbul. In Auf der anderen Seite, a lesbian relationship set in motion from Germany to Turkey proves necessary for the negotiation of other same-sex familial relationships that structure the film. Two authors I examine in this dissertation employ queer narrators or narrators who can be read as queer. Judith Hermann authors highly mobile and highly sexual characters, but often omits information about her protagonists respective genders. These

characters exhibit different gendered behaviors in different spaces, thus frustrating the readers attempt to assign them a gender. In Christian Krachts work, sexual orientation, rather than gender, is rendered unintelligible as his characters travel in Germany and abroad. The first-person narrators in his novels Faserland (1995) and 1979 (2001) both have clear sexual orientations (heterosexual and homosexual, respectively), but often recoil from possible sexual encounters as they enter new spaces. Sexual orientation does not correspond with sexual desire in Krachts works; nor does it correspond with other types of orientation. In 1979, the narrators anxiety about sex corresponds with an anxiety toward space, and he must rely on the androgynous figure Mavrocordato to provide him with spatial orientation. As we shall see, Emine Sevgi zdamar, Bodo Kirchhoff, and Angela Krau denaturalize heterosexuality in their works. Bodo Kirchhoff explores male heterosexual desire as alienating and frightening, as his protagonists travel to exotic locations and encounter there the sexual and cultural Other. In his novels, Kirchhoff employs the abject as an aesthetic mode to alienate the reader from the desires of his heterosexual protagonists and to express the protagonists alienation from foreign spaces as they travel. By contrast, male friendships offer Kirchhoffs protagonists more fulfilling relationships, and Kirchhoffs employment of the abject changes character in those texts in which he depicts the homosocial. Emine Sevgi zdamar employs a similar aesthetic, the grotesque, in her autofictional works. zdamar thematizes border crossingboth geographically and in terms of genderand explores female heterosexual desire in foreign spaces. The grotesque lends her narratives humor as her protagonists adjust to

living in a foreign country and have strange sexual experiences there. Finally, Angela Kraus protagonist in Die berfliegerin sets out into the world in search of selfdiscovery and learns upon encountering two transvestites that identity is performed, constructed, and negotiated. Her own heterosexual identity is queered when she embraces multiplicity. In investigating the thematic intersections of space, mobility, gender, and sexuality in contemporary literature, I take into consideration popular and theoretical discourses on space and gender that gained currency in the latter half of the twentieth century. Spatial theory since Henri Lefebvre has offered models of thinking about space not simply as a material reality, but also as socially constructed, normative, and regulatory. Such theorists as Marc Aug, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Doreen Massey, among others, have created conceptual models for understanding space in our contemporary world of heightened mobility and flow. Moreover, social geographers such as Dennis Altman and Massey have examined the implications of globalization for local constructions of gender and sexuality. These theorists provide models for considering how spaces may be rendered aesthetically in literature and film, as well as how gender and sexuality function in different kinds of spaces. Spatial theory in the latter half of the twentieth century has conceptualized space as fluid and negotiable, and thus a less stable basis for identity than previously understood. In her groundbreaking works Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter

(1993), Judith Butler has similarly destabilized gender as a basis for identity.2 In these foundational works of queer studies, Butler reconceives gender as existing neither as a binary opposition nor on a continuum, but as a performance, a discursive reality that is reified through the repetition of norms, behaviors, and discourses. By denaturalizing binaries of sex and gender, Butler has created a paradigm that allows for the transgression of long established social boundaries that also regulate sexuality. Moreover, since Butlers early work, categories describing sexuality have multiplied. Theories by intellectuals such as Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Halberstam, among others, have found resonance in both popular culture and academic discourses, rendering reflections on gender and sexual identity visible in public discourses in an unprecedented way. In the chapters that follow, I examine the ways in which characters in contemporary German literature and film, and particularly in those texts and films that thematize the traversal of space, exhibit queer gender and/or sexuality. In Chapter 1, I map out my theoretical framework for examining the spatial and gender/sexuality systems in contemporary German literature and film. I trace the major shifts in both spatial and queer theory and focus on their parallel concerns since 1990 as both fields of theory reorganized themselves around the tenets of poststructuralism. In Chapter 2, I examine constructions of queer in Judith Hermanns short story Sonja (1998), Angela Kraus longer story, Die berfliegerin (1995), and Fatih Akins film Auf der anderen Seite (2007). The popularity of these texts provides evidence of the centrality of queer in
2

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). ---, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993).

contemporary representation. I demonstrate that queer appears not only in the form of gay/lesbian/queer characters, but also can be an aesthetic mode or narrative standpoint. Moreover, by examining the spaces of queer encounter in these texts, I show how literature and films imagine queer and hetero-queer spaces. In Chapter 3, I turn to an examination of heterosexuality in the works of Emine Sevgi zdamar and Bodo Kirchhoff. I argue that these authors use the grotesque and the abject, respectively, to alienate the reader from their protagonists heterosexual desires and thereby to queer heterosexuality. I also discuss their characters unwillingness to settle, either into stable relationships or into the places and spaces in which they find themselves. Finally, in Chapter 4, I propose androgyny as an aesthetic rendering of queer sexuality and gender. I examine the characters Mavrocordato in Christian Krachts novel 1979 (2001), the unnamed protagonist-narrator in Judith Hermanns short story Sommerhaus, spter (1998), and Sibel in Fatih Akins film Gegen die Wand (2004), each of whom is capable of displaying both masculine and feminine features at once and of oscillating between intelligible and unintelligible gender expressions. All literary texts in question have received attention from scholars and critics alike, yet little work has connected these protagonists travel and their sexual activity. My dissertation demonstrates that sex, space, and mobility can, and should, be understood in tandem with one another in many contemporary works. As I will demonstrate, contemporary literature and film part from the conventions of the travel narrative in which the protagonist travels in order to find a coherent sense of self and in which sexual encounters serve that project by heterosexualizing the protagonist. Instead,

in contemporary German literature and film, characters who engage with different kinds of spaces find their identities to be mutable and in flux. Rather than settling at the end of the narrativeeither in terms of space or a stable gender/sexual identitythese characters prefer to remain unsettled. They prefer to keep open the possibility of further movement through space and further possibilities for gender and sexual expression.

Chapter 1: Reading Queer Space: Theory and Methodology In the introduction to this dissertation, I proposed that the travel motif in contemporary German literature and film parts from the conventional model in which the protagonist journeys into the world in order to find a core sense of self and experiences sexuality on the trip as part of his initiation into (re)productive adulthood. Rather, I argue, contemporary authors and directors set their characters in motion to experience spatial and gender/sexual disorientation, and characters tend to remain unsettled at the end of texts in terms of both space and a sexual/gender identity. In investigating this trend in contemporary German literature, I turn to two fields of theory, spatial and queer theory, that similarly examine identity as fluid, hybrid, unnstable, discursively constructed, and performed. In this chapter, I examine the major ideas and trends in spatial and queer theory and then turn to a discussion of the ways in which queer activism has used placemaking as a strategy for gaining legitimacy in the public sphere. By looking to spatial and queer theory, as well as to the ways in which queer activism has conceived of and used different spaces, I trace various models for understanding the connections between gender, sexuality, and space in our material world and in the worlds of literature and film. Finally, I conclude this chapter by briefly outlining how I employ concepts from spatial and queer theory to analyze fictional texts in the chapters that follow. Spatial Theory Space has a great deal of currency in German studies today. Conference panels, articles, and anthologies are devoted to examining both the social implications and

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literary expressions of the so-called spatial turn in intellectual thought. Summed up neatly by the oft-cited call Always spatialize!,3 the spatial turn refers to a trend in the social sciences in the1980s and 1990s (and some two decades later in the humanities) to privilege space over time as an organizing principle of intellectual interrogation. For literary studies, this has meant learning to read and analyze spaces in texts. Setting can no longer be considered a mere backdrop for the temporal trajectory of plot; rather, literary scholars are concerned with the ways in which characters engage with their spatial environments and what that engagement with space contributes to our understanding of texts. In her book chapter, Spatial Turn in Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (2007), Doris Bachmann-Medick contextualizes this shift to privileging space over time in intellectual thought. She writes that during the Enlightenment, time was established as the privileged category of the modern era.4 Indeed, one finds an explicit explanation for the privileging of time in Immanuel Kants Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). In his chapter On the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding Kant posits time and space as the two a priori conditions for all understanding. Time is the a priori condition for the thinking subjects inner reflection; space is the a priori condition for the existence of the outside world. Because

The origin of this call is disputed. A clear play on Frederic Jamesons slogan, Always historicize! ( The Political Unconscious, 1981), Doris Bachmann-Medick mistakenly credits Jameson himself for this call to spatialization. Other theorists have attributed the slogan to Henri Lefebvre, and feminist theorist Susan Stanford Friedmann claims to have created the slogan in her book Mapping: Feminism and the Cultural Geography of Encounter (1998).
4

Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007).

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the individuals reflection is primary to all understanding, time is the principal a priori category, even for spatial interpretation. He writes, The concept of the understanding contains pure synthetic unity of the manifold in general. Time, as the formal condition of the manifold of inner sense, thus of the connection of all representations, contains a priori manifold in pure intuition.5 According to Kant, if the world cannot be knowable, but only interpreted through our own perceptions, then understanding of the outer world must depend on the inner sense of the individual, which is time. Intellectual thought should, then, privilege time over space as an organizing principle of interrogation. Aside from shaping intellectual discourses, time and the attendant concepts of progress, transcendence, evolution, history, and the future, etc., have shaped the values upon which Western culture has based itself, according to Bachmann-Medick. Space, in this paradigm, holds a lesser value and has been associated with stasis, the imminent, the cyclical and the material present. Not only has Western culture perceived itself as operating on a historical timeline of cultural development; it has also characterized other cultures as existing in inferior positions on that same timeline. Bachmann-Medick writes that we can see the effects of privileging time in the historicism and colonialism of the nineteenth century. In the age of postcolonialism and postmodernism, temporal metaphors like progress and evolution have lost validity as bases for positive values, having been exposed for their role in the colonial era in the violent subordination of ostensibly lesser evolved peoples like Africans, American Indians, and Asians, for the profit of supposedly culturally advanced Europeans. As a
5

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 272. I am indebted to Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf for my understanding of this concept.

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result, temporal concepts have given way in the postcolonial era to spatial models of understanding the relationships between cultures. Thinkers like Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and Edward Soja, among many others, have argued that cultural relationships can be understood as existing in synchrony and constellation.6 Whereas time had been a linear concept that could only tolerate one cultural standard at a time, space as an organizing category of thought prefers multiplicity, plurality, networking, multiculturalism, and eclecticism.7 This is not to say that space was ignored before Edward Soja coined the term spatial turn in 1989.8 Indeed, space and time have been considered primary categories for understanding experience since Plato, and space has long been the subject of geography, sociology, anthropology, architecture, and cartography.9 However, the proliferation of thought on space beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century has resulted in paradigmatic changes in the way we conceptualize space and our identification with it. Over the next several pages, I will trace the major trends in spatial

Bachmann-Medick 285-295.

Of course, political discussions on space cannot be conceived of as universally positive. Thinking in terms of space and culture brings up often troubling questions of territorialism and nationhood that do not tolerate cultural pluralism. Perhaps the most notorious example of this is Friedrich Ratzels concept of Lebensraum, which I discuss in footnote 11.
8

Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). See also: Jrg Dring und Tristan Thielmann, hrsg. Einleitung. Was lesen wir im Raum? Der Spatial Turn und das geheime Wissen der Geographen, Spatial Turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2008) 7-48.
9

In his play Timaeus, Plato develops the concept of the chora, which, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a three-dimensional field in which the created universe may subsist, a field that Timaeus initially calls the receptacle (hupodoch) of all becoming (49a56) and subsequently calls space (chra, 52a8, d3). Platos Timaeus, Stanford Encyclopedia of Phylosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-timaeus/.

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thought, focusing on the ways in which theorists have posited the relationship between humans and their spaces. Each model of thinking about space suggests ways in which group and individual identity is anchored in (and can become de-anchored from) spaces and places. Before I continue with a discussion of spatial theory, however, I should define the terms space and place for this dissertation. One of the difficulties of reading spatial theory arises from the failure of theorists to define their particular use of these seemingly intuitive terms, and the implementation of these terms differs from theorist to theorist. In this chapter, I survey theories on space and place and use the terms in accordance with the particular theory in question. In the chapters that follow, I employ the term space to describe a dimension that is dynamic and mutable as characters traverse it. Place, on the other hand, denotes an area that is perceived by characters as stable and unchangeable. Both spaces and places can be arenas in which characters develop senses of identity (or not). Both spaces and places can be named, located on maps, and delineated. However, space in this dissertation will be a matter of practice and dynamism, place a matter of established physical boundaries. Prior to the 1970s, thinking on space was based on a container model, in which space was conceptualized as a pre-existing parameter within which people conducted life. Drawing from this model, theorists like Friedrich Ratzel, Georg Simmel, and Fernand Braudel, among others, conceptualized natural space as having a determining influence on the people who inhabit it. At the turn of the twentieth century, Friedrich Ratzel argued that landscapes and their inhabitants have a natural and essential relationship. In ber

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die geographische Lage (1894), Ratzel asserts that the geographical situation of a people has a determining effect on both the physical characteristics of the population and the character of the culture as a whole. To tend ones land is therefore to care for ones people. He writes: Indem ein Volk sein Land erhlt, erhlt es sich selbst. Sein Land zu behalten, es in jedem Sinne zu genieen, sich in seinen Grenzen auszuleben, sieht ein Volk als seinen nchsten Zweck an. . . .10 Natural space is God-given, Ratzel argues, and ones territory should be defended. However, it is also natural for a political unit to expand or retract its geographical space according to its needs and political relationships with neighboring entities. As the parameters of a cultures spaces change, so do the characteristics of the entire culture.11 Whereas Ratzel theorized the ostensibly determining effects of space on groups of people, his contemporary, Georg Simmel, soon began to examine the inverse, that is, the ways in which people manipulate space to create the political boundaries that are critical for the formation of groups. Simmel argues that political boundaries are not a spatial fact with sociological consequences, but a sociological fact that is formed spatially.12 For Simmel, social groups create borders in order to shape their possible experiences and
10

By maintaining its land, a people also maintains itself. A people sees its first purpose as upholding its land, enjoying it in every way, and living out life within its borders [] (my translation). Friedrich Ratzel, ber die geographische Lage (1894), Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, hrsg. Jrg Dnne und Stephan Gnzel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006) 387.
11

Ratzels geographical determinism would become dangerous as the twentieth century progressed. In his work Der Lebensraum. Eine biogeographische Studie (1901), Ratzel argues that a society functions like an organism, which, as it grows, seeks out more space to live. This concept of Lebensraum would be co-opted by the National Socialists to justify imperialist expansion of Germany into Eastern Europe. See: Woodruff D. Smith, "Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum," German Studies Review 3.1 (Feb 1980): 5168.
12

Trans. David Fearon. See: Georg Simmel: The Sociology of Space, Website for the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Sciences (CSISS): http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/75.

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relationships within space. Boundaries lend a group a sense of cohesion, because they mark a physical expression of sameness. Moreover, spatial boundares determine the relationships of one social group with others, that is, they establish the proximity or distance of other groups. According to Simmel, the ultimate validation of a social group is a space of its own.13 Space has been the subject of not only human geography and sociology, but more recently, of history as well. In the mid-twentieth century, historian Fernand Braudel, as a leader of the Annales school of historiography, rejected teleological accounts of the past and argued instead for a materialist human geography, or a gohistoire, in order to explain how the past informs the present. In his seminal work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1945) he writes that gohistoire means discovering a history of space. He states: To pose the human problems the way that an intelligent human geography sees them, distributed spatially and charted whenever possibleyes we certainly should. However, they should not be posed only for the present and in the present, but rather, find their application in the past by accounting for time.14 To support his call for spatializing history, he examines how the people on the Mediterranean Sea interacted with their unique geographical positioning to build their cultures and thus create their histories. Careful to distance himself from the geographical

13

Georg Simmel, ber rumliche Projektionen sozialer Formen, Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, hrsg. Jrg Dnne und Stephan Gnzel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006) 304-316.
14

Fernand Braudel, Gohistoire und geographischer Determinismus, Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, hrsg. Jrg Dnne und Stephan Gnzel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006) 395. (My translation from German).

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determinism of Friedrich Ratzel, he argues that the time, space, and agency of a people in their environments are all connected in producing history. Ratzel, Simmel, and Braudel are only three of numerous spatial thinkers of the modern era who drew from a container model of space to understand the relationship between humans and their environments. Their work presumes that groups are formed through the divisions of spaces into separate containers that can then be differentiated from the containers of other groups. Space, in this paradigm, is the pre-existing parameter within which human interactions take place. In 1974, however, Henri Lefebvre changed the trajectory of spatial theory by rejecting the container model and arguing instead that people create spaces through their various modes of interaction. In his seminal work The Production of Space (1974), he writes: Nature is . . . simply the raw materials (matire premire), with which the productive forces of different societies have operated to produce their space.15 In what has become known as the relational model of space, Lefebvre argues that each society produces its spaces through social interactions. Lefebvre outlines three main ways in which a society produces spaces: through 1) the ways in which it divides and uses natural space, 2) the ways in which it represents and organizes real spaces on documents like maps and city plans, and 3) the ways in which art produces the symbols and images by which people of that society organize their own spatial perceptions. After Lefebvre developed his model of relational space, spatial thinkers could no longer conceptualize space as simply the framework or

15

Braudel 395 (my translation from German).

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pre-existing container in which history takes place. Rather, we now understand space as continually produced and reproduced through human interactions.16 The influence of Lefebvre on spatial thinking has been far reaching. During the 1970s and 80s, theorists like Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, and Doreen Massey, among many others, built from Lefebvres concept of relational space to examine how spaces are produced socially and what power structures are invested in the production and maintenance of certain spaces. Michel de Certeau demonstrates how socially constructed, relational space is created within material space in his work The Practice of Everyday Life (1984).17 According to de Certeau, a space is necessarily created by those physical barriers that delineate it, but also by the human subject who makes choices when s/he traverses it. The city is full of possibilities and interdictions, in the form of streets, buildings, walls, etc., which make traversing some spaces simple and others difficult. By making choices in the creation of a path, the subject actualizes city spaces: In that way, [the walking subject] makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.18 For de Certeau, walking can be

16

For an in-depth discussion of the philosophical debates on space as containers versus space as relational, see Benno Werlen, Andere ZeitenAndere Rume? Zur Geographie der Globalisierung, Denken des Raums in Zeiten der Globalisierung, hrsg. Michaela Ott und Elke Uhl (Mnster: Lit, 2005) 5772.
17

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (1984; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
18

De Certeau 98.

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likened to a creative speech act, and the city provides the grammar for such creative walking.19 Finally, de Certeau makes an important distinction between space and place. Whereas a place is a set of elements that stand in specific locations in relation to one another, space is a set of vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables and always implies the creative process of traversing it: In short, space is a practiced place.20 In other words, a place is delineated, named, and perhaps locatable on a map. Space is the dynamic subjective experience of a place as it becomes activated by those people who inhabit and traverse it. It is produced by the subject, by his/her choices in walking or otherwise moving, and in his/her interactions with other people. De Certeaus contemporary, Pierre Bourdieu, is less concerned with the production of material spaces than with the relational symbolism of space. In his chapter Social Space and Symbolic Space, in Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (1989), Bourdieu states that his entire body of work has the (structuralist) aims of mapping out patterns in specific cultures, attempting to find the invariant structures behind them, and discovering the applicability of those patterns for understanding other cultures.21 According to Bourdieu, one of the most universal means of understanding cultural power structures is to look at the cultures use of space. Not only is space

19

De Certeau 97. De Certeau 117.

20

21

Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, trans. Randall Johnson (1989; Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) 2.

19

allotted to individuals and social groups in a means proportionate to either economic or social capital, but social classes derive their legitimacy through spatial metaphor: This idea of difference, or a gap, is at the basis of the very notion of space, that is, a set of distinct and coexisting positions which are exterior to one another and which are defined in relation to one another through their mutual exteriority and their relations of proximity, vicinity, or distance, as well as through relations of order, such as above, below, and between. Certain properties of members of the petit-bourgeoisie can, for example, be deduced from the fact that they occupy an intermediate position between two extreme positions . . . .22 Both social classes and individual people occupy social space, according to Bourdieu. The social space of an individual is unique to that person (just as no two entities can occupy the same material space) and is determined by social class, family, economic wealth, and social capital, among other factors. According to Bourdieus most influential concept, the habitus, a persons position within social space comes to be manifested on his/her body through mannerisms, clothing, and gestures. The production of space in society is both relational and symbolic, and each person in a society demonstrates his/her unique position through the habitus. Similar to Bourdieu and de Certeau, feminist geographer Doreen Massey draws from Lefebvre in her critical reading of spatial control as a means of gendered power. In her collection of essays Space, Place, and Gender (1994), Massey demonstrates the ways in which, traditionally in Western culture, womens work within the domestic sphere has been necessary to allow men the requisite mobility and time flexibility for productive work in the public and political spheres. Mens work, which becomes then aligned with historical notions of progress, production, and transcendence in a metaphysical manner, is
22

Bourdieu 6.

20

supported by a notion of femininity that is associated with cyclical work within the household, reproduction (as opposed to production), and immanence (as opposed to transcendence).23 Masseys work has inspired an entire body of feminist spatial theory. Feminist geographers like Joanne P. Sharp, Nancy Duncan, and Gill Valentine, among others, have engaged in discussions about male and female spheres, gender and citizenship, feminist architecture, and sexuality and space. 24 Masseys influence on the field of geography extends outside feminist discourses, however. She takes Lefebvres concept of relational space beyond its original parameters, arguing that space is not only socially constructed and artificially rendered, but that cultural productions of relational space should not be conceptualized as isolated from one another. All spaces must be understood in global terms. Moreover, taking a global perspective on space reveals that space itself is inseparable from time. She writes: Space is created out of the vast intricacies, the incredible complexities, of the interlocking and the non-interlocking, and the networks of relations at every scale from local to global. . . . Seeing space as a moment in the intersection of configured social relations (rather than as an absolute dimension) means that it cannot be seen as static. There is no choice between flow (time) and a flat surface of instantaneous relations (space).25 The boundaries of space are not stable. Spaces connect, merge, separate, and interrelate, and because space is so dynamic, it can only be conceptualized in relation to its moment in time. It is the fundamental flaw of previous spatial thinkers, according to Massey, to
23

Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). See specifically the essay Space, Place, and Gender 185-190.
24

A good starting point for examining these discourses is the anthology Nancy Duncan, ed, Bodyspace: Destablizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1996).
25

Massey 265.

21

attempt to separate space and time and to confuse simultaneity for stasis. She argues that [s]pace is not static, nor time spaceless.26 She calls for historians and geographers to think not in terms of time or space to inform their respective fields, but rather spacetime. Moreover, in attempting to dismantle the binary of time/space, Massey also argues for the dismantling of other related binaries that regulate power, such as male/female and global/local. Indeed, for spatial thinkers of both the container and relational models, to examine space means to scrutinize the actual and symbolic relationships between human societies and their environments. A societys position in geographical space, according to the container model, could determine the character and history of that culture. According to the relational model, a persons position within society is largely shaped by the spatial divisions that regulate class and gender. Although the container and relational models dominated spatial thinking in the twentieth century, outliers also exist that are gaining new currency since the spatial turn. For example, Michel Foucaults concept of the heterotopia, which focuses on the non-places that exist rather invisibly in all cultures, is perhaps the most frequently cited concept in spatial theory today. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris smooth and striated spaces are similarly influential. According to Deleuze and Guattari, a persons perception of space as s/he traverses it determines the kind of space it is. Rather than theorizing static spaces and places (which is perhaps no longer credible after Massey), these spatial thinkers prefer to examine

26

Massey 264.

22

dynamic spaces that change character either through practices of collection and juxtaposition or through the subjects mobility through those spaces. In his essay Of Other Spaces (1967) Michel Foucault predicts the spatial turn that would be named some twenty years later. He writes that while the great obsession of the nineteenth century was history, [t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.27 Rather than examining the ordinary spaces in which group identity formation occurs, Foucault is more interested in the non-placesthe utopias and heterotopias that he contends exist in nearly all societiesin which difference, change, and the compilation of disparate objects are valued. Utopias, he argues are sites with no real places. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society and that reflect an image of society as either perfect or the opposite of perfect.28 The mirror, he argues, is the best example of a utopia. Heterotopias are much more complex; they are the spaces that exist in each society that reflect elements of all other societies. The museum and the library are good examples, in that they bring disparate objects from all corners of the world into one building. The graveyard is a similar such site, in that people from different ages, areas, and families are collected there. One of the defining features of heterotopias, Foucault writes, is that one must gain permission to

27

Michael Foucault, Of Other Spaces, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics. 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22-27. 22. Foucault, Of Other Spaces 24.

28

23

enter, either through invitation or by paying admission. The heterotopia is, therefore, not a space one encounters on a daily basis and a space that one must make an effort to enter. The ship, which restricts who may enter and which travels from port to port, collecting objects and people along the way, is the best example of a heterotopia, according to Foucault. Finally, he asserts that all non-places have one of two opposite functions: either 1) to create an illusory space that reveals all other spaces to be illusory or 2) to create a real space that exhibits a total degree of order and harmony unachievable in any other space.29 What Foucault does not make explicit, but what I find to be an intriguing aspect of heterotopias, is that these space are always evolving. Libraries and museums acquire materials to display; graveyards continue to bury people. The ship, which evolves through its mobility, changes configuration at each stop, gaining new passengers and dropping off others while it collects new objects and then sails again. The heterotopic space is not concerned with establishing or maintaining a stable social identity for a group of people; rather, when the subject enters heterotopic space, s/he encounters elements of disparate cultures in continually evolving arrangements. Unlike the container or relational space, the heterotopic space lends itself to the suspension of identity because it is not anchored to any one place or associated with any particular group of people.30

29

Foucault, Of Other Spaces 27.

30

When discussed in tandem with Masseys concept of space-times that are continually in flux, Foucaults heterotopias can seem to describe any space. However, there are some important distinctions to be made between the two concepts. First, unlike Masseys spaces-times, which evolve rather organically because of

24

While Foucault is interested in the non-places of societies, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari are concerned with disparate perceptions of everyday space. In their book chapter 1440: The Smooth and the Striated in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), Deleuze and Guattari develop two categories of space. Striated space is characterized by its delineations: its landmarks, buildings, and points of interest that make it unique and thus navigable. Subjects in striated space are interested in getting from place to place. Smooth space, by contrast, is less delineated and more fluid. The subject does not attempt to navigate it, but rather, wanders through it without clear intention. S/he experiences it visually, aurally, sensually, and haptically. Deleuze and Guattari write that the smooth and the striated are not distinct types of space, but rather, share common characteristics: Of course, there are points, lines, and surfaces in striated space as well as in smooth space. . . . In striated space, lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another. In the smooth, it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the trajectory.31 Thus, a striated space can become smooth and vice-versa. For example, one might expect a city space to be always striated, but it is smooth for the flaneur.32 Likewise, the desert or ocean, typically
the people traversing them, Foucaults heterotopias exist outside commonly-tread spaces and control how they evolve by restricting who and what may enter. Additionally, Masseys concept of space -time depends on a linear time continuum, whereas Foucaults heterotopias defy p rogressive senses of time or space. Heterotopias are composed of objects from disparate times and places in the world that are juxtaposed rather than placed in a continuum.
31

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1440: The Smooth and the Striated, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 478.
32

While Deleuze and Guattari use the rather obscure term city nomad to describe the wanderer who experiences smooth space in the city, I prefer to employ the more widely received term flaneur as developed by Walter Benjamin. Benjamins flaneur is both mobile through city space and highly perceptive

25

considered to be smooth spaces, can be navigable by the stars or modern technological equipment. What Deleuze and Guattari are describing, though they do not state it explicitly, is that space depends on the embodied perceptions of the subject while mobile. Space becomes striated when the subject is aware of being situated in it and attempts to navigate through it. His/her intellectual capability to interpret and navigate space determines that space. Smooth space, by contrast, is characterized by the subjects sensory perceptions. It depends on haptic rather than optical perception. . . . It is an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances not of measures and properties. . . . Perception in it is based on symptoms and evaluations rather than measures and properties.33 In both cases, the travelers embodiment, intentions, and perceptions determine the kind of space s/he traverses. Space is not constructed through social interaction; it is projected outward from the mobile subject.34 Unlike their contemporaries who support the container and relational models, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari are not concerned with examining issues of group formation or social identity anchored in places and the division of spaces. Rather, they are interested in dynamic spaces that change characteristics over time and due to the

of the sights, sounds, smells, and feeling of a city. See: Walter Benjamin, M: The Flaneur, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999) 416-455. See specifically [M 1,3] on 417.
33

Deleuze and Guattari, The Smooth and the Striated 479.

34

In the conclusion of the essay, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the political implications of striating space. The sky, for example, is a space that has changed quality through history. Once a smooth spaceone thought to be infinite and without any kind of permanent marking it is now strictly parsed into airways and no-fly zones. Spaces that are striated are controllable and thus subject to the dominating forces of political and private interests. Striated space is the space of seated power; space that is regulated by the state. Smooth space is the space of war; it is space available to be changed, conquered, and striated.

26

mobility of those who inhabit and traverse them. Their discussion of space as something that can be perceived outside of identity is unique, and these are among the most frequently discussed theories on space since the spatial turn. One important contemporary thinker follows in the footsteps of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. Marc Augs Non-Places. An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995) addresses the ways in which traditional places are disappearingnot spatially, but phenomenologicallyin our age of unprecedented technology and mobility. According to Aug, supermodernity can be characterized by the disappearance, or at least deemphasis, of what he calls anthropological places, which he defines as relational, historical and concerned with identity.35 That is, people are spending less time in places like towns and city neighborhoods, where people live and where identity formation is ostensibly anchored, and more time in transitional non-places like airports, train stations, and highways. Moreover, people live increasingly in temporary abodes like hospitals, clinics, and hotels, where relationships are only fleeting. Even drawing money from ones bank account no longer requires interaction with a human being when an ATM machine is much more efficient. Aug writes that in this age of technological advancement and mobility, people are much less connected with places, even though they retain the sense of experiencing places all the time: The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which . . . do not integrate the earlier places: instead, these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of places of memory, and assigned to a
35

Marc Aug, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995) 63.

27

circumscribed and specific position.36 Non-places in the Augean sense (as opposed to the Foucaultian sense) are those transitional spaces that disconnect the modern subject from places, all the while giving him/her the sense of experiencing place. For example, humans now travel at speeds never before imaginable and on routes such as the skyways, highways, and high speed railways that bypass anthropological places. Moreover, these modes of transportation are designed to give the passenger a false sense of having experienced the places s/he actually bypasses. Airplanes are supplied with travel magazines that are intended to give the passenger a sense of having experienced a foreign location by reading articles about shopping or the local cuisine of a place. Pilots and inflight video updates announce the location of the plane over the earth, giving the passenger a sense of space traversed, even though s/he is not experiencing those places crossed. Similarly, highways are marked with billboards and signs that announce the attractions of a city or town. The traveler has a sense of what is characteristic of the place without actually driving through it or stopping there. Images and texts replace material places. These transitional spaces offer up images and texts of other places and thus are also not experienced as places in themselves by the distracted traveler. Moreover, the means by which the traveler gains a false sense of experiencing place is the same means by which the identity of the traveler is made into a non-identity. The traveler is a consumer, an ATM number, a security threat or non-threat, or a destination printed on a ticket. The travelers identity is de-centered from the actual person. It is constructed through the text that markets to him/her or that identifies
36

Aug 63.

28

him/her through code, rather than through any core sense of self that the traveler communicates or projects. These non-spaces eliminate social interaction and local identity while maximizing anonymity. Today, discourses on space are multiple and varied. While such concepts as Foucaults heterotopias, Deleuze and Guattaris smooth and striated spaces, and Augs non-places sidestep issues of group identity (or dispense with them altogether), another branch of spatial theory is concerned with the changing characteristics of cultures and places in the age of global marketing, communication, and travel. Theorists like Homi Bhabha and Daniela Ahrens continue to draw from Lefebvres concept of relational space to understand how cultural spaces and cultural identities are negotiated in the age of advanced globalization. Homi Bhabhas notion of third space, for example, discusses the necessary hybridity of cultural identity in both real spaces and the space of intercultural communication. He argues that all cultures contain a degree of diversity, though this diversity is regulated by the norms of the dominant culture. When two dominant cultures meet, he argues, a negotiation of norms must take place. Within this paradigm, cultural identity is not anchored to a place or space, but rather, is mutable and subject to reconfiguration based on the negotiation of cultures.37 Similarly, Roland Robertsons concept of glocalization is concerned with the hybridization of local and global cultures in the age of globalization. According to Daniela Ahrens, who expands on Robertsons concept, the local and the global cannot be conceived of as distinct spatial

37

Jonathan Rutherford, The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha, Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990) 207-221.

29

categories. Although globalization is a seemingly overwhelming force that seeks to homogenize places through the mechanisms of marketing and chain franchises, local cultures frustrate a total homogenization of space. Rather, local cultures select which globalized goods and media to adopt and which to reject altogether, and they often adapt those globalized products to fit local tastes and traditions.38 For example, it would be unthinkable in the United States to order a beer at a McDonalds, whereas in Germany, one can. Both Bhabha and Ahrens demonstrate how cultural identity is mutable according to the spatial reconfiguration of populations and businesses in the age of advanced globalization. Spatial theory in the age of advanced globalization must deal with questions of both cultures and the individuals who move through spaces. What does identity mean when one moves through space rather than remaining in those places where identity is ostensibly stable? What happens to identity when the individual moves outside a space where that identity is constituted? How do individuals perceive space as they move through it? What kinds of spaces maximize mobility? How do people create spaces as they traverse it? Contemporary thinkers on space continue to draw on Henri Lefebvres relational model of space to address these questions, yet newer work on space also problematizes the ostensible cohesiveness of identity based on place that Lefebvre assumes. Contemporary concepts such as third space, glocalization, the global village, and the flattening of space in the era of global communications and multiculturalism question the bases of stable group identity in a world that promises more
38

Daniela Ahrens, Rolle und Funktionen der Region in Zeiten der Globalisierung, Denken des Raums in Zeiten der Globalisierung, hrsg. Michaela Ott und Elke Uhl (Mnster: Lit, 2005) 73-88.

30

access to global mobility and cultural multiplicity than ever before. With the dissolution of stable spaces, identity must become more fluid or dissolve altogether. I am interested in demonstrating how the fluidity or altogether dissolution of identity has become a theme commonly paired with travel and mobility in contemporary German literature. By outlining the major trends in spatial theory of the twentieth century, with focus on how spatial theory posits humans sense of identity in terms of their spatial positioning, I have enumerated the approaches to space that inform my work. Whether characters in this literature find themselves in container spaces, in relationally constituted spaces, or spaces that they create, activate, or fail to recognize through their mobility, the spatial theories outlined in this introduction give us a basis for recognizing the spatial dynamic in these contemporary German texts. In the section that follows, I outline the ways in which queer theory similarly questions the ostensible stability of gender and sexual identity. By demonstrating how both spatial theory and queer theory posit the instability of identity based on spaces/places or gender/sexuality, respectively, I focus my theoretical frameworks for examining the interplay of space and sexuality in contemporary German literature. Queer Theory In February 1990, less than a year after Edward Soja coined the term spatial turn, Teresa de Lauretis called for a new direction in gay and lesbian studies. According to de Lauretis, queer theory would shift scholarly inquiry away from the identity politics of gay liberation and lesbian feminism and re-focus attention to examine the

31

ways in which identities are created through discourse.39 Rather than doing away with the concept of identity altogether, queer theory was to examine the construction of queer identities both within queer communities and with regard to queers relationships to heterosexuality. While queer theory was born out of a need to evaluate the construction of, and relationships between, non-heteronormative identities, at no point has there been a consensus on what it means to be queer. Although queer is used most often as an umbrella term to describe an alliance of non-heterosexual identities, there is little consensus about the validity of that use of the term. Gloria Anzalda has called queer a useful but false unifying umbrella, that erases the differences between gays, lesbians, the transgendered, transsexuals (pre- and post-op), intersex people, and other seemingly limitless identity categories, as well as racial and ethnic differences, that exist under its rubric.40 More pointedly, Nikki Sullivan has stated that the term queer often conjures the singular image of the white gay man.41 At the same time, however, queer has provided a community of inclusion for those who do not identify along the heterosexual/homosexual binary, such as bisexual people (who are often excluded from both straight and gay/lesbian communities), transgendered and transsexual people (whose border crossings in terms of gender often do not correspond to
39

De Lauretis coined the term queer theory at a working conference on gay and lesbian studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The essays presented at that conference were published in the jounal differences in 1991. See: Teresa de Lauretis, Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, an Introduction, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 3.2 (1991): iii-xviii. Three years later, de Lauretis would distance herself from the term queer theory, arguing in the same journal that queer had become a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry. See: Teresa de Lauretis, Habit Changes, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6.2+3 (1994): 296-313.
40

Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, (New York: New York UP, 2003) 45-47. Sullivan 48.

41

32

a same-sex desire), and sadomasochists (who identify not in terms of sexual object choice, but rather, sexual practice).42 Additionally, queers position vis--vis the categories gay, lesbian, and heterosexuality is also contested in discourses on sexuality. One of the earliest descriptions of queer comes from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who in her book Tendencies (1993) argues that the term queer must preserve gay/lesbian at the heart of its definition. She writes that although queer can refer to . . . the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyones gender, of anyones sexuality arent made (or cant be made) to signify monolithically, queer can only function if same-sex expression remains at the definitional center of the term.43 Otherwise to displace [same sexual expressions] from the terms definitional center[] would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.44 In other words, if same-sex desire is not at the center of queer, then queer becomes too abstract to function as an identity category. In its most radical form, queer can be understood as being antithetical to both heteronormativity and gay/lesbian identity categories. Some groups of people who identify as queer, such as the activist group Queers United Against Straight-Acting
42

Sullivan 38-9 See also: Jonathan Alexander and Karen Yescavage, The Scholars Formerly Known as: Bisexuality, Queerness and Identity Politics, The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney and Michael ORourke (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009) 49-65.
43

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 8. Sedgwick goes on to write that some of the most important and exciting work that comes out of queer exceeds the parameters of sexuality and gender, including work on race, ethnicity, nationality, etc., and that queer seems to work most effectively when dealing with issues of self-perception, performance, and experimentation. Sedgwick, Tendencies 8-9.
44

Sedgwick, Tendencies 8.

33

Homosexuals, have distanced themselves from homosexuality, arguing that lesbian and gay identity categories reinforce the binary heterosexuality/homosexuality and thus reaffirm heteronormative culture. Such groups see queer as stepping outside that binary and thus occupying a perpetual outsider status. They argue that the most effective challenge to heteronormativity lies in personalizing ones own identity and thereby resisting simplistic categorizations of gender or sexual identity.45 At another extreme, queer has been conceptualized as a category capable of including not only gays and lesbians, but also some heterosexuals. In his seminal work Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1995), David Halperin defines queer not as an identity, but as a position against whatever is the norm: Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. Queer, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis--vis the normative.46 This position of queer could be occupied by heterosexuals, even reproductive heterosexuals, under certain conditions. Halperin goes on to write that queer is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of his or her sexual practices: it could include some married couples without children, for example, or even (who knows?) some married couples with children

45

Sullivan 45-6.

46

David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) 62. (original emphasis)

34

with, perhaps, very naughty children.47 While Halperins inclusion of heterosexuals in his definition has been charged with making queer too diffuse to be useful, it is, on the other hand, an important attempt to dismantle the binary heterosexual/homosexual and to position queer as a challenge against norms rather than as an identity.48 Queer theory has come under attack for the inability of its proponents to agree on a definition, and thus working parameters, of queer. However, the terms evasiveness can be understood as indicating what queer does. Queer evades definition and institutionalization, even while the study of queer has been taken up by universities and pop culture alike. Queer explores the fluidity and multiplicity of identities, the instability of identity categories per se, their historical and social contingencies, and the fictions they rely on. As Noreen Giffney has argued, queer signifies the messiness of identity, the fact that desire and thus desiring subjects cannot be placed into discrete identity

47

Halperin 62.

48

Calvin Thomas questions the extent to which heterosexuals (and particularly heterosexual men) can be taken seriously as proponents of queer theory. In his book article Straight with a Twist: Queer theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality Thomas argues that heterosexuals must not onl y work intellectually with queer theory, but rather, must scrutinize their heterosexual privilege and use this privileged social position to enact change. He argues that because heterosexuals do not experience strict societal taboos and violence against their form of love, they have the luxury of political unconsciousness, that is, of ignoring the close relationship between eroticism and the validation of social identity. However, heterosexuals who examine their privilege can use that position to queer heterosexuality and to thus challenge heteronormativity. He acknowledges that this effort requires courage, because to be perceived as queer can make one the target of prejudice and even violence. Nevertheless, it is the responsibility of those heterosexuals interested in queer equality to contest the precarious constitutive boundaries between heteronormativity and queer. Calvin Thomas, Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality, The Gay 90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies, ed. Thomas Foster, et al (New York: New York UP, 1997) 83-115. See also: Calvin Thomas, On Being Post-Normal: Heterosexuality after Queer Theory, The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney and Michael ORourke (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009) 17-32.

35

categories, which remain static for the duration of peoples lives.49 Proponents of queer theory argue for its potential to challenge institutional hegemonies and norms, and the very contestation of the term queer demonstrates its effectiveness in resisting delineation and thus institutionalization.50 Queer theory has its roots in poststructuralist theory, a philosophical turn that rejects the modern humanist notion of a unified, knowable, independent self and instead examines the ways in which the self is constructed through discourses and institutions that wield power over concepts of knowledge and truth.51 The self is constructed through the individuals (conscious or unconscious) participation in discourses, performance of culturally sanctioned roles, and adherence to institutions. Informed by this paradigm, Judith Butlers concept of gender as neither something that one has or is, but rather, as what one does has been the most basic and most important step for queer theorists to think outside of identity categories.52 Butler argues that we do gender by repeatedly performing the socially prescribed gestures and behaviors that effectively maintain a binary concept of male/female. She contends that we can dismantle the binary, which is limiting for those people who do not fit neatly into either category, by doing gender differently, that is, by experimenting with performative
49

Noreen Giffney, Introduction: The q Word, The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney and Michael ORourke (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009) 2.
50

At the same time, however, several theorist, including Teresa de Lauretis, believe that queer has become institutionalized (precisely because it is taken up by universities), trendy, and marketable. See footnotes 39 and 84.
51

Sullivan 41. Butler, Gender Trouble 79-141.

52

36

possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.53 For David Halperin and Annamarie Jagose, among others, doing queer means taking an active stance against heteronormative culture.54 It means keeping the definition of queer fluid so as to have the flexibility and agility to respond to authoritative institutions that seek to limit modes of sexuality. This emphasis on doing gender and queer destabilizes them as bases for an essential, unchangeable core identity and instead empowers individuals to do gender and queer in a way that can liberate themselves and others. Queer theorys strongest foundations can be found in the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and the academic partnership of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari. Foucaults The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (1976) historicizes modern discourses on sexuality and demonstrates how institutions that regulate knowledge such as the church, the legal system, medicine, and the field of pscyhology become central to controlling and creating categories like heterosexuality and homosexuality that shape an individuals sense of identity.55 He refutes the repressive theory, i.e., that Western society suffers largely from institutionalized repression of sexual desire, and argues instead that Western society speaks compulsively about sex in the form of
53

Butler, Gender Trouble 141.

54

Giffney 5, Halperin 62, Sullivan 43. Others have criticized this approach, arguing that taking a position against heteronormativity reinforces the binary hetero/queer and thus fails to dismantle identity categories (Sullivan 48). However, Halperins definition of queer that actually includes heterosexuals belies this critique and places queer in a position against authoritative heteronormativity rather than heterosexual people. (Giffney 2) See also: Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York UP, 1996) 96-97.
55

Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

37

institutionalized confession. By making sex a taboo subject, institutions like the church and the legal system have forced people to develop new and creative ways to conceptualize and discuss desire that circumvent conventional vocabulary for sex. Additionally, the church, the law, medicine, and psychology elicit confessional accounts of sex from deviants, thereby expanding the discourse further. These institutions thus wield power both to control the range of acceptable gender and sexual expression and to foster a proliferation of discourses on sex. By historicizing the discourses that have shaped modern categories of sexuality, Foucault denaturalizes identity categories like heterosexual and homosexual and shows how sexual pleasure can be created anew through discourse. Likewise, Jacques Derridas method of deconstruction contributes to queer theorys project of dismantling the heterosexual/homosexual binary. For example, in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, (1993) Judith Butler uses this method to demonstrate how heterosexuality can be considered the legitimate form of sexuality only if homosexuality is maintained as a category of illegitimate sexuality. According to Butler, homosexuality is the constitutive outside that delineates heterosexuality.56 If homosexuality becomes normalized and is thus no longer the constitutive outside that demarcates the boundaries of heterosexuality, then heterosexuality loses its viability as the natural category, as well as its privileged position on the hierarchically organized binary.

56

Butler, Bodies that Matter 187-189.

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Finally, the concept of becoming as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980) has been adopted by queer theory to challenge the possibility of a stable identity. According to Deleuze and Guattari, relationships and interactions, or the processes of continual becoming, are all that exist in terms of identity. In their example of the orchid and the wasp, in which the orchid mimics the wasp to attract it (and thus becomes a becoming-wasp) and the wasp becomes part of the orchids reproductive system by spreading its pollen (and thus becomes a becoming-orchid), the two entities become so entwined that they can no longer be conceived of as separate beings. They are both becomings, in that each is always implicated in the deterritorialization of the self and the reterritorialization of the other, so that identity is lost in favor of interaction.57 In terms of gender and sexual identity, becoming is a way of thinking about fluidity of identity, interactions based on sexual object choice or sexual practice, and the transformative nature of desire. 58 Queer theory draws from these foundations in poststructuralism to focus on the possibility of breaking out of heteronormative identity categories. The concepts of becoming and of doing gender and queer divest the notion of an essential gender or sexual identity of its validity and make new articulations of gender and sexuality thinkable. It is no coincidence that the term queer theory was coined within a year of Edward Sojas pronouncement of a postmodern spatial turn. Both fields of intellectual thought had been influenced directly by poststructuralist thinkers like Gilles Deleuze,
57

Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Introduction: Rhizome, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 3-25.
58

Giffney 6.

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Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Flix Guattari and began reorganizing themselves around the concepts of construction, discourse, practice, and performance in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Previously, gay and lesbian studies of the late 1960s and 1970s had focused on fostering notions of group identity. Gay and lesbian studies had grown out of contemporary equal rights activism, the historicization of sexuality, and advances in the social and hard sciences whose advocates argued for a revision of the ways in which gay and lesbian identities were being conceptualized. Barry D. Adam describes the era in terms of a shift in institutionally sanctioned discourses: Psychologists were displacing the homosexuality-as-sickness view with new investigations into homophobia, the irrational prejudice directed against homosexual practices and peoples. Sociologists, anthropologists, and historians were unsettling biological models of sexuality by showing how desire is deeply shaped by cultural context, and how pet notions concerning the natural, the moral, and the desirable are peculiarly ethnocentric.59 Gay and lesbian identity politics were supported by this work which demonstrated how unfair the marginalization and repression of homosexuals were. They operated on the notion that unity was central to empowerment. Identity politics were based on the sameness of group members, a premise that would soon be challenged by queer theory to be limiting and exclusive of those who do not fit the heterosexual/homosexual binary.60

59

Barry D Adam, From Liberation to Transgression and Beyond: Gay, Lesbian and Que er Studies at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies, ed. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman (London: Sage Publications, 2002) 17.
60

Although gay liberation and lesbian feminism were related movements, there was a distinct divide in their approaches to achieving political liberation. While gay liberation worked to claim visibility for gays and lesbians in public spaces within major cities, lesbian feminism found the movement to be androcentric and took a more separatist approach. Maintaining that women would never gain full legitimacy in a society structured for and by men, lesbian feminism sought separate spaces in which women would run their own

40

By the 1980s new vocabulary problematized the gay/lesbian identity categories. For example, bisexuality and transgender were categories that did not fit neatly into the heterosexual/homosexual paradigm.61 Moreover, for readers of Foucault, it became apparent that the political liberation of an essential homosexual was problematic, since heterosexuality and homosexuality were terms invented through western discourse. At the same time, the grand narratives of liberation (such as Marxist liberation) were becoming increasingly difficult to believe.62 In the 1990s, Adam writes, liberation had given way to transgression as a leading project and queer theory ushered in by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick became the arena for re-thinking the articulation of queer identities.63 Queer theory questioned how people became categorized in the two camps of heterosexual and homosexual and sought to delineate the regimes that create and maintain the binary.64 Whereas the identity politics of gay liberation and lesbian feminism had taken the notion of a persons core identity as the basis for political action, queer theory sought to denaturalize the notion of a core self that was to be expressed through ones sex, gender, desire, and social relationships.65 As Nikki Sullivan

businesses and make their own politics, at the extreme even creating rural, all-female settlements known as lesbian lands. See Jagose 75 and Gill Valentine, Queer Bodies and the Production of Space, Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies, ed. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman (London: Sage Publications, 2002) 146-9. For more on radical lesbian feminist separatism, see Radicalesbians, The Woman Identified Woman, Feminist Theory: A Reader (Mountain View: Mayfield Publishing Company, 2000) 194-198.
61

Adam 15, Sullivan 39. Adam 18. Adam 18 (original emphasis). Adam 18-19. Sullivan 81.

62

63

64

65

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has written: [O]nce normative assumptions about sex/gender are undermined and/or the traditional focus on object choice is shown to be cultural rather than natural and inevitable, identity categories such as heterosexual and homosexual become almost impossible to maintain.66 In problematizing the way in which sexuality and gender were viewed as expressions of an individuals core self, queer theory effectively undermined the perceived naturalness of the heterosexual/homosexual binary. Of the voices that shaped early queer theory, Judith Butler has had arguably the most wide-spread effect in theoretical discourses. Her breakthrough contribution to queer theory, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) is a genealogy of critical discourses on gender and a critique of feminist identity politics. Feminism, according to Butler, reinforces heteronormativity in that it assumes the existence of a stable and viable category of people called women who have a set of common needs, desires, and motivations.67 She traces the feminist (and non-feminist) discourses that construct, maintain, and critique the binary gender system of male/female, which she calls the heterosexual matrix, a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice

66

Sullivan 15.

67

Butler, Gender Trouble vii-xii. See also: Judith Butler, The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess, The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih and Judith Butler (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) 183-203.

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of heterosexuality.68 The heterosexual matrix is a complex set of institutions and discourses that approve of certain types of relationships and lifestyles (particularly those that most closely resemble the ideal of reproductive monogamous heterosexuality) at the expense of others and that universalize them as the natural and ahistorical forms of appropriate gender and sexuality. According to Nikki Sullivan, heterosexuality can then be understood as a (historically and culturally specific) truth-effect of systems of power/knowledge whose dominant position and current configuration are contestable and open to change.69 Butler argues further that while the heterosexual matrix is likely invisible to those who function well within in itwho perform heterosexual gender and sexual desire appropriatelyit is oppressive to those whose bodies, genders, and desires do not line up within the matrix.70 By disregarding the construction of gender and sexual categories as regulatory fictions, feminism merely reproduces the heterosexual matrix, according to Butler. Butlers concept of gender performativity, which is only one point among many and which is fleshed out towards the end of Gender Trouble, has become the most widely received and discussed concept in her entire body of work. Drawing on J. L. Austins speech act theory, Butler argues that gender is not natural or essential, but rather is reified through patterns of behavior that express internalized norms.71 Gender categories are normalized in culturally and historically specific ways, and the individuals adherence to
68

Butler, Gender Trouble 151. Butler defines the term heterosexual matrix in endnote #6. Sullivan 39. Butler, Gender Trouble 6-7, 35-38. Sullivan 82.

69

70

71

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these categories through dress and gesture, among other means, contributes to the intelligibility of that individuals body in its cultural context. Under the paradigm of the heterosexual matrix, biological sex, gender, and sexual desire must line up to mirror heteronormative gender and sexual desire in order for the body to be intelligible. To demonstrate how gender, sex, and desire may not map neatly according to the heterosexual matrix, but rather are malleable in their presentation and constellation, Butler discusses drag. The drag performer consciously layers, blends, and juxtaposes genders through parody and masquerade, thereby demonstrating how gender is dependent upon the stylization of the body through clothes, make-up, hair, accessories, gestures, and behaviors. In Bodies that Matter, Butler clarifies her terms for a readership that she sees as having used her work reductively. Performance and gender performativity should not be confused, she warns. Performance is the conscious act of displaying gender (as in drag performance); performativity is the (usually) unconscious act of displaying gender in everyday behavior and thus reifying it. The drag performer operates on a level of parody and performance while those who adhere to the heterosexual matrix performatively reify binary gender categories.72 In Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, Butler makes a second foundational contribution to queer theory by dismantling the sex/gender distinction that is the basis of feminist ontology. This distinction, developed by Gail Rubin in her 1975 article The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, maintains that biological sex is the basis of male/female difference and that gender is the social overlay that is based
72

Butler, Bodies that Matter ix-xii, 1-23.

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on that difference. Butler turns this truth-effect on its head, questioning the privileged position of the material body as existing prior to social meaning. Instead, she argues, the material body cannot be interpreted without pre-existing social categories. She illustrates her point with a well-known example: when a baby is born, the first pronouncement made about it is its a girl or its a boy. Gender categories must first exist before the material body can be interpreted. Because two categories exist prior to the child, the child is categorized as one or the other. Even a child born with a material body that does not conform to the pre-existing categories will be assigned a category nonetheless and sometimes even surgically altered to fit that category. According to Butlers argument, the social construction exists prior to the material, and thus biological sex cannot be understood as essential or primary, but rather, only as an interpretation of materiality made intelligible through discourse.73 Butler demonstrates that if gender and sexual categories are truth-effects rather than essential reality, then the path to a validation of queer identities lies not in the identity politics of gay liberation or lesbian feminism, but rather in exposing the categories male/female and heterosexual/homosexual to be fictions capable of destabilization and reorganization. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks The Epistemology of the Closet, published in the same year as Gender Trouble, seeks to locate the maintenance of those fictions in twentieth-century western institutions.74 Taking the work of Michel

73

This concept is introduced in the preface of Gender Trouble and revisited with this particular example in Bodies that Matter 230-3.
74

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Eighteen years later, in the preface to the 2008 edition of Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick commented

45

Foucault as her methodological basis, she examines the ways in which institutions like the church, the law, medicine, and psychology, etc., are invested in controlling discourses to maintain the illusion that heterosexuality is the only valid sexual identity. Sedgwick begins her investigation of the modern discursive construction of sexual identities by historicizing the origins of the heterosexual/homosexual binary. It is well known among historians of sexuality, she writes, that the terms homosexuality and heterosexuality were developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, respectively. (Indeed, the category heterosexuality could only exist once its Other, homosexuality, had been established.) The subjects sexual object choice, rather than sexual practice, became the basis for modern sexual identity around this time: It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of sexual orientation.75 Sedgwick does not attempt to explain this historical phenomenon, other than to assert that the establishment of binary gender was a prerequisite for the stratification of sexual identity. Instead, she devotes Epistemology of the Closet to exploring the institutional

on the simultaneity of the two works and their common referencing as foundational texts in queer theory: Like Judith Butlers Gender Trouble, also published in 1990 and also widely considered a foundational text in queer theory, Epistemology doesnt use the word queer. So what is queer about it? Retrospectively I would say its exactly this resistance to treating homo/heterosexual categorizationstill so very volatile an actas a done deal, a transparently empirical fact about any person. 2008 edition preface, xvi .
75

Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet 8 (original emphasis).

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regulation of sexual discourses as they exist today and as they are depicted in twentiethcentury English literature. Like Butler, Sedgwick draws from Derridian deconstruction to argue that homosexuality is the perceived constitutive border of heterosexuality. However, she departs from Butler in two ways. First, she focuses on sexuality rather than gender and, second, she argues that heteronormative individuals and institutions are at least somewhat aware of the precariousness of heterosexualitys privilege on the binary of sexual categories (which, she contends, is why they work fiercely to maintain this privilege). To make this point, Sedgwick investigates the term homosexual panic, a concept commonly used in the 1980s as a legal defense for heterosexual people charged with hate crimes against LGBTQ people.76 If a defendant claimed that his/her actions were motivated by homosexual panic, this meant that s/he had felt threatened by a perceived sexual advance from a homosexual person and acted violently in defense. Sedgwick argues that the very fact that homosexual panic was a legally and medically sanctioned defense for perpetrators of hate crimes against homosexuals demonstrates how individual and institutional forms of homophobia are mutually reinforcing.77
76

According to the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry 4th ed (1985), the term homosexual panic describes a temporary psychosis triggered by any variety of homosexual threats, including perceived sexual advances from a member of the same sex. Harold I. Kaplan and Benjamin J. Sadock, eds., Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 4th ed. (Baltimore: Williams & Williams, 1985) 1320.
77

Ironically, Sedgwick argues, homosexual panic functioned as a defense only by admitting the precariousness of the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Panic is an emotional response to destabilization and, in this case, the defendant panics when s/he realizes that his/her heterosexual identity is not as stable as s/he previously thought it to be. The perpetrator becomes violent because his/her sexual integrity is perceived to be threatened. Moreover, Sedgwick argues, such a defense does not appeal to the judges or jurors rationality, but rather, to their emotional identification with the defendant. The judge or jurors are supposed to ask themselves if they would have acted similarly in the same situation and to make a decision based on maintaining their own desire to reaffirm their

47

Sedgwick argues that the most powerful means that institutions have for maintaining the primacy of heterosexuality is to silence queer expression. In examining this power, she departs from Foucaults argument that institutions are responsible for the proliferation of discourses on sex and instead looks for ways in which silences are institutionally mandated and proliferated. She argues that many social institutions, for example schools that refuse to hire homosexual people or religious groups that seek to cure homosexuals, place homosexual people in the precarious position of concealing their sexual identity in order to have access to work or social groups. In many cases, once a persons homosexuality is revealed, s/he is then punished for having concealed it. Sedgwick argues that this silencing causes some people to become alienated from their own sexuality, a terrible violence in an era in which sexuality is a large determining factor in ones identity: To alienate conclusively, definitionally, from anyone on any theoretical ground the authority to describe and name their own sexual desire is a terribly consequential seizure. In this century, in which sexuality has been made expressive of the essence of both identity and knowledge, it may represent the most intimate violence possible. It is also an act replete with the most disempowering mundane institutional effects and potentials. It is, of course, central to the modern history of homophobic oppression.78
heterosexuality. Homosexual panic is then indicative both of the fragility of the binary heterosexuality/homosexuality and of the institutional power of the law to maintain the binary. Although Sedgwicks examples seem dated today after much legal progress has been made in the last two decades in terms of gay rights and visibility, her overall argument about institutionalized homophobia remains relevant. To find evidence of institutionalized homophobia, one need only look to the contemporary debate in the United States about the Dont Ask, Dont Tell military policy that keeps queer military members in the closet, the prohibition in many countries including the United States against institutional validation of queer relationships, or the public statement made by New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino in October 2010: "I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don't want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option -- it isn't."
78

Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet 26.

48

Sedgwick argues that silence is the most effective means of maintaining heterosexual control of western discourses and institutions. Not only is the closet an oppressive and unjust place, according to Sedgwick, but the act of coming out of the closet is a difficult and never-ending process since heterosexuality is the presumed norm in our society. LGBTQ people must continually choose when and to whom to come out. This speech act must continue to be performed, or not performed, according to the queer persons judgment of the social situation and his/her relationships. Sedgwick grounds homophobia firmly in institutional arenas that are interested in maintaining heteronormative authority. By controlling the discourse and thereby closeting (or at least minimizing) homosexual voices, social institutions reify heterosexuality as the norm and maintain the illusion that it is natural. However, Sedgwick argues, the precariousness of the binary is exposed in those moments when homosexual panic emerges and institutions find themselves involved in violent means of upholding the closet. Sedgwick argues that it is a futile project to argue for queer equality through institutions that have based their own marginalization of LGBTQ people on incoherent discourses. Rather, she maintains, it is more fruitful to expose the incoherence of these discourses and thereby also the violence of those institutions. Since the publication of Butler and Sedwicks early works, queer theory has seen a shift in emphasis, abandoning interrogations of the constitutive borders of the categories heterosexual/homosexual in favor of pursuing examinations of the potential of bodies to transgress against notions of gender coherence. In her book, In a Queer Time and Place (2005), Judith Halberstam posits the transgendered body as representative of

49

postmodern reconsiderations of gender binaries. The transgendered body, she argues, operates through an economy of recognition and misrecognition that deprives the traditionally gendered gaze of its heterosexist authority and exposes its violence.79 Grounding her argument in the literary and filmic adaptations of the Brandon Teena story, the most famous of which is the film Boys Dont Cry (Peirce 1999), Halberstam discusses the transgendered body as complicating the presumed links between the visual markers of the material body, identity, and the truth about a person. Identity does not necessarily follow from the material body, she argues, and the transgendered person often masks the material body to make parts of it disappear. The transgendered body then confounds the gaze that seeks a coherent gender by concealing certain gender markers while selective exhibiting others. Halberstam argues that the film Boys Dont Cry illustrates the violence done to the transgendered body by exposing it, looking at it, and thereby attempting to establish truth about a biological sex (which, according to the heterosexual matrix, should correlate with both the gender and sexual desire of that person). The transgendered body exposes the heterosexist gaze to be violent, as well as misguided, when it seeks to establish a truth based on the material body. Halberstam proposes instead that a queer gaze aimed at the critical reinvention of the body, that is, a gaze that is willing to accept seemingly contradictory and multiple visual markers, is less violent and more capable of understanding complex truths about a transgendered person.

79

Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York UP, 2005).

50

Her most compelling arguments come from her analyses of art. For example, she discusses the photographic works of De LaGrace Volcano, which explore the mutability and transformability of the human body, and thereby also its capacity to express transsubjectivity. Volcanos works thematize drag kings, glorify body parts that are normally considered grotesque or ugly, and demonstrate the mutability of the body through self-portraits in which Volcano exhibits different identities. In another example, Halberstam discusses the faux-collage paintings of JA Nicholls that posit bodies as compilations of features and parts that are often ill-fitting and seemingly at odds with one another rather than harmonious and coherent. The works of these artists challenge the viewer to rethink his/her assumptions about the natural body as an ontological basis for identity and to look at possibilities for altering and reconfiguring the body through technological and biotechnological means. Halberstam has been recognized not only for pioneering thought on transgender and queer identities, but also for being influential in the field of posthumanism. According to Patricia MacCormack, posthumanism questions humans perceived independence from, and superiority to, other living and non-living beings. It seeks to invalidate the notion that human is an independent category by placing humans on a continuum with animals, molecules, and monsters on one end and cyborgs, body modifiers, and biotechnology on the other. MacCormack writes that posthumanism is a mode of queer thinking: The creation of connectionslife as relation not dividuation is posthuman living. Desire is, put most simply, the need to create connections with other things, not to have or know but collapse the self with other(s). In this sense

51

posthumanism is a form of queer desire, or queer life.80 Sexual seduction is a reciprocal process, she writes, in which each party wishes to change and be changed by the sexual other. It is a technique of hybridization and change, a sexual technique of queer becomings.81 Queer theory operates as posthumanist thought because it values pluralities, coalitions, and hybridities.82 The turn in queer theory away from interrogations of the constitutive borders between heterosexuality and homosexuality (as theorized by Butler and Sedgwick, among others) towards conceptualizing the body as capable of accommodating fluid and fluctuating identities (Halberstam and posthumanism), brings up questions about the limitations of queer. For example, as Barry D. Adam points out, queer has never been wholly successful at moving away from identity politics and redefining homosexuality and heterosexuality instead as regulatory categories; gay, lesbian, and straight continue to be popular identity categories (albeit now only three among several).83 Others have argued that queer is too trendy, too marketable, and too normal to describe the transgressive nature of what was originally conceptualized as queer.84 David V. Ruffolo

80

MacCormack 113. MacCormack 115.

81

82

MacCormack 114. Posthuman thought has been related to feminist thought since its inception. Donna Haraways A Cyborg Manifesto (1991), one of the foundational texts of posthumanism, proposes both a reconsideration of humanity as constituted through cyborg hybridity and a form of feminism that follows a similar model. Haraway argues for a form of feminism that moves away from identity politics to embrace more coalitional and situational, more cyborg, forms that come together and mutate as specific causes arise. Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist -Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 149-181.
83

Adam 22.

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argues that queer has become too limited by its insistence on anchoring subjectivity to the body. He proposes a post-queer theory that focuses instead on the potentiality of the becoming-body through technology, biomedicine, economics and intellectual thought to emphasize the hybridities, flows, and alliances that problematize the stable body.85 Indeed, Ruffolo seems to be proposing that the latest turn in queer theory toward posthumanism brings it outside the actual parameters of queer and into new territory. Whether or not queer theory remains the transgressive interrogation of identity that it was conceptualized to be, the wide ranging questions that queer theory proposes remain relevant. As long as LGBTQ people struggle to come out of the closet, sexual identity and its connection with the intelligible body will continue to be important factors in thinking about the rights one has to self-acknowledgement and self-expression. Moreover, queers questioning of the heterosexual/homosexual binary has led to an explosion of identity categories that LGBTQ people can use to describe their individual experiences, and queer has made it acceptable for some people to remain unintelligible, that is, to resist settling into a gender or sexual identity altogether. By tracing major paradigms in queer theoryits roots in the identity politics of gay liberation and lesbian feminism, its contestation of the constitutive borders of

84

As early as 1993, Judith Butler predicted the failure of queer once it was limited by its institutional usage and thus deprived of its political power. She writes that queer will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes. This also means that it will doubtless have to be yielded in favor of terms that do that political work more effectively. Butler, Bodies that Matter 228. In 1994, Teresa de Lauretis would famously declare queer theory a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry. See: De Lauretis, Habit Changes 296-313.
85

David V. Ruffolo, Post-Queer Considerations, The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney and Michael ORourke (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009) 379-394.

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heterosexuality and homosexuality, its turn toward the mutable queer body to destabilize gender ontology, and finally its relationship to posthumanism and the post-queerI have outlined several models for considering queer figures and spaces in contemporary literature. These models provide both the necessary concepts for examining literary and filmic articulations of destabilized gender and sexual identity and the methodology with which to avoid heteronormative readings (or at least to attempt that). In the chapters that follow, I examine from a queer perspective contemporary literary texts and films, many of which do not posit their characters explicitly as queer. I do this in three ways. First, I examine the ways in which gender is encoded in the spaces of the texts and whether or not characters behave in gender-specific ways in those spaces, as mandated by the heterosexual matrix. For example, in my analysis of Fatih Akins film Gegen die Wand in Chapter 4, I examine the art of walking in two placesin Hamburg and Istanbul. The protagonist, Sibel, adheres to the heterosexual matrix with her feminine walking in Hamburg, but moves outside it when she turns androgynous and walks with a heavy, masculine gait in Istanbul. Second, I undertake close readings to identify moments in which a characters gender is left unspecified by the narrator and is thus left to the reader to assume. For example, in my reading of Hermanns short stories, I argue against a body of scholarship that presumes her characters to align with the heterosexual matrix. When Hermann does not specify the gender of her characters, I read these characters as possibly queer or as undergoing gender transformations in the text. I then examine the ways in which space is encoded as gendered to ground my readings of her characters as queer. Third and finally, I take into consideration whether the aesthetic

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mode employed in texts indicates a queer character. In my readings of novels by Emine Sevgi zdamar and Bodo Kirchhoff, for example, I argue that heterosexuality becomes queered when these authors employ the abject and the grotesque to alienate the reader from these characters and thereby to disallow identification with them during heterosexual encounters. I thus undertake a queer reading on the formal, narrative, and aesthetic levels of these texts. It has required careful close reading and attempting to suspend assumptions that characters fit neatly into the heterosexual matrix. By finding those tiny indicationsthe lack of a gendered pronoun or the masculine gait of a once feminine film protagonistand working through their implications, I open up these texts to new and productive readings of space and the gender/sexuality system. For both spatial and queer theory, identity has been unmoored from the spatial and social situation of the material body and recast as always mutable and in flux. Both fields of theory give us methods by which to understand the ways in which identities, and gender or sexual identities in particular, are discursively, culturally, and spatially conceived. At the same time, however, the spatial practices of LGBTQ people in our real world have indicated that certain spaces and places continue to be important in the formation and even mutability of queer identity. It is therefore important to my project to take into consideration both theoretical and real-life examples of spatial practice when I consider literary and filmic representations of space and gender/sexual identity. In the section that follows, I map out different kinds of spaces marked as queer and thereby identify such spaces that may also appear in contemporary literature and film. Queer Space

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In the final chapter of his monograph Global Sex, geographer Dennis Altman evaluates queer theory as a paradigm from which to develop a global politics of sex. In concluding his examination of a global market that capitalizes on sexual identity, the sex trade, and sex tourism, among other topics, he pleads for a political economy of sexuality, one which recognizes the interrelationship of political, economic, and cultural structures, and avoids the tendency to see sexuality as private and the political and economic as public.86 His conclusion is that [p]ostmodern feminist and queer theories are relatively unhelpful in constructing this sort of politics because of their lack of emphasis on political institutions as distinct from discourse, their first-world centrism, and their lack of interest in social movements.87 He contends that postmodernism and queer theory are preoccupied with concepts such as discourse, performance, and play and thus ignore the material realities and inequalities that operate in the physical world. Queer theorys focus on desire, he argues, sidesteps a reality in which sex habitually also occurs as a result of power inequalities and economic drives.88 While I contend that queer theorists preoccupation with desire and performance is actually an examination of the real lived experiences of people and their material bodies and spaces, Altman does make a good point.89 Queer theory is only loosely connected with its roots in queer

86

Dennis Altman, Global Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) 157. Altman 158. Altman 159.

87

88

89

Judith Butlers work is commonly misrepresented in secondary literature as ignoring the material body in real space in favor of more amorphous, abstract thinking on constructed identity. However, Butlers work actually takes materiality as its central focus, particularly in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, her two most widely received works on gender and queer. In fact, the title of Bodies that Matter plays on a pun,

56

activism, which is much more concerned with issues of economy, politics, and establishing territory in public space from which to articulate solidarity in identity. Indeed, for my examination of the intersections of sexual identity, gender, space, and movement, it is important to look at how real physical and virtual spaces have been created by and for LGBTQ people. The effort to claim territory and thus establish visibility in public spaces is a longstanding strategy of queer activists for seeking legitimacy in heteronormative culture. 90 According to Anne-Marie Fortier, this effort to claim territory arises out of the so-called queer diaspora.91 Diaspora refers in this case to the large-scale exodus of LGBTQ people from intolerant home communities and families into more queer-friendly spaces like metropolitan cities, online communities, and small networked groups, many of which connect LGBTQ people across global distances. According to Fortier, communities of the queer diaspora are not based on solidarity of identity or spatial permanence, but rather turn instead toward contingency, indeterminacy, power, and conflict and operate along axes of difference in their numerous local and global manifestations.92 These communities operate with the goals of providing safety and comfort from often dangerous public spaces, as well as helping LGBTQ people deal with the emotional

emphasizing the double meaning of matter as both a verb and a noun. In other words, materiality does matter, and she unpacks this pun in the introduction of her book.
90

See: Brent Gordon Ingram, et al, Queers in Space: Communities/Public Spaces/Sites of Resistance (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997).
91

Anne-Marie Fortier, Queer Diaspora, The Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies, ed. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman (London: Sage Publications, 2002) 183-195.
92

Fortier 183.

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difficulties of coming out.93 Queer diaspora provides a progressive way of thinking about community in our age of global mobility and transnational spatial practices: [T]hese [discourses on the queer diaspora] could bring to light the ways in which new forms of solidarity, attachment and reterritorialization come about in a world largely defined in terms of flows, scapes and mobilities. For one of the fascinating aspects about diasporic identities and cultures, is how they are shaped through both movement and attachment, how they are at once deterritorialized and reterritorialized. . . .94 As Fortier explains, the notion of a queer diaspora works to dismantle normative notions of place and identity. Existing on the margins, and embedded in the between spaces of larger heteronormative society, the diasporic queer space can only be a temporary safe haven for LGBTQ people. Queer communities have been relegated historically to rather diffuse and marginalized (even virtual) communities in part because of a large degree of intolerance in both private family space and mainstream public space. Objections to queer identity expression in public spaces are most often based on the belief that sexuality belongs to the private realm.95 Queer activism, finding its roots in the feminist argument that the private is political (and thus public), has fought against the notion that space can ever be neutral with regard to gender and sexual identities. As Gordon Brent Ingram argues, Virtually every wave of homosexual, lesbian, gay, and queer activism in the twentieth

93

Fortier 191-2. Fortier 194.

94

95

It should be noted that the concepts public and private are historically and culturally variable. The arguments in discussion here refer to twentieth century Western bourgeois notions of public and private spaces, in which family life and sexuality are associated with the private home sphere and in which the public sphere is the arena for gaining social legitimacy.

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century has questioned or actually confronted the heterosexist dichotomies of public and private space.96 Queer activists argue that the division of public and private realms disavows queer sexualities because it delineates and reserves private space for reproductive sex while deeming sexuality in the public sphere as inappropriate.97 According to Wayne D. Myslik, the belief of many heterosexuals that sexuality should be kept from the public sphere stems from a blindness regarding their own displays of sexuality in public. 98 He writes: most people are blissfully ignorant of the degree to which sexuality, and in particularly, heterosexuality, permeates space. Illustrative of this ignorance is the often heard statement that gays would be tolerated if they didnt flaunt their homosexuality. Inherent in this statement is the assumption that heterosexuality is itself not flaunted or expressed outside the home.99 Heterosexuality is visible in public spaces through symbols like wedding rings, baby showers, and family photos displayed in works spaces, as well as actions performed by heterosexual couples such as holding hands, hugging, or kissing in public. While heterosexuality might be normalized for heterosexuals in public space, LGBTQ people face constant reminders of the prohibition against their own expression of affection or identity in most spaces. Gill Valentine argues that public displays of queer

96

Gordon Brent Ingram, Marginality and the Landscapes of Erotic Alien(n)ations, Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Cites of Resistance, ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, et al (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997). 30-1.
97

Wayne D. Myslik, Renegotiating the Social/Sexual Identities of Places: Gay Communities as Safe Havens or Sites of Resistance? Bodyspace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality , ed. Nancy Duncan (London: Routledge, 1996) 156-169.
98

Gill Valentine, (Re)negotiating the Heterosexual Street, Bodyspace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Nancy Duncan (London: Routledge, 1996) 149.
99

Myslik 159.

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affection often create outrage because they demonstrate just how precarious the construction normal is. Referring to Judith Butlers concept of gender performativity and the compulsory repetition of performance required to maintain the phantasm of heteronormativity, Valentine argues for a similar understanding of space: The straight street or office environment do not pre-exist their performance, rather, specific performances bring these places into being and these spaces are themselves performative of particular power relations.100 In line with Butler, Valentine argues that by understanding heterosexual space as something performed, it can then be denaturalized, undermined, and claimed for queer expression.101 However, Valentine states, regulatory regimes exist specifically to reproduce the heterosexual street and to protect it from the threat from sexual dissidents (re)negotiating the way everyday spaces are produced.102 This regulation happens through a multitude of heteronormative symbols and actions (discussed above), advertisements and media that implicitly reinforce heterosexuality as normal, and more conscious homophobic attacks on LGBTQ people in both queer and heteronormative spaces.103 According to Jean-Ulrick Dsert, every space, whether public or private, is sexually charged and often in multiple ways: The possibility of any space is latent until the moment it doubles and is devoured by the contradictions of its program and the actual

100

Valentine, Queer Bodies and the Production of Space 154. Valentine, (Re)negotiating 146. Valentine, (Re)negotiating 150.

101

102

103

Gordon Brent Ingram, et al, Surveying Territories and Landscapes, Queers in Space: Communities/ Public Places/Cites of Resistance, ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, et al (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997) 92.

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events of its construction, use, and eventual destruction. A queer space is an activated zone made proprietary by the occupant or flaneur, the wanderer. It is at once private and public.104 All space has a latent sexual charge that must be activated by its occupants, and the activation of queer space can come in any number of forms. Valentine argues that a queer space can be created by a certain kind of music or the dress or body language of its queer inhabitants. A queer space is created when a space becomes intelligible (to use Butlers phrase) to its inhabitants as such: Often it may be not so much what is there but what is missing, the wedding ring for example, that marks out (an)other identity. Thus through these fleeting glances or cruising, dykes can produce gay(ze) space.105 Indeed, according to Dsert and Valentine, any space can be queer when certain signals bring the spaces queerness out of latency and into explicit intelligibility. Heterosexuals do not always recognize that they are in a queer space. The power of the queer space, then, is that it undermines the heterocentric norm, even if only fleetingly.106 Although many opponents of queer expression argue that queer should remain in the private sphere (if it is to exist at all), people with queer sexualities have had, in many cases, little choice but to pursue sexual encounters in the public sphere. LGBTQ people have had difficulty, historically and even today, bringing partners home when they live

104

Jean-Ulrick Dsert, Queer Space, Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Cites of Resistance, ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, et al (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997) 21.
105

Valentine, (Re)negotiating 150. Valentine gives the examples of kd lang and Melissa Ethridge as artists whose music could contribute to the creation of a queer space in the 1990s. More current examples would be contingent upon contemporary music styles. Also, Valentine quotes Lisa Walkers term gay(ze) space, from her article More Than Just Skin-Deep: Fem(me)ininity and the Subversion of Identity, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 2.1 (1995): 75.
106

Dsert 21; Valentine, (Re)negotiating 148, 150-152.

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within a heteronormative household or rent from property owners who discriminate on the basis of sexuality. Public places like parks, parking lots, and public restrooms, as well as bathhouses and bars, have been places for LGBTQ people to meet.107 Gordon Brent Ingram writes that many of the public efforts to repress queer expression have centered on reappropriating public spaces where LGBTQ people mingle: Today, the forces that are working to destroy these public queer spaces are growing in number as urban populations increase, natural areas dwindle, and social groups diversify. A disturbing consequence of this competition for space is the increase in violence against women and gay men in public areas. Less noticeable is the homophobia by design of many park agencies, municipalities, and governments.108 He also points out that, contrary to the commonly held notion that parks and public leisure spaces are asexual spaces, many were, in fact, designed as spaces in which sexuality would be put on display and under surveillance: Many of the city centre parks in North America and Europe were first established or were redesigned in the late nineteenth century with an emphasis on the public promenade, the male gaze, suppression of public sexual contact, and team sports as a means to lift up working-class morality. Such public parks have usually been programmed for what are sometimes conscious displays of androcentric heterosexual desire, courtship, and conquest.109 Ingram, et al, argue that public spaces where LGBTQ people have traditionally met are being increasingly privatized or semi-privatized, and that once they are privatized, they become heteronormative spaces. The shopping mall is a common example of a semi107

Gordon Brent Ingram, Open Space as Strategic Queer Sites, Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Cites of Resistance, ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, et al (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997) 119. See also: Ingram, Marginality 46 and Ira Tattelman, The Meaning at the Wall: Tracing the Gay Bathhouse, Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Cites of Resistance, ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, et al (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997) 391-406.
108

Ingram, Open Space 96. Ingram, Open Space 102.

109

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privatized, and thus heteronormative, space. Perceived by many as a public space that anyone can enter, the shopping mall is actually a private space where businesses advertise in heteronormative fashion and displays of affection can be regulated by private security forces.110 This is not to say, however, that spatial politics have not improved in recent decades for LGBTQ people seeking a private space. Ingram, et al, write that it has become increasingly easier in recent years for LGBTQ people to find appropriate housing, for example, as sympathy for queer equality has increased.111 Weary of occupying marginal spaces that rely on invisibility and secrecy to avoid raids and surveillance, queer communities have made great strides since the late 1960s in claiming public space within which to express queer identity openly. The gay ghettos of many major citiesfor example the Castro District in San Francisco, Dupont Circle in Washington DC, the Marais in Paris, and Nollendorfplatz in Berlin, among many othersprovide spaces for LGBTQ people to meet and be openly out in public, thus validating queer identities in a way that is not possible in most other spaces.112 Serving as a gathering point for LGBTQ people, these spaces represent a queer alliance with often

110

Valentine, (Re)negotiating 149. See also Gordon Brent Ingram, et al, Placemaking and the Dialectics of Public and Private, Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Cites of Resistance, ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, et al (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997) 297.
111

Ingram, Placemaking 297-8. Ingram, et al. also argue that although appropriate housing is becoming increasingly available to LGBTQ people, this has resulted in a dynamic in which only LGBTQ people with the economic means actually have the right to practice their sexuality in private spaces. People who cannot afford to rent or own in queer friendly places remain in the public sphere. The privatization of sexuality, so to speak, has become a class issue as well as one of individual rights.
112

There are, of course, varying degrees of difference between the gay ghetto and the city in which it is situated. For example, Nollendorfplatz might house more visibly gay-owned businesses, but LGBTQ people are generally well accepted in most areas of Berlin. The same is true of San Francisco and other cities with long histories of queer activism.

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considerable financial and political power, unified in its consumption and voting.113 These spaces are the bases for political representation in local and federal government, and thus larger scale social acceptance. The gay ghetto is not simply a queer paradise, however. Gill Valentine argues that however liberating the gay ghetto may seem for those who enjoy it, ghettoization can effectively limit the challenge to heteronormativity in most other everyday spaces. 114 Furthermore, spaces marked as queer become easy targets for homophobic attacks. In Mysliks (1996) study examining gay mens perceived safety in queer spaces, he found that although most gay men reported feeling safer in those areas than in heteronormative spaces, they were up to 28% more likely to be attacked in a space marked as queer than in a heteronormative space.115 Another problem with the gay ghetto, according to Ingram, is that it tends to export a singular image of queer identitythat of the middle class, white, gay manand this erases the very multiplicities of identity and sexual expression that exist within the queer community. Ingram attributes this phenomenon to
113

Valentine, Queer Bodies 146.

114

Valentine, Queer Bodies 147. In making this statement, Valentine references Lawrence Knopp, Sexuality and the Urban Space: Gay Male Identity P olitics in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, Cities of Difference, ed. Ruth Fincher and Jane M. Jacobs (London: Guildford Press, 1998) 149176.
115

He attributes the increased attacks in queer spaces to intelligibility. Most gay men, he writes, change their behavior, either consciously or unconsciously, to make themselves less intelligible as gay men in heteronormative spaces. Paradoxically, the men in his study reported feeling safer to express their sexual identities while in queer spaces, thus making them more likely to be targets of attack. An interesting corollary to Mysliks study is Valentines report that although gay men are more likely to be attacked by men in cruising areas, there is less differentiation in terms of space or gender for attacks on lesbians. Lesbians are much more likely to be attacked in heteronormative spaces than gay men and their attackers may be either men or women. Valentine contends that in many cases, it is difficult to ascertain whether the motivations for attacks against lesbians are seated in homophobia or misogyny. This double motivation for attacking a woman who deviates from norms of gendered appearance or behavior might explain the reasons why lesbians are more likely to be attacked in heteronormative space than gay men. Myslik 162, see also Ingram, Marginality 40 and Valentine, (Re)negotiating 149

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a capitalist economy, in which certain companies have learned to capitalize on queerness, catering to LGBTQ people with a narrow selection of brands and styles. Likewise, in areas where queer has become fashionable, the gay ghetto has become increasingly commodified. This is a problem for inhabitants of the gay ghetto who do not wish to be treated as the exotic Other for heterosexual tourists.116 This homogenizing image of queerness has global ramifications, according to Dennis Altman. With a global distribution of the homogenizing image, local queer cultures around the world are being forsaken in favor of looks and identities associated with Western homosexuality: Homosexuality becomes a particularly obvious measure of globalization, for the transformation of local regimes of sexuality and gender is often most apparent in the emergence of new sorts of apparently gay and lesbian, even queer, identities.117 He states that the bakkla in the Philippines or the kathoey in Thailand, for example, are identities connected with behaviors that the Western world would associate with homosexuality, but that the individuals who identify as such do not. Young people around the globe are parting from such local categories of identification to identify increasingly with Western sexual and gender identity categories. However, Altman argues, it would be a mistake to equate Western queerness with its non-Western copies: Walking through the gay area of Tokyos Shinjuku you will see large numbers of young men in sneakers and baseball caps (or whatever happens to be the current gay look) but this does not mean they will behave or view themselves in the same way as

116

Ingram, Marginality 40 and Valentine, Queer Bodies 147. Altman 100.

117

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equivalent young men in North America or northern Europe.118 Indeed, while many traditional local forms of non-heterosexual identity are being erased in the age of globalization, the change is not as monolithic as one might imagine. As Altman has pointed out, sexual identity is facing the same glocalization that many other American exports have undergone. Even with the problems associated with a delineated queer spaceits availability as a target for homophobic attacks, its tendency to erase multiple identity categories in favor of a singular image of the middle-class white gay man, and its export of that image with worldwide consequencesthe existence of queer space is considered by many to be necessary for the well-being of LGBTQ people and the advancement of their cause in social politics. Ingram, et al, argue that it is important for the self-perception of LGBTQ people to have a space to express their affections and identities openly: Placemaking has achieved more than the temporary assertion of control over points and territories. These experiences continue to transform how we view ourselves and our inherent rights, as well as how we move within our communities and across neighbourhoods and landscapes.119 Myslik writes that queer spaces can have symbolic meaning, even for people who do not inhabit them. Knowing that spaces like The Castro exist can be enough to help individuals who feel isolated in their own spaces have a sense of community and legitimacy.120

118

Altman 100. Ingram, Placemaking 296. Myslik 168.

119

120

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Following my previous discussion of queer and spatial theory, and specifically how those two fields of theory posit identity as constructed, mutable, and unfettered from traditional material signifiers, the question here remains: can a queer spatial practice preserve the fluidity of identities and alliances posited by queer theory or must the staking of territory also mean the establishment of a singular core queer identity? JeanUlrick Dsert has proposed a way of thinking about space that turns away from identity as its basis and thus perhaps answers that question: Queer culture would not be queer if there were no other culture from which to establish its difference. I argue that to reinforce an isolationist stance rather than engage in an evolution of perpetual differences would be detrimental to any notion of a living queer culture. Queer culture exists because of the dominant normative culture. And in many instances the fluidity and blur between the cultures are the very richnesses and contradictions that should be embraced.121 Indeed, Dsert draws from Butlers assertion that heterosexuality requires homosexuality as its constitutional border to claim that queer does the same thing and should be empowered by it. He argues that by embracing the differences between queer culture and heterosexuality, as well as between queer cultures, non-heteronormative spatial practices can proliferate. Dserts concept of spaces created out of differences runs counter to dominant notions of space and place based on sameness of identity. According to Ingram, the potential already exists for transforming heteronormative space into hetero-queer space, since spaces are inherently layered with disparate modes of desire: Cities and more natural terrains have supported layered and often contradictory social transactions related to queer communality, love, and sex that involve and are between sites. These cumulative interactions and the associated
121

Dsert 19.

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environmental constraints and opportunities can be called the queerscape.122 The potential to transform any space into a queerscape exists because LGBTQ people already inhabit heteronormative space, either at the points of the queer network that exist within heteronormative space, or invisibly in those queer spaces that are created through fleeting glances and mutual recognition of queerness, or in the gay ghettos that exist at the margins. The political implications of a new queerscape, or a new hetero-queer space, would be the dismantling of barriers to LGBTQ people in public and private spaces. It would mean the dismantling of the patriarchal division of the public/private binary and a correction of the commonly held disavowal that a space can ever be neutral of the gender and sexual styles of those who inhabit and construct it. As Ingram has written: The landscape is never just a backdrop; it transforms and is in turn transformed through pleasure, danger, sacredness, and contentiousness in the process of its use as queer site. And such cultural processes are extending well beyond bedrooms, closets, and dark outdoor sites of anonymous sex.123 Indeed, hetero-queer space is space that already exists, either latently or explicitly, and it is precisely the kind of space that I will demonstrate exists explicitly in contemporary texts and films. Conclusion In this chapter, I have traced major theoretical shifts in spatial and queer theory. Significantly, both of these theoretical fields have experienced a major paradigm shift around 1990 towards poststructuralist themes and methods. Perhaps in itself, the shift in

122

Ingram, Marginality 28-9. Ingram, Gordon Brent. Open Space 123.

123

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both spatial and queer theory towards poststructuralism is not surprising, since major paradigm shifts often have influence across different bodies of theory. What is striking, however, is that this paradigm shift that questions the viability of stable identity categories also finds expression in popular fictional German literature and film since 1990. I understand this phenomenon to mean that the destabilization of identities is not only a subject of intellectual debate, but marks a larger shift in our culture as well. In the chapters that follow, I examine the ways in which protagonists habitation or traversal of different kinds of spaces affects their sexual or gender expression. In Chapter 2, I discuss two short stories, Judith Hermanns Sonja (1998) and Angela Kraus Die berfliegerin (1995), and one film, Fatih Akins Auf der anderen Seite (2007), focusing on the implications of domestic spaces and the transitional spaces of travel in their treatment of queer. I argue that queer can be represented aesthetically not only through the presence of a gay/lesbian/queer protagonist, but also as a narrative standpoint or aesthetic mode. Similarly, I show that in these texts, queer spaces are not relegated to the gay ghetto, but rather, are central to various spatial constructs. In Chapter 3, I examine the larger body of works of two contemporary authors, Bodo Kirchhoff and Emine Sevgi zdamar, both of whom send their protagonists into foreign spaces. They employ the abject and the grotesque, respectively, to alienate the reader from heterosexual desire and to represent aesthetically the strangeness of the sexual encounter in foreign space. Finally, in Chapter 4, I propose that androgyny is a specifically poetic form of queer, if one that no longer exists as an identity category. I discuss Christian Krachts protagonist in 1979 (2001) as a person whose anxiety

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regarding sexuality corresponds to his spatial disorientation and who is more comfortable inhabiting Foucaultian non-places rather than those places where identity might be more firmly established. His friend Mavrocordato, an androgynous alchemist, is more capable of navigating space and orienting the narrator. In Judith Hermanns Sommerhaus, spter, (1998), the first-person narrator moves between Berlin, a city where free-floating identification, bisexuality, androgyny are the narrators preferred modes, and a house in Brandenburg, where s/he would be more likely assigned a female gender. I argue that her ambivalence regarding space is reflective of her gender ambivalence as well. Finally, in Fatih Akins Gegen die Wand, I examine Sibels gender in two citiesthat is, her femininity in Hamburg and her androgyny in Istanbuland argue that she negotiates a position between femininity and androgyny by the end of the film. In each of these examples, I take models from spatial theory to interpret the characters perceptions and constructions of space based on their mobility, as well as from gender theory to understand their gender and sexual mutability.

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Chapter 2: The Centrality of Queer in Contemporary Representation In the previous chapter, I outlined various, and often competing, definitions of queer. In each instance, queer represented an identity category or a non-heteronormative position regarding gender roles, behaviors, and/or expectations. As discussed, queer has a range of meanings and can describe same-sex desire, a position outside the heterosexual/homosexual binary, or even non-heteronormative heterosexuality. In this chapter, I examine aesthetic renderings of queer in both literature and film and interrogate multiple modes of queer. How does queer appear in literature and how does film render queer differently? Are representations of queer limited to the presence of gay/lesbian/ queer characters or can queer also be an aesthetic framework? What kinds of queer spaces exist in literature and film? This chapter focuses on two literary texts and one film in which queer is a central theme or narrative standpoint: Judith Hermanns short story Sonja (1998), Angela Kraus longer story Die berfliegerin (1995), and Fatih Akins film Auf der anderen Seite (2007). 124 All three are considered mainstream, even popular, literature and film (i.e., not commonly categorized as gay/lesbian/queer), and each of these texts feature gay/lesbian/queer characters who travel or whom the protagonist encounters during travel. By examining popular texts that employ queer in different manners, I demonstrate the multiple ways in which queer is becoming central to cultural representation. Moreover, by examining the spaces of queer encounter in these texts, I show how literature and films imagine queer and hetero-queer spaces.
124

Die berfliegerin has not been translated into English and therefore does not have an official English title. Translated directly, the title means the woman who flies over. The film Auf der anderen Seite has the official title The Edge of Heaven, but the German title translates literally to on the other side. I will discuss the meanings of both these titles over the course of the chapter.

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Queer Narration in Judith Hermanns Sonja In her short story Sonja, from the collection Sommerhaus, spter (1998), Judith Hermann draws on reader expectations about female authorship to create characters who operate outside the heterosexual matrix and its gendered prescriptions for inhabiting spaces.125 The story opens as Hermanns unnamed first-person narrator makes the acquaintance of a strange young woman named Sonja on a train from Hamburg to Berlin. Sonja insists on following the narrator through Berlin after the train has arrived, and the two develop an unconventional romantic relationship. The narrator finds Sonja alternately fascinating and irritating, but does not commit to her because of a steady relationship with a woman named Verena in Hamburg. Ultimately, the narrator must choose between Sonja and the more traditionally feminine Verena, and when the narrator chooses Verena, Sonja disappears. At the end of the story, the narrator is left with feelings of irritation, dissatisfaction, and longing for the unintelligible Sonja. In the first half of the story, Hermann authors an intelligibly female, lesbian firstperson narrator. She leaves the gender of her narrator open to interpretation, thus drawing on reader expectations that female authors generally write female narrators (when not otherwise specified). Nearly halfway through the story, however, reader expectation is defied when Sonja utters the male pronoun er in reference to the narrator and thus assigns him a male gender.126 The female/male narrators gender becomes

125

The English translation of the title Sommerhaus, spter is The Summer House, Later. I will discuss the title story of the collection and the significance of the eponymous house in Chapter 4.
126

Maria Katharina Wiedlack similarly argues that the narrator is rendered male through Sonjas performative speech act. Maria Katharina Wiedlack, Transgressing GendersA Queer Reading of

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unintelligible in this moment, and the heterosexual male is rendered a queer figure as the reader must imagine the narrators female-to-male gender transition. The protagonist is queered, paradoxically, through the assignment of a heteronormative gender. Gender is precarious in Sonja, due in part to the characters non-traditional means of inhabiting space. As in many of Hermanns other stories, identity, including gender and sexual identity, is disconnected from any domestic space. Rather, it is negotiated in transitional spaces like trains and streets. By destabilizing identity in Augean anthropological places and making identity intelligible in non-places, Hermann queers space as well as gender in her story. 127 In this chapter section, I examine the gender intelligibility of the three main characters in Sonja and discuss how different kinds of space queer and are queered in this story. I first discuss the two versions of femininity that Verena and Sonja represent and how their different ways of inhabiting domestic space contribute to their varying degrees of gender intelligibility. I then turn to a discussion of the queer moment in which the narrator transitions from female to male in the charged space of Sonjas apartment. Finally, I discuss the ways in which transitional and domestic spaces are complicated, and in turn complicate gender, in this text.

German Literature: Judith Hermanns Sonja and Annemarie Schwarzenbachs Lyric Novella, Queering Paradigms, ed. Burkhard Scherer (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010) 315-327.
127

Nancy Nobile has argued that in Hermanns body of work, bisected space signifies oppositional choices that her protagonists must make. Nancy Nobile, A Ring of Keys: Thresholds to the Past in Judith Hermanns Sommerhaus, spter, Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 9 (2010): 288-315. 296. While this argument functions in Sonja to the extent that Verena is associated with Hamburg and Sonja with Berlin, other organizations of space frustrate a reading of clearly bisected space in this story. I will discuss the multiple meanings of domestic and transitional spaces in Sonja later in this chapter.

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In her groundbreaking work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Judith Butler coined the terms heterosexual matrix and gender intelligibility that would gain currency in gender and queer theory over the next two decades. According to Butler, the heterosexual matrix is that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized. . . . a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality.128 The heterosexual matrix is thus the compilation and interworking of cultural expectations, institutions, and structures that create and maintain norms regarding gender and sexuality. It has direct implications for the ways in which bodies are interpreted and either accepted or rejected socially. A body is intelligible when a person clearly expresses one gender through his/her clothing, gesture, and behaviors, and when this gender aligns with both that persons biological sex and sexual desire for members of the opposite sex. According to Butler, a persons gender intelligibility has direct implications for the ways in which that person is regarded, what choices are made available to that person, and whether that person is marginalized, accepted, or abjected socially. Although Butler originally argued that only heterosexual people are intelligible according to the heterosexual matrix, it has become commonly accepted in discourses on gender that in many places and contexts, lesbian and gay relationships have gained in social acceptance and intelligibility as well (albeit in a still limited manner).

128

Butler, Gender Trouble 151 (see note # 6 in her text).

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In Sonja, Hermann proposes a range of intelligibly female characters: the overtly female Verena, the more complicated Sonja, and the lesbian narrator whom she queers, or renders unintelligible, later in the story.129 The narrators intelligibility as a lesbian at the beginning of the story lies largely in reader expectations based on Judith Hermanns own feminine persona. Sonja belongs to a collection of short stories in which all other protagonists are, or are presumed to be, female.130 Not only has the reception of this collection discussed these narrators as female (except in Sonja), but the publicity surrounding its debut added to reader expectations regarding gender.131 Hermann was grouped with a number of female writers, characterized collectively as das literarische Fruleinwunder, who emerged in the mid- to late 1990s and whose book debuts were surrounded by media spectacle that focused on the authors femininity. Like that of many members of the Fruleinwunder, Hermanns likeness was familiar to potential readers before they had a chance to read her work. Literary critic Helmut Bttiger wrote in the Frankfurter Runschau in Feburary 1999 regarding the media spectacle surrounding the debut of Sommerhaus, spter: Am Anfang war das Foto. . . .

129

Most of the scholarship on the story discusses a male narrator without addressing Hermanns choice to leave his/her gender open to interpretation. Only Mila Ganeva attempts to resolve this gender ambiguity by stating: The author endows the male narrator with almost feminine flexibility and softness, which allows him to tolerate the ambiguity and the ultimate futility of the mysterious erotic play initiated by Sonja. Mila Ganeva, Female Flaneurs: Judith Hermanns Sommerhaus, spter and Nichts als Gespenster, Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 3 (3004): 250-277. 268. Although Ganevas assertion is plausible, I find that a queer reading of the character opens up an opportunity to speak more broadly about the multiple ways in which gender operates in this text.
130

I will argue in Chapter 4, however, that the narrator/protagonist of the title story Sommerhaus, spter also undergoes gender transformations.
131

Jrg Dring, Hinterhaus, jetztJugend, augenblicklichHurrikan, spter. Zum Paratext der Bcher von Judith Hermann, Fruleinwunder literarisch. Literatur von Frauen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts, hrsg. Christiane Caemmerer, et al (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005) 13-35.

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Man kannte von dieser Autorin keine Zeile. Aber man kannte dieses Foto. 132 Judith Hermanns famed PR photo takes up half a page in the original hard cover of Sommerhaus, spter and features Hermann in black and white with her hair swept back into a bun, her head leaning gently to the right, gazing off the page toward the reader. The photo is stylized to give Hermann a timeless, feminine look and is reminiscent of famous images of Virginia Woolf. Jrg Dring contends that the authors widely distributed PR photo influenced not only who purchased the book, but also how s/he read it. He asks, was aber, wenn [das Autorenphoto] unsere Lesehaltung schon prdisponiert? Wo beginnt man ein Buch zu lesen?133 and answers his own question later when discussing the reception of Sommerhaus, spter: Die Geschichten, die der Buchinteressent im Begriff ist zu lesen, sollen schon vorab mit Judith Hermanns Gesichtsausdruck identifiziert werden knnen.134 Indeed, critics characterized the photo and the short stories in similar terms: as dreamy, melancholic, and feminine.135 Although Hermann could not have known in advance the degree of media attention that both her collection and her image would attract, her choice to conceal her narrators gender in Sonja, leaving readers to make assumptions, suggests a conscious play with gender. She further encodes her narrator as female, moreover, by lending the

132

Quoted in Dring 16: In the beginning, there was the photo. . . . We werent yet familiar with one line of this authors work, but we knew the photo. (my translation)
133

Dring 13: What happens when the authors photograph predisposes our attitude toward the text? When does one begin read a book? (my translation)
134

Dring 31: The stories that the potential reader is about to read are to be associated in advance with Judith Hermanns facial expression. (my translation)
135

Ganeva 255.

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narrator behaviors that are considered female according to the heterosexual matrix. For example, on the first page, the narrator speaks of her love for her girlfriend Verena and the care she takes in grooming Verena: [I]ch war sehr in sie verliebt. Verena hatte einen Kirschmund und rabenschwarzes Haar, das ich ihr jeden Morgen zu zwei dicken, schweren Zpfen flocht, wir gingen am Hafen spazieren, ich sprang um sie herum.136 The narrators description of braiding Verenas hair conjures imagery of sisterly affection rather than masculine sexual or romantic attraction. In contrast to the narrator, whose femininity is implied by the narration and by some behaviors, both Verena and Sonja represent more overt, yet different, expressions of femininity. Verenas femininity is anchored in cultural traditions. As Nancy Nobile points out, Verenas Kirschmund and zwei dicke schwere Zpfe align Verena with the prototypical fairytale protagonist. Later, when the narrators friend Mick describes Verena as so ziemlich das Schnste, was er je gesehen htte, his formulation is reminiscent of fairytale narration.137 Verenas beauty is anchored in a genre that is often prescriptive of gender roles, behaviors, and beauty standards. Moreover, the narrator describes Verena as both domestic and sexually available, that is, as creating a domestic space of comfort and satisfaction for the narrator: Sie brachte meine Pfandflaschen zurck, kaufte Unmengen von Lebensmitteln ein, stellte die Kche mit Fliederstruen

136

Judith Hermann, Sonja. Sommerhaus, spter (1998; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003) 55: I was very much in love with her. Verena had a cherry mouth and raven-black hair that I plaited for her every morning into two thick, heavy braids. We went for strolls on the harbor, and I bounced around her. (Note: all translations of German quotes into English from Sonja are my own)
137

Nobile 296. Literary quote from Sonja 73: just about the most beautiful thing he had ever seen

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voll und war stndig bereit mit mir ins Bett zu gehen.138 Her territorialism over domestic space follows the nineteenth century angel of the house or more current domestic goddess model of femininity, brought up to date by her sexual attractiveness and availability.139 Sonja, by contrast, represents irritation rather than satisfaction.140 Although female, her gender intelligibility is complicated by excesses and anachronisms in her body and gesture.141 The narrator notes the awkwardness of Sonjas body and manners in her initial observation of Sonja on the train: Sonja aber starrte aus dem Fenster mit einer unglaublichen Sturheit, sie hatte eine Krperhaltung wie bei einem Bombenalarm. . . . Sie war in diesem allerersten Moment alles andere als schn, wie sie dastand, in einer Jeans und einem weien, zu kurzen Hemd, sie hatte schulterlanges, glattes, blondes Haar, und ihr Gesicht war so ungewohnt und altmodisch, wie eines dieser Madonnenbilder aus dem 15. Jahrhundert, ein schmales, fast spitzes Gesicht. Ich schaute sie von der Seite an, ich fhlte mich unwohl und war rgerlich, weil mir die Erinnerung an Verenas Sinnlichkeit entglitt.142

138

Hermann, Sonja 61: She took my bottles in for deposits, bought huge quantities of groceries, filled the kitchen with lilacs, and was always ready to go to bed with me.
139

The angel of the house mod el of domestic femininity is based on the poem of the same title by Coventry Patmore in 1854. The poem was popularized in Europe and America in the late nineteenth century and became prescriptive of womens domestic roles. In her speech Professions for Women in 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote that killing the angel of the house is part of the occupation of a woman writer. For the full speech, see: http://s.spachman.tripod.com/Woolf/professions.htm
140

Nobile 297.

141

As Esther Bauer points out, Sonjas femininity is also anchored in certain gender conventions, though antiquated ones. I will discuss Sonjas femininity later in this chapter section. Esther K Bauer, Narratives of Femininity in Judith Hermanns Sommerhaus, Later, Women in German Yearbook 25 (2009): 50-75.
142

Hermann, Sonja 56: Sonja stared out the window with an unbelievable stubbornness. She had body posture as though she were experiencing a bomb scare. . . . She was anything but beautiful in this very first moment, the way she stood there in jeans and a white shirt that was too short for her. She had shoulderlength, blond hair and her face was so odd and old-fashioned, like one of those paintings of the Madonna from the fifteenth century, a narrow, almost pointed face. I watched her from the side. I felt uneasy and was angry, because my memory of Verenas sensuality was slipping away.

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The narrator is viscerally affected by the body of this woman who has caught her attention on the train. The sight of Sonjas nervous posture, ill-fitting clothes, and anachronistic features shake the narrator out of her daydreams of intimacy with Verena. Sonja unsettles the narrator, and the narrator will continue to indicate this discomfort by describing her as altmodisch, biegsam, and seltsam throughout the text. Despite the irritation that Sonja provokes, the narrator is also attracted to her. The tension between this irritation and attraction is established once again in an early scene in which the two meet at a bar for their first date: Sonja kam eine halbe Stunde zu spt. . . . Sie trug ein unglaublich altmodisches, rotes Samtkleid, und ich bemerkte irritiert, da sie Aufsehen erregte. Sie stckelte auf viel zu hohen Schuhen auf mich zu . . . und ich war kurz versucht ihr zu sagen, da ich sie unmglich fand, ihre Aufmachung, ihre Unpnktlichkeit, ihre ganze Person. Aber dann grinste sie, kletterte auf den Barhocker, kramte ihre Zigaretten aus einem winzigen Rucksack hervor, und mein rger lste sich in Belustigung auf. Ich trank meinen Wein, drehte mir eine Zigarette, grinste zurck und fing an zu reden.143 Not only is Sonja associated with anachronism in this sceneshe arrives late and wears outdated clothingbut her appearance is loaded with an excess of femininity. She wears a red velvet dress, attire that is presumably too formal for a casual meeting at a bar, and totters on high-heeled shoes that are too tall for her. Sonjas femininity in this scene verges on parody and conjures images of an inexperienced drag queen rather than someone who practices femininity easily or more naturally. However, the narrators

143

Hermann, Sonja 60: Sonja arrived a half hour late. . . . She wore an unbelievably old-fashioned red velvet dress and I was irritated to notice that she was arousing attention. She tottered towards me on heels that were much too tall for her . . . and I was just about to tell her that I found her impossible her style, her unpunctuality, her whole persona. But then she grinned, climbed onto the bar stool, dug her cigarettes out of a tiny backpack, and my anger turned into amusement. I drank my wine, rolled myself a cigarette, grinned back, and began talking.

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irritation with Sonja soon turns into an intimacy that allows her to speak with Sonja in a way that she cannot with the picture-perfect Verena. For nearly half the story, Hermann draws out these themes of gender intelligibility and feminine excess and thereby leads her readers to envision two separate lesbian relationships (or, at least a clearly established lesbian relationship with Verena and a less intelligible friendship/romance/partnership with Sonja). However, gender intelligibility becomes more complicated in a scene in which Sonja has invited the narrator to her apartment for the first time. The narrator describes arriving at her apartment for the party: Aber dann war ich oben angelangt, die Wohnungstr stand offen, irgend jemand zog mich in den Flur, und dort stand Sonja. Sie stand an die Wand gelehnt, sie sah ein bichen betrunken aus, sie lchelte mich an mit einem absolut siegesgewissen Gesichtsausdruck und ich fand sie zum ersten Mal schn. Neben ihr stand eine kleine Frau in einem seetanggrnen, langen Kleid und mit einer unglaublichen Flle von rotem Haar, und Sonja deutet auf mich und sagte: Das ist er.144 By uttering the pronoun er (he/him), Sonja effectively assigns the narrator a male gender. The masculine pronoun appears only this one time in the story. Its placement not only at the end of a paragraph, but marking the end of a text block, emphasizes the magnitude of the pronoun. The reader who has pictured a female narrator to this point now has the space of a text break to reorient him/herself and to imagine a female to male gender transition for the narrator. Paradoxically, by assigning the narrator a male gender

144

Hermann, Sonja 65: But then I reached the top [of the stairs]. The apartment door stood open. Someone pulled me into the hallway, and there stood Sonja. She stood leaning on the wall. She looked a little drunk and smiled at me with an expression of absolute triumph and I found her beautiful for the first time. Next to her stood a small woman in a long, seaweed green dress and an abundance of red hair. Sonja pointed at me and said: Thats him.

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and thus orienting him intelligibly within the heterosexual matrix, Hermann queers the narrator. This gender transition is accompanied aesthetically in the text by the narrators own experience of disorientation. The narrator describes the party in terms of the carnivalesque: [E]s war eine Zusammenstellung von Gsten, Gesichtern und Charakteren, die dazu fhrte, da dieses alte Mietshaus an der Spree sich irgendwann von der Wirklichkeit zu lsen schien. . . . ich war berhaupt nicht betrunken, und dennoch begann alleszu schwimmen.145 The apartment, with its improbable constellation of guests, lends the narrator a sense of being in a space outside normal life. Moreover, as the narrator loses control, Sonja gains power. Not only has she uttered the word er and thereby performatively rendered the narrator male; she is capable of permeating space: Sonja schien berall zu sein. Wo auch immer ich war, stand sie an der anderen Seite des Raumes, vielleicht war auch ich immer dort, wo sie war.146 In this space apart, Sonja has power and is attractive to the narrator. In the scenes that follow, Sonja and the narrator attempt a private life in domestic space together and their relationship becomes uncomfortable and forced. Sonja has assigned the narrator a masculine gender, and a patriarchal power system now rules their mode of engagement with one another. Sonja visits the narrator every evening, once his workday is finished, and remains until well into the night. She first follows the narrator
145

Hermann, Sonja 65: It was a compilation of guests, faces, and characters that gave that this old apartment building on the Spree [river] the fee l of having at some point parted from reality. . . . I wasnt at all drunk, but nevertheless, everything beganto swim.
146

Hermann, Sonja 65: Sonja seemed to be everywhere. Wherever I was, she stood on the other side of the room. Maybe I was always where she was.

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around his apartment, which doubles as his art studio, watching as he clears away his work. They then eat together quietly and go out to bars. Rather than exhibiting the excessive personality that irritated and amused the narrator in the beginning of the story, Sonja has taken the role of the passive and silent wife: Sonja redete nie. So gut wie nie. . . . In diesen Nchten redete ich. Ich redete wie zu mir selbst, und Sonja hrte zu, und oft schwiegen wir, und auch das war gut.147 The narrator describes Sonja in an infantilizing manner, and in one instance, he compares her directly to a child: Ich mochte ihre Begeisterung fr bestimmte Dinge, fr den ersten Schnee, ber den sie auer sich geraten konnte wie ein Kind . . . .148 In these passages, Sonja is not the excessive, over-the-top pseudo-drag queen in red velvet, but rather a small, silent child who patters around in stocking feet, following her husband/ father around his apartment. Her affection borders on worship: Sie stahl Kleinigkeiten aus meiner Kche, wie Walnsse, Kreiden und selbstgedrehte Zigaretten, und bewahrte sie in den Taschen ihres Wintermantels auf wie Heiligtmer.149 In these passages, Sonja is a non-entity. She inhabits the narrators domestic space, but without becoming territorial. Unlike Verena, she does not cook, clean, or sleep with the narrator. Scholarship on this short story describes Sonja variously as a muse, a projection screen, and auratic rather than as a real woman.150

147

Hermann, Sonja 68: Sonja never talked. Practically never. . . . I talked those nights. I talked as though to myself and Sonja listened, and sometimes we were silent and that was also fine.
148

Hermann, Sonja 68: I liked her enthusiasm for certain things, for the first snow, which she could go nuts for like a child . . . .
149

Hermann, Sonja 68: She stole small things from my kitchen like walnuts, chalk, and hand-rolled cigarettes and kept them in the pockets of her winter coat like sanctuaries.

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Additionally, the narrators dismissive descriptions of her as silent and child-like contribute to a picture of her as small, unimportant, and asexual. By assigning the protagonist a male gender that orients him in the heterosexual matrix, Sonja has effectively orchestrated her own defeat. When Verena writes that she will arrive soon for an extended visit, the reader understands that the narrator will choose to be with her instead of Sonja. Sonja will never be the Kirschmund151 beauty and domestic goddess to rival Verena. By making their relationship explicitly heterosexual and attempting to create a private domestic space with the narrator, Sonja has entered the heterosexual matrix, a place where she does not belong. Sonja inhabits domestic space only awkwardly, and the unintelligibility of the relationship is exacerbated by the confused eroticism in it. In contrast to Verena, who is constantly available for sex (that is, whenever she and the narrator are in the same city), Sonja is abstemious. The narrator claims that Sonja does not excite him erotically, although as Christine Kanz has pointed out, the discrepancy between his perceptions and his actions indicate an erotic tension that he is unwilling or incapable of admitting. Just
150

Esther Bauer argues that neither Verena nor Sonja is a real woman to the narrator, but rather, they are projection screens for his own desires. The narrator chooses Verena in the end because she represents an ideal more in line with the prototypical sexualized nurturer only after having discovered that Sonja has desires of her own. It is easier for the narrator to maintain Verena as a projection screen, whereas choosing Sonja would mean having to adjust his perception of her to accommodate her desires. Bauer 61. Katja Stopka characterizes Sonja as the narrators auratic muse who represents a mysterious elusiveness. She loses her aura, according to Stopka, when she expresses her own desires. Katja Stopka, Aus nchster Nhe so fern. Zu den Erzhlungen von Terezia Mora und Judith Hermann, Bestandsaufnahmen. Deutschsprachige Literatur der neunziger Jahre aus interkultureller Sicht, hrsg. Matthias Harder (Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 2001) 164. For similar arguments, see also: Thomas Borgstedt, Wunschwelten. Judith Hermann und die Neuromantik der Gegenwart, Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 5 (2006): 207-232. And: Brigitte Weingart, Judith Herman. Sommerhaus, spter, Meisterwerke. Deutschsprachige Autorinnen im 20. Jahrhundert, hrsg. Claudia Benthien und Inge Stephan (Kln: Bhlau Verlag, 2005) 148-175.
151

cherry mouth

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as in Hermanns other short stories, expectations and desires are built up in Sonja without being acknowledged, much less satisfied.152 Indeed, the one erotically charged scene in the story does not result in an admission of sexual desire, but rather, frustration on the narrators part. On the evening in which Verena announces she will visit soon, Sonja spends the night at the narrators apartment and the two share a bed without having sex: Es war unglaublich kalt, ich legte mich zu ihr, wir lagen Rcken an Rcken, einzig die kalten Sohlen unserer Fe berhrten sich wirklich. . . . Ich war berhaupt nicht erregt, nichts htte mir ferner gelegen, als jetzt mit ihr zu schlafen, dennoch war ich beleidigt, als ich an ihren ruhigen und gleichmigen Atemzgen bemerkte, da sie schon eingeschlafen war. . . . Ich wei noch, da es wie inzestus gewesen wre, mit ihr zu schlafen, ihre Brste zu berhren, ich fragte mich, wie es sein wrde, Sonja zu kssen, dann schlief ich ein.153 The narrator has conflicted feelings about his desire for Sonja. He sees her as an unsuitable sexual partner, and thus his desire for her is incomprehensible to him. In narrating the moment, the narrator uses the word incestuous, thereby tabooing sex with Sonja to construct a defense mechanism against his own desires. In a later scene, the narrator admits to conflicting desire for and fear of a relationship with Sonja. When she informs him in a matter-of-fact manner that they will marry one day and have sex only for the purpose of procreation, the narrator becomes frightened by her desires: [I]ch hatte Angst vor der pltzlich so naheliegenden
152

Christine Kanz, Kein bisschen aufgeregt? Sonja von Judith Hermann, Lustfallen. Erotisches Schreiben von Frauen, hrsg. Christina Kalkuhl und Wilhelm Solms (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2003) 127-130.
153

Hermann, Sonja 71-2: It was unbelievably cold. I lay down next to her and we lay back to back. Only the cold soles of our feet really touched. . . . I was not at all aroused. Nothing could have been further in my mind than to sleep with Sonja now. Still, I was hurt when I noticed from her quiet and regular breath that she had already fallen asleep. . . . I know that it would have felt incestuous to sleep with her, to touch her breasts. I asked myself how it would be to kiss Sonja, and then I fell asleep.

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Mglichkeit eines Lebens mit einer seltsamen kleinen Person, die nicht sprach, die nicht mit mir schlief, die mich meist anstarrte, grougig, von der ich kaum etwas wute, die ich wohl liebte letztendlich doch.154 Sonjas abstinence before marriage, her silence, her idealization of sexless marriage, and her desire to share domestic space with the narrator as a path to marriage all indicate an anachronistic form of femininity that is frightening to the narrator.155 Indeed, Sonjas anachronistic persona is the reason why she inhabits the narrators domestic space so awkwardly. The narrator describes a strict regulation of time in his apartment that allows for Sonjas presence only in the evenings, and Sonjas old-fashioned notions about sex are antithetical to a relationship in which two people share domestic space in the late evenings and nights only. Sonja is out of place in the narrators apartment because the kind of relationship she desires does not fit temporally with their arrangement. In contrast to domestic space, the transitional non-places of the train, the streets, anonymous bars, and parties enable the relationship between Sonja and the narrator to develop.156 This dynamic is established in the opening scene of the story in which both

154

Hermann, Sonja 79: I was afraid of the suddenly obvious possibility of a life with this strange little person who didnt speak, who didnt sleep with me, who mostly stared at me, wide -eyed, whom I didnt know much about, whom I loved, after all, though.
155

As Esther Bauer points out, both Verena and Sonja exhibit femininities that are routed in old-fashioned traditions. The difference between Sonjas and Verenas femininities, however, is that Verenas is simply modified for modern standards of sexuality and style. Bauer 62-3.
156

The spatial dynamic of their relationship inverts Marc Aug characterizations of space for human connection and the negotiation of identity. According to Aug, transitional spaces and places such as trains, train stations, highways, airways, etc., are non-places because they are sites where neither personal nor group identity forms. Opposed to these non-places are the anthropological places in which people interact, build connections, and negotiate identities. In Sonja, it is not the domestic anthropological place where the two figures connect, but rather in transitional ones. Marc Aug, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995).

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Sonja and the narrator are introduced to the reader (and to one another) in the train. As previously discussed, Sonja is characterized as anachronistic and awkward in this scene, and the narrators gender is left unestablished. Indeed, one can read this transitional space as an early indication of the narrators own gender ambiguity. The train is somewhere between Hamburg and Berlin when Sonja and the narrator meet. It is neither in the city in which the narrator is intelligible as a lesbian (Hamburg), nor in the city in which his masculinity will be established (Berlin). Rather, both the train and the narrators gender are in transition. Having been initiated in a transitional space, the relationship between the narrator and Sonja can only function well when the two occupy similar transitional spaces. Sonja and the narrator enjoy each other in the scenes in which they trek through snowy streets and enter random bars in order to role play flirtatious anonymity and try out different gender performances with one another. The high point of their relationship comes in the summer after Verena arrives in Berlin, stays a while, and then leaves for Hamburg again. The narrator names this period Sonjas summer, lending it an air of romantic timelessness. They spend Sonjas summer outdoors, bar hopping, and swimming in every lake around Berlin; that is, they spend this fleeting time together in spaces that one can only occupy transiently. The narrator devotes less than a page to describing this important summer, thereby leaving the blossoming romantic relationship to the readers imagination. In a filmed version of the story, Sonjas summer might appear in montage form rather than as a sequence of scenes. The effect of this narration is that the reader imagines the two in motion, their ideal state of inhabiting spaces.

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By contrast, all domestic spaces are fraught with multiple meanings, and any attempt by the narrator and Sonja to reify binary gender in this type of space is frustrated. The narrators apartment doubles as his living space and studio, that is, his private sphere and public work sphere. Similarly, Sonjas apartment is both public and private when she throws a party. Her attempt to assign the narrator a heteronormative gender in this doubled space results in a simultaneous heterosexualization and queering of the narrator. The only instance in the text in which domestic space is not fraught with multiple meanings is when the narrator arrives at Sonjas apartment to end their relationship. Previously, during Sonjas summer, the two had spent their nights at Sonjas apartment, sleeping in her bed without engaging sexually. The narrator characterizes Sonjas bed in one instance as a ship, referring both to the view from her bedroom window over the Spree and to the narrators sense of the apartment as an unanchored, floating space. In this final scene in Sonjas apartment, however, the narrator does not describe it as an unanchored or carnivalesque space. Rather, Sonjas apartment is simply a domestic space that the two can no longer inhabit together. When the narrator informs Sonja of his decision to marry Verena, she ejects him from it. Once the narrator has made the choice to enter the heterosexual matrix in the most intelligible way possible by choosing Verena over Sonja, Sonja and the narrator can no longer cohabit domestic space. Paradoxically, the narrators decision to be with Verena in many ways complicates the domestic ideal. Whereas Sonja had told him, in a matter of fact manner, that they would live together, marry, and have children, Verena informs him that she will

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not take his name and will remain in Hamburg. The two will remain together institutionally, but not spatially or emotionally in the way that he and Sonja coexisted. The consequence of the narrators choice for a more coherent heterosexuality is the loss of his emotional connection with the unintelligible Sonja. Verenas choice to live in separate spaces defies traditional notions of gender and domesticity. However, according to the logic of the story, living separately is the only way she and the narrator can maintain a clearly intelligible heterosexual relationship. Hamburg has been encoded as the place in which Verena and the narrator have had a lesbian relationship. Berlin is the place of gender unintelligibility, performance of feminine excess, misrecognition, and only strained heterosexuality. The heterosexual matrix only works for the couple when Verena can visit intermittently, play the role of the domestic wife, and disappear again before the role loses its charm. Heterosexual marriage can only work for this couple when they have the distance to maintain their domestic ideal. Butler argues in Bodies that Matter that heterosexuality can only maintain a sense of cohesion as an identity category if it keeps homosexuality at its constitutive border.157 Hermann demonstrates this in her story as well. Once established as heterosexual, the narrator chooses the partner who best performs the role of wife, who makes domestic life easier for him, and whose presence he does miss when she is away. The narrator believes he is choosing satisfaction (Verena) over irritation (Sonja). Yet the narrators sense of irritation (or unfulfilled erotic desire) does not vanish with Sonja. Just as queer identity
157

Butler, Bodies that Matter 187-189.

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remains on the constitutive border of heterosexuality, the narrators sense of irritation returns time and again, reminding him that his choice of Verena also includes the loss of Sonja. The last sentence of the story reads: Manchmal habe ich auf der Strae das Gefhl, jemand liefe dicht hinter mir her, ich drehe mich dann um, und da ist niemand, aber das Gefhl der Irritation bleibt.158 The narrator will continue to be reminded in those transitional spaces outside the domestic sphere of what his choice has excluded. In these moments of movement and passage, the heterosexual matrix is destabilized by the reminder that queer is integral to the narrators choice. Queer Potentialities in Angela Kraus Die berfliegerin Few literary texts queer their narrators in the way that Sonja does. More often, when a queer figure narrates a text, s/he self-identifies as gay/lesbian/queer or recounts the process of discovering his/her own queerness. In Angela Kraus Die berfliegerin (1995), the straight narrators encounter with two queer figures results in her identity transformation. The narrator relinquishes her notion of a coherent, essential self and opts instead for an identity that can be multiple, fluctuating, and anti-normative. Although the text never indicates a change in the narrators sexual orientation, she is nonetheless queered by the position she takes vis--vis identity and norms. Die berfliegerin is the first-person narrative of a woman living in Leipzig (in former East Germany) who, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German Reunification, experiences alienation from her home and seeks to find her identity by traveling in foreign spaces. The story is divided into three parts, each organized around a place or set
158

Hermann, Sonja 84: Sometimes when Im on the streets I have the feeling that someone is walking right behind me. I turn around and its no one, but the feeling of irritation remains.

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of spaces. The first part takes place over the course of one night, as the narrator makes the spontaneous decision to renovate her apartment. Feeling estranged from her home and the city spaces visible from her window, she rips layer after layer of wallpaper from the wall and destroys old furniture. Her initial purpose is to dismantle her home in order to put it back into perfect order. Taking apart her grandmothers couch, she states her intentions: Ich zerlege alles bis auf das Skelett. Und dann setze ich es fehlerlos wieder zusammen!159 Rather than completing the project, however, the narrator sits triumphantly amidst the remnants of her destruction at the end of the first part. In the second and third parts, she flies to America and then Russia, both countries that had occupied Germany before reunification. In America, the narrator discovers the simultaneity of heterogeneous spaces, as well as lifestyles and daily routines she had never known existed concurrently with her own. In the final scene of the second part, the narrator encounters transvestites who run a second-hand clothing store in San Francisco. Their layered gender performances and eclectic taste in clothing de-center the narrators own sense of a coherent self, and she learns to embrace multiplicity. Finally, in the third part of the story, the narrator flies to Moscow, where she observes her friends engaging in black market currency exchange in hopes of amassing wealth in the new capitalist system. The Russia represented by the narrator is both still old and new, as capitalism is beginning to flourish amidst crumbling buildings and poor living conditions. At the end of the third part, the narrator flees Russia after a matriarch offers the narrator her

159

Angela Krau, Die berfliegerin (1995; Frankfurt am Main: SuhrkampTaschenbuch Verlag, 2002). 40: I am dismantling everything down to the skeleton. And then I will put it all back together flawlessly. (Note: all translation of German quotes from Die berfliegerin into Engli sh are my own.)

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grandson in marriage. In the final scene of the story, the narrator escapes the matriarch and orders a car to drive her to the airport. She fears for her life in this surreal scene when the car transforms into an aircraft and takes off into the air. The narrator realizes that she does not want to die, screams out this wish, and the car lands. It is not revealed where. In this story, the narrators search for self-discovery is closely entwined with her engagement with different kinds of spaces, many of which are themselves in transition. Her destruction of her interior space at the beginning of the story expresses her emotional need to transcend a self that has been determined largely by history and geography. 160 In all three parts of the text, flying is the overarching symbol of freedom to transcend spatiotemporal specificities and thus to discover oneself. As Susanne Kelley has pointed out, the narrator originates from a country that no longer exists and can only undergo identity reformulation outside the borders of unified Germany. 161 However, in her search for self-discovery, the narrator is not compelled to fly to exotic or completely foreign locations. Rather, she visits the two countries that most directly shaped the politics of (and thus her daily life in) East Germany. Having visited these two countries, the

160

According to Barbara Mabee, the search for identity is an overarching theme inKraus works postunification: Krau Texte seit der Wende sind fortgesetzte Versuche einer Identititsrekonstruktion und Bewusstseinserweiterung inmitten stndiger Neueindrcke in der westlichen Welt. (no paginationfirst page) [Kraus texts since reunification are continued attempts at identity reconstruction and the expansion of consciousness amidst constant new impressions in the western world. (my translation)] Barbara Mabee, Das Weltbild korrigieren. Nackdenkliche Fortsetzung der Fahrt.: Angela Krau poetisierte Amerikareisen als Umdenkprozesse und Aufbrche zu einem neuen Lebensmustern, Glossen: Eine Internationale zweisprachige Publikation zu Literatur, Film und Kunst in den deutschsprachigen Lndern nach 1945 19 (2004): (no pagination).
161

Susanne Kelley, The Travel Motif in Post-Wende German Literature: Angela Krau Die berfliegerin and Antje Rvic Strubels Offene Blende, South Atlantic Review 74.3 (2009): 1-19. 3.

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narrator experiences a broadening of her horizons, yet nothing is left resolved in terms of identity or location. The open ending of the story leaves the narrators fate up to the readers imagination: she might have died, might continue her travels, or might return to Leipzig. Much of the narrators search for identity revolves around negotiations of gender and sexuality. At the beginning of the story, the narrator is bored with a lover whom she keeps at arms length, allowing him to visit only on Sundays. At the end of the story, the prospect of an arranged marriage frightens her so deeply that she leaves Russia altogether. Arguably the most transformative moment in her journey is her encounter with the two transvestites, Sally and Tabury, in a second-hand clothing store in San Francisco. The opening image of destruction is intensely corporal. Beginning with only two fingertips, the narrators whole body soon becomes implicated in the act of tearing down the wallpaper. When she throws open the window, setting her entire body in motion, and declares, Fliegen wre schn, 162 we get the sense that she means flying with her body, out the window. Her sweat mixes with the water she uses to weaken the wallpaper glue, and later, when she overturns her sofa to destroy it, she topples with it. Reconfiguring ones space requires the action of the entire self. The narrators destruction of her apartment is symbolic of a need to free herself from the restrictions of her own historical and geographical situation. The building is several generations old, as evidenced by the multiple layers of wallpaper, and it is fitted
162

Flying would be nice.

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out with her grandmothers furniture. The narrator must cast off the material relics of family inheritance in order to fly, and she destroys her grandmothers couch, first by toppling it, then by sawing it into pieces. The narrators mention of her grandmother is significant. Before she can venture to the parent countries America and Russia in the second and third parts of the book, the narrator must first destroy any relics of reunified Germanys grandparent regime: Nazi Germany. Paul Michael Ltzeler similarly reads the narrators actions as a revolt not only again the history of the German Democratic Republic, but against German history of the entire twentieth century: Wieder gilt ihre Haus-Revolte nicht lediglich dem, was sie an die Vergangenheit der DDR erinnert, sondern allem, was mit den acht Jahrzehnten Lebenszeit des Hauses zu tun hat.163 The destruction of the apartment alludes to the Berlin Wall falling, an event that for many people represents a historical caesura from the two previous oppressive regimes. These regimes have the left the narrator in a home space that is alien to her and that can no longer inform her sense of self. By ripping down her wallpaper and sawing through the materials that bind her to that space, the narrator is taking radical action to liberate herself from her previous spatial and historical containment. In this act of de-territorialization, the narrator is freeing herself to explore new spaces and places that might better facilitate her self-discovery.

163

Paul Michael Ltzeler, Zum Beispiel Angela Krau, Die berfliegerin (1995), Postmoderne und postkoloniale deutschsprachige Literatur. Diskurs Analyse Kritik (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2005). 50-60. 52: Again, her house-revolt is not simply against what she remembers about the past in the German Democratic Republic, but rather, everything that had to do with the eight-decade life of the house. (my translation)

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The story opens at midnight, yet the entire city seems to be as sleepless as the narrator. She describes a soldier patrolling below her window, babies stirring in their sleep, and her own action of slipping past bedroom windows in the night. This restlessness is punctuated by the sound of a stick banging against metal somewhere in the distance. The narrator talks of train wrecks and airplane collisions. Indeed, this opening scene is filled with tropes of inertiaas the world moves, the narrator also feels the need to be in motionand a sense of impending danger. At the same time as she speaks of this commotion, however, she also describes Leipzig as lonely and abandoned: In dieser Stadt gibt es Gnge, Tunnel und Hoflabyrinthe, die am Tage so verlassen sind wie nachts . . . . 164 The city is full of empty, out-of-the-way spaces and passageways that only she and few other people know. It is not these hidden spaces, however, but the familiar ones visible from her window that most contribute to her sense of dislocation: Das htte ich mir in meinen Alptrumen nicht ausgemalt, wie es sein wird, wenn ich eines Morgens aufwache, aus dem Fenster schaue, hinunter auf die Fabrikhalledcher, die Schornsteine und Kabelbume, die Laderampen und Lagerschuppen . . . und das alles steht in einer fremden Welt.165 She buys a map, um die neuen Entfernungen von mir zu einem beliebigen Punkt meiner

164

Krau, Die berfliegerin 10: In this city there are passageways, tunnels, and labyrinthine courtyards that are as deserted by day as they are by night . . . .
165

Krau, Die berfliegerin 10: Not even in my nightmares could I have imagined what it would be like to wake up one morning, look out the window over the factory building roofs, the cobblestone and wiring, the loading ramps and warehouse scalesand it all exists in a foreign world.

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Umgebung ablesen zu knnen.166 The binary familiar/foreign has collapsed for the narrator, as evidenced by her need to refer to a map in her home city just as one would in a foreign place. This collapsed binary prompts her to journey into foreign spaces in the next two parts of the story to discover new possibilities for her sense of self. In the second part of the book, the narrator flies to America, where she learns of multiple possible lifestyles and identifications with history previously unknown to her. The narrators first stop is in Minnesota, where she lives briefl y with an academic couple named Julie and David. David is a human rights activist who writes letters pleading for the freedom of political prisoners, and Julie is a professor whose students are sorely misinformed about the social history of East Germany. Rather than claiming a right to correct Julies students, however, the narrator simply observes their interactions, indicating detachment from the subject of her own history. In Minnesota, the narrator learns that other spaces and other ways of living exist than the one she has known before. In one scene she accompanies Julie in her morning ritual of completing the Canadian air force exercises, a new experience that prompts the narrator to gaze out over a vast Minnesota landscape and reflect, Dieses Leben hier war also auch schon seit zwanzig Jahren im Gange, und ich hatte nichts davon gewut. Gleichzeitig mit meinem Leben, nur sechs Stunden versetzt, lief es seit zwanzig Jahren auf derselben Erdkugel ab, nur an einer anderen Stelle der Krmmung. Nun erfuhr ich das zufllig.167 America represents

166

Krau, Die berfliegerin 38-9: so I can read the new distances from myself to any given point in my environment.
167

Krau, Die berfliegerin 65: This life here was thus already underway for the last twenty years, and I had known nothing of it. Simultaneous to my life, only offset by six hours, it took place for the last twenty

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not only new rituals and landscapes, but wholly new configurations of space as well. In a later scene she examines a map of Los Angeles and is perplexed by its grid-like street plan: Ich vertiefte mich in einer Ecke des Kartensaals in das Gitternetz der Straen von Los Angeles. Je lnger ich daraufsah, desto unheimlicher wurde mir der geheimnislose Bauplan.168 The clarity of the Los Angeles street plan is puzzling to the narrator, who is accustomed to the labyrinthine spaces of Leipzig. The pinnacle of the narrators American experience comes in the final scene of the second part, in which she stumbles into a second-hand clothing store and has a transformative experience there. Just as the narrators spatial awareness was transformed in Minnesota, her identification with history is transformed in this scene. This particular second-hand clothing store is run by two transvestites who offer a rich variety of vintage clothing that stretches back through American history. The narrator is enthralled by both the vast variety of clothingto be sure, the store is a microcosm of American multiplicity and choiceand the shop owners who exhibit multiplicity in their expression of gender identity. The narrators enthusiasm leaves her nearly breathless as she ventures through the store: Ich ri mich los . . . um mich immer aufs neue inmitten der Kleiderkarussells zu drehen, in ihrem berraschenden Geruch nach Staub und getrocknetem Leben, in diesem sen Duft nach Vergangenheit, einem kostbaren Geruch nach etwas, das es hier eigentlich nicht gab und in dem in prachtvoller Pose die Verkufer

years on the same globe, just on a different part of the curve. I learned that now by coincidence. (The narrator mistakenly states that Minnesota is six hours behind Leipzig, when in fact the time difference is seven hours.)
168

Krau, Die berfliegerin 77: In the corner of the map room [of the university library], I engrossed myself in the grid of streets of Los Angeles. The longer I looked at it, the more eerie the transparent street plan became to me.

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standen, ein Bein gegen die Wand gewinkelt, die schnen kraftvollen Mnner als Frauen drapiert.169 She is thrilled by the possibility of constructing and reconfiguring her identity that the variety of clothing offers and that the transvestites demonstrate. The concept of gender as a performance is new to the narrator: Ich mute bleiben und [die Transvestiten] lange anschauen. Ihre Art, sich auszustellen, ohne die Betrachter eines Blickes zu wrdigen, zog mich immer strker an . . . ihre Bewegungen waren einzig zur Prsentation da, fr einen unsichtbaren Blick . . . .170 Identity is constructed, expressed through ones presentation of self, and negotiated between ones performances and the beholders perceptions. The narrators sense of a coherent self begins to break down as she realizes that her own identity is contingent upon these factors, and, conversely, that she belongs to a vast multiplicity: Ich war ein Teil einer Vielheit . . . . Hier, mitten in Amerika, versank ich bereitwillig in einem Haufen von Kleidern aus zweiter Hand, der mir deutlich machte, da die Welt wirklich unendlich ist. Ich sank und sank und wute, da ich hier bleiben wollte.171 America, with its short history, vast space, and endless variety for consumption, offers the freedom to negotiate ones identity.

169

Krau, Die berfliegerin 84: I tore myself away . . . in order to keep turning anew amongst the clothes carousels, in their surprising scent of dust and dried life, in this sweet fragrance of the past, a precious smell of something that wasnt actually here and in which the salespeople stood in a magnificent pose, one leg propped against the wall, the beautiful men draped as women.
170

Krau, Die berfliegerin 84-5: I had to stay a while and watch them. Their manner of exhibiting themselves without deigning to look at the beholder, was alluring to me . . . their movements were solely for presentation to an invisible gaze . . . .
171

Krau, Die berfliegerin 85: I was one part of a multiplicity . . . . Here, in the middle of America, I sank willingly in a pile of second-hand clothes that made it clear to me that the world is really endless. I sank and sank and knew that I wanted to stay here.

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The narrators personal transformation is further signified in the text by Tabury, who asks in disbelief upon Sallys discovery of the narrator: Da sitzt wohl ein Kerl in der Wsche?172 Taburys reference to the narrator as a Kerl (guy) indicates the narrators gender ambiguity in this moment. The narrator delights in this shift in identity and performs her own version of drag by grabbing several mismatched ties and placing them all around her neck at once. When Sally and Tabury ask the narrator who she is, she responds with the same as you, meaning a person who experiences herself as harboring multiplicities. Ltzeler reads the narrator as striving toward a middle gender, one that takes significations from both male and female.173 I would argue, however, that rather than melding genders and seeking a position in between, the narrator is layering genders in an emulation of the transvestites when she grabs several mismatching ties and places them around her neck. For the narrator, the transvestites represent multiplicity both within the self and as expressed on the body. They layer that which does not conventionally belong together.174 America, and this clothing store in particular, offers the possibility of multiple simultaneous identifications. Additionally, this scene in which the narrator sits on a pile of second-hand clothing mirrors the final scene of the first part of the book. Whereas the narrator in that previous scene sat triumphantly on a pile of destroyed materials that had once represented the scope of her familiar space and her self172

Krau, Die berfliegerin 88: There is a guy sitting in the clothes? Ltzeler 57.

173

174

My reading of the narrators gender in this scene is supported by Susanne Kelleys argument that Kraus characters refuse to commit to any identity during their dislocation, including a specifically hybrid one. Kelley 3. The narrator will no sooner develop a hybridized German -American identity nor an East-West German identity than she will a hybrid male-female one. Instead, she retains the capability to layer and create identities of her own constellation.

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concept (determined by family, inheritance, legacy, and history), she is now aware of multiple possible selves. Both scenes end in her triumph. The narrators drag also expresses her repudiation of conventional knowledge. When she tells the transvestites Eure Wahrheit liegt in der Mitte . . . und da mchte ich auch gerne bleiben,175 she means that they represent an alternative to the binary truths/untruths she grew up learning. Their layering of genders, eclectic clothing, and collection of evidence of multiple historical realities present the narrator with a new paradigm for understanding her orientation in the spatiotemporal world: Durch den Aufschlag war etwas in meinem Innern durcheinandergeraten. Wie wenn man ein Kaleidoskop schttelt, pltzlich ist ein neues Muster da, ein vollkommen neues Ornament aus den alten Bausteinen. Sie sind kaum wiederzuerkennen.176 The narrator herself is transformed, reconfigured like the constitutional elements of a kaleidoscope. The narration of America ends as the narrator walks out of the store confidently wearing the several ties at once and pondering who she wants to be now that she has the choice. In the third part of the book, the narrator travels to Moscow, where she discovers parallels between this newly capitalist country and her own home. Having dismantled her notions of polarity in America, she is faced with navigating a country in transformation whose own clashing polarities are coming to a head. In this post-soviet Russia that is clamoring to adjust to a new capitalist system, the older characters the

175

Krau, Die berfliegerin 89: Your truth lies in the middle [] and I would like to stay there.

176

Krau, Die berfliegerin 88: By landing here, something inside me was mixed up. Like when you shake a kaleidoscope, suddenly a new pattern is there, a perfect new ornament made of the old elements. You barely recognize them.

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narrator encounters are described in archetypal terms and seem unreal, while younger characters risk losing themselves in a system of global economics. Moreover, as Ltzeler has pointed out, the aesthetic binaries established in the first and second parts of the novelLeipzig as dark and cramped, America as light and spaciousare dismantled and mixed in this final part, and this aesthetic strategy expresses the narrators conflict over her perceptions of Moscow.177 This text depicts a newly capitalist Russia as a fantastical place, and the narrators unconventional trajectory to reach Moscow underlines its improbability. Directionality is turned on its head when the narrator flies from San Francisco to Moscow: Seitdem flog ich durch die Welt . . . solange nach Westen, bis der Westen pltzlich wieder Osten war.178 East and West lose their meanings as oppositions as the narrator reaches the East by means of travelling west and as the East becomes westernized. Once there, she encounters figures more literary than real, for example, the five old women who share a bench and only get up from it to clean it, and the matriarch Aglaja, who sits mysteriously on a divan under a shimmering chandelier and prophesies to those who visit her.179 In one scene, the narrator becomes fascinated with a beautiful cake in a bakery window, a common trope in childrens stories and nursery rhymes.180 Even the colors seem unreal

177

Ltzeler 50-1.

178

Krau, Die berfliegerin 96: Since then I flew through the world . . . West until West suddenly became East again.
179

Paul Michael Ltzeler reads the five women as representing an older Russia that is ever-present, yet consigned to observe only. Ltzeler 58.
180

Associations include the magical cakes in the various renderings of the Alice in Wonderland stories as well as the diverse pastries in the Mother Goose fairytales.

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to the narrator: Ich lachte auch, das hier war vielleicht nicht die Wirklichkeit, sondern etwas Farbiges nach der Natur, mit noch schneren, noch tieferen Farben, die sie erfunden hatten, um die Natur zu verstehen.181 However, like Dorothy in the The Wizard of Oz, who lands in a parallel world of Technicolor fantasy, the narrator is presented with vague associations of home in this strange place. While in Russia, she continually orients herself by walls, many of which show signs of wear or are crumbling altogether: Da ich es jederzeit wieder sehen kann, wenn ich es brauche: die Risse in den Mauern. Die alten Muster.182 This allusion to the Berlin Wall indicates that the narrator must ground her identity in something familiar. Although she has already destroyed many of the wallsliteral and figurativethat have constituted her identity thus far, she finds walls to be affirming in Moscow. Indeed, as the narrator recognizes the commonalities of Moscow and her own eastern Germany, her thoughts turn to her own future and the future of her country.183 The narrator is not completely unfettered from the familiar demarcations and divisions of space that remind her of her home. At the same time as the narrator encounters unreal/familiar spaces and people, she also describes Russia as a place in transition. She watches as her Russian acquaintances participate in the virtual world of fluid global economics. They invite the narrator to participate in a dangerous game of black market currency and commodity exchange. The

181

Krau, Die berfliegerin 106: I laughed as well. This here was perhaps not reality, but rather something colorful made to imitate nature, with still more beautiful, deeper colors they had invented in order to understand nature.
182

Krau, Die berfliegerin 119: So that I can see it again anytime that I need to: the cracks in the walls. The old patterns.
183

Kelley 9.

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narrator recognizes the potential for her own loss of self in the ever fluid world of manifold constellation, swapping, and multiplicity that she found exciting in America: Ich wei, da smtliche mglichen Bedeutungen existieren wie Pflanzen und Tiere, wie Gesteinsformationen und Wolkenbildungen. Auf diese Weise kehren deren unendlich vielfltige Formen im Menschen wieder, sobald er aufgehrt hat, nach einer einzigen Bedeutung zu suchen. Durch unerschrockenes Fliegen bin ich zu dieser Erkenntnis gelangt. Auch der Zustand der Entropie ist so reich an Erscheinungen, Formen und Figuren des Daseins, da man ihn ohne Einschrnkung Leben nennen kan. Aber in diesem Moment beschlo ich: nicht mit mir.184 The narrator recognizes the destructive side of entropy, that is, the potential to lose oneself completely by surrendering to it. She resolves to retain some sense of self. Although the narrator has learned to orient herself by those signifiers that remind her of home, she must also avoid falling into old categories as the people she encounters continually attempt to label her. She is identified as a guest, a daughter, and a potential bride, all labels that are uncomfortable to her and prompt her to move on. In the scene that finally motivates her travel away from Russia, she meets with the Gromtterchen (little grandmother) Aglaja, who wishes to marry her off to her grandson, Serjosha. Indeed, the image of this grandmother figure reclining on a divan recalls the grandmothers sofa that the narrator destroyed at the beginning of the story. The narrator must escape the grandmother a second time. If in America the narrator has learned that multiple selves are possible, in Russia, she must take agency in establishing her identity, lest it be determined by others.
184

Krau, Die berfliegerin 112: I know that all possible meanings exist, like plants and animals, like rock and cloud formations. Their endlessly manifold forms recur in humans as well as soon as they stop searching for a single meaning. I came to this realization through fearless flying. Even the condition entropy is so rich in appearances, forms, and pieces of existence that one can without qualification call it life. But in this moment I resolved: not with me.

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When the narrator informs Aglaja that she must leave, Aglaja articulates the storys central problem: Du bist hier wie anderswo am richtigen Ort, also kannst du auch hier sein. Es ist gleichgltig, wo du bist, alles ist richtig. Der Mensch mu nicht fort, wozu? Um die Welt zu sehen? Wozu? Der Mensch sieht immer sich selbst. Alles was er sieht, sieht ihm hnlich, Lnder, Leute es ist alles nach seinem Ma. Er kann nicht wirklich Fremdes aufnehmen, der Mensch. Alles was er von drauen erkennen kann, ist er selbst. Er ist in sich eingeschlossen, und deshalb sucht er die Freiheit. Er sucht die Freiheit an einem Ort drauen.185 To a large extent, the grandmother figure has identified the narrators own mode of engagement. Her travel has been for the purpose of self-discovery, not necessarily the discovery of other places, and her experiences of foreign spaces have been largely shaped by German stereotypes about America and Russia.186 She has confirmed her notions that Americans are friendly and ignorant of world history; in Russia she has encountered people who resemble literary archetypes rather than real people. Indeed, the narrator has been less interested in engaging with the places she visits than with exploring herself. Barbara Mabee has pointed out that this mode of engagement with places is indicated even in the title of the book. berfliegen has two meanings in German: literally, to fly over something, and figuratively, to skim something.187 However, an berflieger is also someone who grasps information quickly, a personality trait the narrator possesses.

185

Krau, Die berfliegerin 118: You are here, just as elsewhere, in the right place, so you can also stay here. It doesnt matter where you are; everything is right. Why do people have to go? To see the world? Why? People always see themselves. Everything they see looks like themselves: countries, people, it is all personalized. People cannot really incorporate the foreign. The only thing from outside that people recognize is themselves. They are trapped in themselves and that is why they seek freedom. They seek freedom in other external places.
186

Ltzeler 55-6. Mabee, last page (online article, no pagination).

187

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Her ability to advance quickly has led her on a journey and some unexpected encounters that have transformed her sense of self, as well as caused her to engage with the places around her. For example, after doing the Canadian air force exercises with Julie, the narrator takes in the Minnesota landscape; in San Francisco, her encounter with transvestites derives much of its meaning from its setting in a second-hand clothing store. Kraus narrative demonstrates that travel is always a negotiation of the travelers preconceived notions and what s/he actually sees and encounters. To this extent, identity transformation is possible through travel, and Aglajas assertion is both true and false. In the books final scene, the narrator flees Aglaja and her offer of marriage to Serjosha. She jumps into the car waiting for her and orders the driver Semjon to take her to the airport as quickly as possible. He drives at breakneck speed, and as the car begins to lift off the ground, he declares: Wir Russen hngen nicht so am Leben!188 The narrator fears for her life, and when she screams, Ich will nicht sterben!189 Semjon announces that they are landing. This obscure final scene leaves few clues as to the destination or the fate of the narrator. Susanne Kelley reads this scene as commensurate with the narrators overarching goal to find a space that is detached from the present, past, and future. The margin following the text break indicates that she has found such a space.190 Astrid Khler argues, conversely, that the circle motif running throughout the narrative indicates that the narrator will now complete her journey across the globe and

188

Krau, Die berfliegerin 124: We Russians dont cling to life like that! Krau, Die berfliegerin 124: I dont want to die! Kelley 6.

189

190

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return to Leipzig. She reads the new enthusiasm for life that the narrator claims to have gained to be an expression of newfound appreciation for home.191 Ltzeler reads the scene as intentionally leaving all possibilities open.192 The final scene of the book contrasts with two earlier scenes in which the narrator has flownfirst to America, then to Russia. In the first flight scene, the narrator believes herself to be in control of the flight when she spots the pilot walking through the cabin aisles. In the flight from America to Russia, flying is characterized as a corporal experience: as the narrator turns in her sleep, the plane banks and turns as well. In this final flight scene, the narrator neither expects nor has control of the flight. Only her cry I dont want to die! results presumably in the vehicle landing. As opposed to the two earlier scenes, the narrator has lost control. She is not in charge of her journey; nor will she be able to put her world back together flawlessly, as she had asserted at the beginning of the story. But perhaps this is the point. Over the course of the novel she has learned to 1) de-center the self, 2) be part of a manifold plurality of elements, 3) not lose herself completely in the plurality, and now 4) surrender to the journey itself. These lessons are contradictory, and the narrator has spoken again and again about embracing entropy, messiness, contradiction, and multiplicity. The abrupt, open end of the story indicates that entropy has taken over. The narrator does not put her world back together at the end of the story, but rather, leaves her readers questioning and all possibilities open.

191

Astrid Khler, Whither? Away! Reflections on the Motifs of Travel and Identity in Recent East German Prose, German Language Literature Today: International and Popular? ed. Arthur Williams, et al (Bradford: Peter Lang, 2000) 213.
192

Ltzeler 59.

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This ending brings to mind Eve Kosofsky Sedwicks assertion of what queer is: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyones gender, of anyones sexuality arent made (or cant be made) to signify monolithically.193 The lesson the narrator learns by encountering the queer figures in San Francisco illuminates the ending of the book. Discrepancies, layering, multiplicity, and mutability are the truths that lie in the middle. For the reader, this is an unsettling ending because it resists lending the narrators journey a coherent, summative meaning. This narrative about a persons identity development cannot end conclusively, and its ending expresses a queer truth about the instability of identity more broadly. Same-Sex Relationships in the Age of Globalization: Fatih Akins Auf der anderen Seite Whereas literature has the capacity to queer by manipulating the minds eye, as exemplified in Hermanns short story Sonja and Kraus Die berfliegerin, film as an inherently visual medium does not operate in the same way. Instead, film provides a more direct means for showing layered gender performances, for example, as in Boys Dont Cry (Peirce 1999) or Transamerica (Tucker 2005). Film also has the capability of presenting the viewer with multiple perspectives, temporalities, and spaces simultaneously by manipulating camera angles and replay speed, by making use of split screens, and by manipulating the relationship between the visual and the aural fields. Indeed, by making use of those mechanisms, film can effectively de-center the viewers
193

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 8.

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perspectives and assumptions. In Fatih Akins feature film Auf der anderen Seite, for example, a Turkish woman named Ayten and a German woman named Lotte fall in love while dancing in the hetero-queer space of a club. The viewer adopts multiple perspectives and experiences multiple temporalities while observing this queer relationship develop. In recent years, depictions of LGBTQ people have become more numerous in mainstream German cinema. Kutlug Atamans Lola und Bilidikid (Lola + Bilidikid 1999), Marco Kreuzpaintners Sommersturm (Summer Storm 2004), Christian Petzolds Gespenster (Ghosts 2005), and Fatih Akins Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven 2007) are among the most prominent examples. In each of these films, locale is important to the films treatment of sexuality. In Lola und Bilidikid and Gespenster, the urban setting of Berlin allows for and at the same time complicates the queer relationship. In Sommersturm, the pastoral space of the countryside provides the appropriate setting for the protagonist Tobi to come out of the closet to his friends and teammates. Fatih Akins Auf der andern Seite sets a lesbian relationship in motion on a global scale. Auf der anderen Seite tells the story of five connected romantic and familial relationships, all of which begin in Germany and either end or find some confirmation in Turkey. The film is structured in two main acts, both of which revolve around romantic relationships that end in death and explore the ramifications of those deaths for the familial relationships of their survivors. A repeating opening and closing sequence brackets the two main acts. In the first full act, titled Yeters Tod (Yeters Death), the retired guest worker Ali invites the prostitute Yeter to live and have sex exclusively with

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him for pay. Yeter accepts his invitation after two Turkish religious fundamentalists threaten her with disfigurement on account of her prostitution. However, it turns out that Yeter has escaped one dangerous fate for a much worse one when, in a drunken jealous rage, Ali hits and inadvertently kills her. Ali is incarcerated, and his son Nejat disowns him. Nejat, whom the audience recognizes from the films opening sequence, is a professor of German literature in Hamburg. After Yeters death, however, he leaves his position to travel to Turkey in order to bury Yeter, seek out her daughter, Ayten, and fund Aytens education. In Istanbul, he starts a new life for himself by purchasing a German bookstore and renting an apartment. In the second full act, titled Lottes Tod (Lottes Death), Ayten is introduced. She is an active member of a left-wing resistance group and a suspected terrorist in Istanbul. Having witnessed the arrest of her comrades after taking part in a violent May Day demonstration, she flees to Germany in hopes of finding her mother. Instead, she makes the acquaintance of a German college student named Lotte, and the two develop a romantic relationship. Lotte invites Ayten to live with her and her mother, Susanne, who disapproves of the relationship, certain that it will bring trouble. When Ayten is arrested, denied asylum in Germany, and extradited to a womens prison in Istanbul, Lotte follows her there with the intention of helping free her. Lotte becomes an unwitting surrogate for Ayten within the resistance group when Ayten asks her to retrieve a hidden gun. However, this assignment proves fatal when Lotte is accidentally shot by street children who find the gun in her purse. Susanne, distraught at the loss of her daughter and guilt-stricken at having not supported Lottes latest attempts to free Ayten, travels to Istanbul to mourn Lotte and adopt her daughters mission. Susanne

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moves into the apartment Lotte had sublet (coincidentally, from Nejat), visits Ayten in the womens prison, and promises to provide for her upon her release. The films ends as it started. In a repeating sequence that introduces the film and then begins the final act, titled Auf der anderen Seite, Nejat travels to Turkey to reconcile with his father. The film had begun with Nejat driving through the Turkish countryside, and only now do we understand why. Prompted by a conversation with Susanne, Nejat regrets disowning his father and is travelling to Trabzon to reconnect with him. In the final scene of the film, Nejat arrives at the shore of the Black Sea, where his father is reported to be fishing, but his father is nowhere to be seen. Nejat simply sits on the beach, waits, and watches the water.194 Among the films most prominent themes are the politics of globalization, Turkeys potential membership in the European Union, and the possibility of intimate human relationships in an era of global mobility. Every relationship in Auf der anderen Seite either requires or results in international travel, and every major figure in the film travels from Germany to Turkey over the course of the film. The film develops an aesthetic of motion that underscores these themes. It opens with Nejat driving and ends in his stasis, and at almost no point between these two sequences is any one character still for long.195 The majority of scenes, sequences, and shots are devoted to depicting motion

194

The relationships in the film are organized in a rhizomatic structure, in which characters who do not know each other cross paths in an inexplicable manner. However, the familial and romantic relationships can be organized in the following linear structure: Nejat-Ali-Yeter-Ayten-Lotte-Susanne.
195

Reception of Auf der anderen Seite has focused on Akins turn away from the punk intensity of Gegen die Wand, the previous film in the Love, Death, and Devil tr ilogy. However, this turn away from intensity does not correspond with a turn toward stasis. The motion in the film is much more controlled and intentional. For more on Akins turn away from intensity, see Rainer Gansera, Der Leidenschaftliche.

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from different points of view, either from the person travelling or through static, unmotivated shots that frame moving buses, trains, streetcars, and automobiles. Characters cross paths (or barely miss one another) as their modes of transportation intersect or travel along parallel courses. Indeed, the viewer has a sense of being in motion for most of the film. The final shot of Nejat sitting on the seashore is unsettling to the viewer, particularly because it presents an abrupt end to the motion. In Akins film, the global and the local are intimately entwined, as the film brings global politics to the level of personal relationships. Akin demonstrates on the screen what social geographer Doreen Massey argues in her book Space, Place, and Gender: that local spaces and places must always be considered in the global context and in terms of relationships. Space, she writes, is created out of the vast intricacies, the incredible complexities, of the interlocking and the non-interlocking, and the networks of relations at every scale from local to global.196 Space is always a relational construct. Borders shift, routes fluctuate, and the dimensions of a space or a place are reconfigured as people travel into and out of it. Indeed, all local places in Auf der anderen Seite are implicated in a web of global politics and international relationships. 197 This
Fatih Akin arbeitet sich in den inneren Zirkel der europischen Autorenfilmer vor, EPD Film 24.10 (2007): 28-30. And: Maha El Hissy, Transnationaler Grenzverkehr in Fatih Akins Gegen die Wand und Auf der anderen Seite, Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migratrion, hrsg. Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009) 179.
196

Doreen Massey, Politics and Space/Time, Space, Place, and Gender (1994; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) 265.
197

Not only are the local and global intertwined, according to Massey, but the inherently unstable nature of space indicates that it can never be considered separately from time. Any one space will be different at different points in time, as the configuration of people that construct it changes. Massey develops the term space-time to describe what she considers to be a truer account of space than previously discussed.

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configuration lends each local place in the film an element of familiarity for the characters travelling through it. As Maha El Hissy argues, Das Verschwimmen der Grenzen scheint die Mobilitt der Figuren zu unterstreichen und lsst sie mehrere Heimaten entdecken. . . . Alle Protagonisten wissen sich sowohl in Deutschland als auch in der Trkei zu bewegen und destruieren damit das Gefhl der Fremdheit.198 Indeed, all characters in this film are seasoned travelers who cross borders easily and who find familiarity in the foreign.199 This interplay of the local and the global is established in the films opening sequence, in which Nejat drives up to a filling station in rural Turkey for gas and a snack. Music by a local musician, Kazim Koyuncu, plays as he enters, and the gas station attendant informs Nejat that the beloved national icon has died of cancer resulting from Chernobyl. The convergence of the local (the local musician Koyuncu), national (Koyuncu as a national icon), and international (repercussions of Chernobyl)is established as the films paradigm for treating space. The films major theme is established in this scene as well. As Nejat enters the gas station, he and the station attendant wish each other a happy Bayram, referring to the national holiday that

Massey 264-5. Indeed, the mobility of the people who construct a space is key to the ever-changing character of that space-time. All characters in the film, whether German, Turkish, or Turkish-German, have a sense of identity that transcends the local and incorporate a sense of fluctuating global politics in their space-times.
198

El Hissy 186: The blurring of borders seems to underscore the mobility of the character and allows them to discover many homelands. . . . All protagonists know how to operate in both Germany and Turkey and thereby destroy any feeling of foreignness. (my translation)
199

Indeed, all of the characters in the film have travelled before. Whereas the Turks in this film have come to Germany for pragmatic reasonsto work or for political reasonsthe Germans in the film travel for education or to gain worldly experience. At the point in which Lotte meets Ayten, she has just returned from India, and we learn later in the film that Susanne had hitchhiked to India in her youth as well.

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celebrates unity across secular and religious differences. The reference to the holiday establishes the scenes point in time, as well as the films main theme of interconnected human relationships.200 At this initial point in the film, we are still unaware that Nejat is searching for his father. When this sequence is repeated some three-quarters through the film, the intimacy of familial relations is added to these themes of mobility, multidimensional space, and the reconciliation of differences. The viewer familiar with Akins films expects Auf der anderen Seite to operate at the cultural interstices of Turkey and Germany, a framework that focuses his work. Indeed, this framework is established in the first scene of Yeters Tod (Yeters Death), in which Nejats father Ali walks through the streets of Bremen. Ali is recognizable as a Turkish man of the Gastarbeiter (guest worker) generation, and Bremen is established firmly through shots of the famous Roland and the statue of the musicians of Bremen, the cathedral of Bremen, and, as if those landmarks do not suffice, on signs at the peaceful May Day demonstration that Ali passes in the street. The local specificities of Bremen are relativized in a later scene, however, when we witness a May Day demonstration also taking place in Istanbul. In contrast to Bremens demonstration, this one soon turns violent and Ayten must flee the country. Temporal simultaneity both connects and contrasts Bremen and Istanbul, as well as parallels Ali and Ayten as characters.

200

As Rob Burns points out, the films title, meaning on the other side is antithetical in many ways to the films major theme. He states that rather than thematizing separation and otherness, the film itself frequently links difference and commonality. Rob Burns, On the Streets and on the Road: Identity in Transit in Turkish-German Travelogues on Screen, New Cinema: Journal of Contemporary Film 7.1 (2009): 11-26. 18.

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Sex and ethnicity become linked themes in the scene in which Ali visits the prostitute Jessy. As he strolls down a street in the red light district, a woman in a blonde wig and red pleather dress, perched in a street-level window, catches his eye. When he asks her in German if she does it French (i.e., offers fellatio), she answers in a manner fitting larger themes of the film: French, Italian, Greek. Ill do it international for you.201 Ali is delighted at the prospect of such international pleasures and enters her room. Once inside, however, Jessy puts on Turkish music, ostensibly a music that would add to her exoticism for the European customer. However, it prompts Ali to recognize Jessy as a Turkish woman, which causes him embarrassment. The culturally ambiguous Jessy is actually named Yeter. The thrill of international pleasures is ruined (although Ali still accepts fellatio from Yeter) by cultural recognition and by the attendant patriarchal social parameters that regulate gender relations for Ali. In this sequence, Ali and Yeter exhibit different degrees of cultural intelligibility mediated by their relative integration into German society. Ali is intelligible as a Turkish man, but his linguistic ability in German allows him relative ease of mobility and purchasing power within the city of Bremen. Yeter, on the other hand, markets herself as ethnically ambiguous and does it international for the cinematic audience as well when she dons the blond wig and prostitutes attire.202 It turns out, however, that Yeters

201

All German quotes from Auf der anderen Seite appear in this chapter in English translation from the subtitles.
202

However, as David Gramling points out, Yeters persona Jessy is a performance of both the national and the international. He notes that while promising to do it international for you, she is actually dressed in the colors of the German flagblack knee-high boots, a read pleather top, and a gold wig. Indeed, Jessy is a performance of international pleasure for a German -oriented clientele. David Gramling, On

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international performance is not only her marketing strategy, but a protective measure as well. When two Turkish religious fundamentalists overhear her speaking Turkish with Ali, they threaten her with disfigurement for disgracing Turks and Muslims. The same patriarchal conventions that cause Ali embarrassment for a sexual rendezvous with Yeter come into play in a much more dangerous form with these two men. Indeed, Akin consistently criticizes religious fundamentalist patriarchy in his films, first in Kurz und Schmerzlos (1998) and then later as a motivating principle in Gegen die Wand (2004). Akin frames Yeters prostitution not as a moral failing, but as her means of providing her daughter with money for education. Indeed, her motivations are similar to those of Ali some decades before when he moved to Germany as a guest worker. Yeter endures threats motivated by a patriarchal system that is losing validity in an age of multiculturalism and global gender politics, and those who judge her harshly in the film are coded as dangerous and narrow-minded. If Ali conjures associations with the Turkish-German economic partnership of the previous generation, Yeters daughter Ayten brings more current international politics to the film.203 Ayten first appears on the screen as she takes part in a violent May Day demonstration in Istanbul, the consequences of which soon prompt her to flee Turkey. She articulates her political position in a later scene in which she is confronted by Susanne, her lover Lottes mother, in Susannes kitchen in Hamburg. Ayten has
the Other Side of Monolinguism: Fatih Akins Linguistic Turn(s), The German Quarterly 83.3 (2010): 353-372.
203

By contrast, the second-generation Turkish-German character Nejat represents a bridge between German and Turkish cultures and the ongoing relationship that resulted from the guest worker program of the 1960s. This bridging is symbolized by Nejats act of commuting between Hamburg, where he is a professor of German literature, and Bremen, where his Turkish father lives.

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introduced herself to Lotte and Susanne under a false name, Gl, and in the scene following her first night in Susannes house, Susanne confronts Gl about her politics. She explains to Susanne that she belongs to a political resistance group in Turkey: We are fighting for hundred percent human rights and hundred percent freedom of speech and hundred percent social education. In Turkey just people with money can get education. Susanne expresses the opinion that Turkeys problems will be solved simply by entering the European Union, and Ayten retorts, Who is leading the European Union? England. France. And Germany. And Italy. And Spain. These countries are all colonial countries. Its globalization and we are fighting against it. Ayten not only has a pointed political perspective regarding her own country; she views her domestic political situation from a global perspective. Susanne is less willing to take this perspective, comfortable instead to sit inside her house and repeat her Euro-centric claim without further reflection. Global politics enters the intimate space of the home kitchen in this scene and also becomes the cause for familial intimacy. Rather than engaging with Ayten on the issue, Susanne treats Ayten as though she were a rebellious teenager, suggesting that Ayten is only interested in fighting and not the cause. When Ayten curses her, Susanne tells her with parental firmness: I dont want you to talk like that in my house. You can talk like that in your house. Ok? Later, we see Ayten sitting on the steps of Susannes house, crying. When Lotte attempts to comfort her, Ayten asks: Can you help me to find my mother? The camera cuts to Susanne watching the scene from a window. The confrontation was not solely about global politics, but also about the emotional and

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spatial distance between Ayten and her mother, Yeter. This fight with Susanne is one that she might have had with her own mother. If all spaces are relational, as per spatial theory since Henri Lefebvre, then it can also be argued that in Akins film, relationships are spatially configured. In this film, love bridges global distances, a theme made explicit in the love relationship between Lotte and Ayten. Few films present same-sex relationships in such a matter-of-fact manner, without treating issues specific to gay/lesbian/queer Otherness. Akins presentation of a lesbian relationship is not gratuitous or titillating, but rather, is central to the negotiation of multiple other relationships in the film. It also contributes to the themes of border crossing, global mobility, and intergenerational familial relationships. The intensity of the relationship between Ayten and Lotte, as well as the films themes of border crossing and unity across difference, are emphasized in the lighting and editing of the scene in which the two fall in love. In this scene, Ayten and Lotte dance together at a club. The scene is dimly lit with amber lighting, a tone between the Aytens dark brown skin and Lottes pale white hue, thus washing out their difference. The music is Turkish pop, a fusion music that brings together the foreign and the domestic. In a series of extreme close-ups in slow motion, the two drink, dance face to face, and share a joint. The intimacy of the close shots in slow motion, juxtaposed with the music at normal tempo, give the viewer a double perspective, that is, both the sense of being a third party to the encounter and of sharing the womens slowed and distorted perspectives caused by drugs, alcohol, and growing passion for one another. We also experience multiple temporalities in this scene, as we are anchored visually to the slow-motion

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perspectives of the two women falling in love and aurally to the music at normal tempo. The camera then cuts from these intimate close-ups in slow motion to wider shots in normal time, extricating the two perspectives from one another and forcing the viewer to oscillate between them. The scene cuts to Lotte and Aytens first kiss, which is framed in a similar manner. In this shot, the young women are seated at a table among a crowd, positioned toward the back of the frame, gazing at one another. The camera zooms in slowly past the others in the crowd as Ayten strokes Lottes face, and they kiss in slow motion. The zoom stops at a medium shot of the two in a breathless embrace. The women gaze at one another, in close shot and counter-shot from positions similar to Lottes and then Aytens perspective. Just as in the previous sequence, the viewer is given initially a third-person perspective as the camera zeroes in on the lovers from afar. The viewer then adopts a perspective that more closely mimics the womens gazes in the shot/counter shot. The viewer both participates in the romantic exchange and observes it from afar as a natural part of the social setting. The relationship between Ayten and Lotte soon becomes complicated when Ayten is extradited to Turkey, but their love relationship is the most emotionally unproblematic of all the relationships in the film. In the following scene, we share Susannes gaze out her bedroom window as Lotte and Ayten arrive home the next morning, giggling and stumbling out of a taxi. From an unmotivated perspective, we then share an intimate moment as the two eat breakfast in the kitchen, giggling and hugging, and watch as Lotte steals a kiss before they rush off to the bedroom. However uncomplicated their emotions

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for one another may be, their relationship has repercussions for those around them. Following the breakfast scene, we watch as Susanne is left to clean up the dirty dishes they have left behind in their blind excitement to go to bed together. This scene foreshadows events to come. However, even for the two, the rush cannot last long. In bed together, Ayten reveals to Lotte that she has introduced herself under a false name and that Gl is only the name on her forged passport. Like her mother, Ayten has assumed a false identity in order to survive in Germany. When Ayten is arrested and extradited to Istanbul, the love relationship between Lotte and Ayten becomes cause for Lotte, and later Susanne, to travel to Turkey. It also causes the first emotional separation between Lotte and Susanne. When Lotte calls home to tell her mother she must stay in Istanbul for at least half a year to work for Aytens release, Susanne declares that she will no longer support her daughter financially. Lotte has taken her mothers generosity for granted up to this point. However, when Lotte is found dead, Susanne regrets breaking with her daughter and travels to Istanbul to mourn her death and take over her daughters mission. This is a transformative event for Susanne. Up to this point in the film, she has been anchored to the interior spaces of her house. Her contact with the outside world has been restricted to her gaze out the window, which does not extend past the street in front of her house. In Istanbul, by contrast, she goes through a metamorphosis, inhabiting first a hotel room, then taking to the streets as she adopts her daughters mission.204 Her daughters death has motivated her to leave the

204

Two scenes in particular depict Susannes transformation as it takes place in two different spaces in Istanbul. In the first scene, we watch Susanne in a hotel room from a high-angle perspective similar to that of a surveillance camera. The placement of the camera distorts the angles of the room and creates shadows

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interior spaces of her home and the comfort of her Euro-centric opinions. Susanne signals that she is now prepared to pass through other spaces and consider other perspectives by wandering the streets and by reaching out to help Ayten. It is unclear how long Susanne will remain in Istanbul, as Susanne has relinquished the permanence of her house for a more transitory existence. It the scene following Aytens release from prison, it becomes clear why the lesbian relationship is necessary for the construction of the films themes. This is a film about personal connections across global distances, as well as familial connections across generations. What is more, all of the emotionally intimate relationships in the film are same-sex relationships. Mothers and daughters must connect and reconnect; father and son as well. The lesbian relationship is only one same-sex relationship among many. Ayten has lost her mother and Susanne her daughter. In order to replace these lost loved ones, Ayten and Susanne must connect with one another, and this only functions if Lotte has a deep connection with another woman. Lotte has served as the surrogate of Ayten in
at the top of the frame. We watch as Susanne moves about the room, shaking her arms wildly and throwing her body against the floor in grief. At points she is hardly visible in the shadows of the room, though we continue to hear her sobs. The scene is dark and quiet, and we can only hear Susanne crying and a faint buzz from the street below. In a parallel scene, Susanne has accompanied Nejat to his apartment, wishing to visit the room her daughter had inhabited. In contrast to the dark hotel room, this one is painted white, except for a crisp yellow at the top of a window, and bright daylight pours in. After sleeping, Susanne wakes up to a vision of Lotte. From Susannes perspective we see Lotte standing in the white, smiling at her mother. The camera cuts to a more neutral position, and we see that no one is there. Susanne slowly realizes that she was dreaming and lies back down in the bed. Read in tandem, the two scenes suggest an evolution in Susannes mourning. In the hotel scene, she is hopelessly alone in her grief. The audience views her only from the detached perspective of a surveillance camera. We are incapable of achieving her perspective in that scene, or perhaps even she has the sense of watching herself from above. Moreover, the darkness of the room and its red tones suggest that she is dealing with Lottes d eath as a lossof her own blood. The room at Nejats apartment, on the other hand, is white and heavenly. We see Susanne not from the disassociated perspective of the surveillance camera, but from the perspective a third party in the room. She is calm and almost ecstatic at the sight of her daughter. Lotte stands before her as a heavenly messenger, and Susanne is beginning to incorporate her daughter into her sense of self. This scene also parallels another moment in which we have seen a ghost in this film. In an earlier shot, Nejat rides the bus while on his quest to find Ayten after Yeters death. Yeters ghost rides with him.

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the political resistance group, and Ayten now serves as the surrogate of Lotte to Susanne.205 The themes of unity across cultural difference and of intergenerational familial relationships come full circle in the final scenes of the film. In one scene, Nejat tells Susanne the story of Ibrahims willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail for God. Susanne listens carefully to Nejat and recognizes the story as that of Abraham and Isaac. She remarks that the story exists for both Muslims and Christians. Indeed, this ancient story bridges cultural differences and is the appropriate story for the holiday Bayram. Susanne asks Nejat whether his father is still alive, and Nejat feels remorse for having disowned Ali. He resolves to travel to Turkey and reconnect with his father. The film ends, however, with a degree of uncertainty as to whether these intergenerational relationships are reaffirmed. After having reconciled, Susanne and Ayten embrace as though mother and daughter. By contrast, it is unclear in the final sequence whether Ali is still alive. He has already suffered a heart attack earlier in the film. Indeed, if Ali is dead, then every character remaining in the film will have lost either a parent or child. If his father is alive, the theme of reconnection will be fulfilled. Akin leaves both possibilities open. The repeated sequence in which Nejat enters the filling station near Trabzon gains poignancy once we understand his purpose for

205

Of course, several opposite-sex relationships also appear in the film, though only one of them is actually a sexual relationship. There are only two sexual relationships at all in the film, and the violence in Ali and Yeters marriage of convenience can only be contrasted with the tenderness between Lotte and Ayten. Casual relationships, such as the acquaintance of Nejat to both Lotte and Susanne, are also presented, though without the intimacy of the same-sex relationships in the film. On the diegetic level, the film could have been configured differently to accommodate a heterosexual relationship for either Lotte or Ayten, but Akin constructs a story in which the lesbian relationship is necessary and natural for the completion of its themes.

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travelling. Not only do the international, national, and local converge in the multidimensional space of the filling station, but the themes of love and death add new dimensions in this later iteration of the sequence. The beloved singer Kazim Koyuncu is dead; Nejats father might be as well. In the final shots of the film, Nejat arrives at the seashore, where his father is reported to have been fishing. With his back turned to the camera, Nejat looks out at the vast sea stretching into the horizon. He stands for a minute and then sits, as though waiting. The films dedication, In memory of Andreas Thiel, appears at the top of the screen as though to comment extradiagetically on Alis condition. The credits roll over this rather serene shot, and the title of the film, Auf der anderen Seite, appears before the film fades to black. The title of the film, Auf der anderen Seite, translates literally to on the other side, a phrase that in both German and English is loaded with metaphorical possibilities. The other side can mean death; it can refer to either Turkey or Germany in this film, depending on ones position on the globe. As an idiomatic phrase in German, it can mean coexisting possibilities (on the one hand x, on the other hand y).206 It also defines a parameter by which a space can be conceived of; just as a person can only conceive of the self in contrast to the other, a space can only exist here if there is another space on the other side. By implication then, that which constitutes the other side also is central to the constitution of the here. Death is central to the conception of life; Ali is

206

Gramling 353.

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central to Nejats conception of himself. The queer and the heterosexual are entwined. Other and self are bridged by this linguistic formulation. The final shot of the film unpacks these multiple meanings of auf der anderen Seite. Having set the film in motion from the very beginning, Nejat has finally settled on a beach, patiently awaiting his father in the still frame. The imagery of heaven is strong as Nejat gazes out over a white-gray horizonless sea, and death is just as much a possibility as Alis return. As Maha El Hissy writes, Bis zum Filmende sind nicht nur die Grenzen zwischen den verschiedenen Welten, Nationen und Generationen, sondern auch zwischen Leben und Tod berbrckt worden.207 In this moment, the distinction between life and death is immaterial. What bridges the here with the other side, whether metaphysical or geographical, is human connection. Auf der anderen Seite is a film about the possibility of intimacy in an age of heightened mobility, and Akin demonstrates that the most intimate of relationships can motivate the traversal of global distances. Conclusion: The Centrality of Queer Space As evidenced by this chapters discussions of queer in Judith Hermanns Sonja, Angela Kraus Die berfliegerin, and Fatih Akins Auf der anderen Seite, queer can appear in various ways in literary and filmic texts and on different narrative levels. Queer spaces can appear in equally various forms: conjured by the linguistic utterance of a gendered pronoun, stumbled onto unexpectedly by the unwitting traveler, or created by two people of the same sex dancing together in public. In Sonja, the party and the
207

El Hissy 186: Up to the end of the film, the borders between not only different worlds, nations, and generations are bridged, but also those between life and death. (my translation)

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charged space of Sonjas apartment become queer to the narrator after Sonja simultaneously queers and heterosexualizes the narrator by assigning her/him a male gender. In Die berfliegerin, a space marked as queer in a gay ghetto in San Francisco transforms the straight narrators concept of singular identity to one in which a multiplicity of identities is possible. In Auf der anderen Seite, queer is normalized, and a hetero-queer space is produced, when Lotte and Ayten dance together at a club. In each of these instances, queer space is represented as a place for positive transformations, and likewise, queerness itself transforms spaces. In Sonja, the habitation of a queer space changes the narrators perspective on relationships. After being queered, the narrator experiences an emotional intimacy with Sonja that he never experiences with Verena. There is a melancholy to the heterosexual space they attempt to inhabit together, but they find their happiness nonetheless in transitional spacesin the streets, bars, restaurants, and lakes they visit together. When the narrator chooses heteronormativity at the end of the story by marrying Verena, it is the wrong choice. The narrator has been transformed by Sonjas own queerness and her queering of him; the queer relationship was the happy one. In Die berfliegerin, the narrator makes the exhilarating discovery that her own identity need not be determined by her historical and geographical situation, but rather, that she can determine her identity and change it at will. Having destroyed the relics of her own family history in the first part of the story, she embraces the secondhand clothing and the possibilities for new identities they allow her in the second half. The second-hand clothing store provides her the space, and the transvestites the model, to make that discovery. In Auf der anderen Seite, Lotte and Ayten fall in love in a space

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that allows for a multiplicity of sexual expressions. Queer and straight are not so opposed in the space of the club; nor are they opposed in the larger world of the film. Lotte is transformed by a relationship that gives her life direction, and in this film in which all characters are linked in one way or another, her transformation has effects on all those around her, particularly her mother. In Auf der anderen Seite, same-sex relationshipseither between lovers or between family membersprovide the paradigm for exploring larger themes of human intimacy. Queer spaces exist explicitly in all three of these texts, and they are the sites for negotiating identity for straight, gay, lesbian, and queer characters. Queer is demonstrated in these texts to be central to everyday experience, and not just for LGBTQ people. Queer spaces are clothing stores, apartments, clubs, streets, bars, i.e., any of those spaces where we make acquaintances and build relationships. These texts demonstrate that queer exists not at the margins in contemporary representation. Rather, as the narrator in Die berfliegerin avers, queer truth lies in the middle.

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Chapter 3: Queer Heterosexuality and the Spaces of Grotesque/Abject Encounter Through the proliferation of queer and sexuality studies, it has become increasingly apparent that heterosexuality can no longer be considered a default, negative, or neutral sexuality, any more than it can be assumed to be the right or natural one. Rather, heterosexuality must be understood as one type of sexuality existing alongside others and as having its own positive (rather than neutral) characteristics. In light of this paradigm shift that disputes the presumed neutrality of heterosexuality, new questions arise for considering its aesthetic representations. How can aesthetic productions depict heterosexuality as a distinct sexual identity? How does contemporary literature portray heterosexuality in a way that goes beyond the conventions of erotica or of the traditional love story? How can literature create the critical distance required for readers, regardless of sexual orientation, to perceive a textual heterosexual relationship as worthy of new consideration? In this chapter, I turn to works by two authors who provide their readers with a critical lens through which to examine heterosexuality anew. Emine Sevgi zdamar and Bodo Kirchhoff employ the aesthetic categories of the grotesque and the abject, respectively, in order to break reader identification with their protagonists and thus to depict heterosexuality from an alienating point of view. Rather than encouraging the reader to identify with the characters in a romantic or sexually titillating way, these authors view heterosexual desire from the outside. The protagonists in both authors works travel and are highly mobile, incapable or perhaps unwilling to settle into any one particular space for very long. Their

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relationships with spacewhich can be described as flexible and free from commitmentclosely resemble their relationships with sexual partners. Sex, for these characters, can be fulfilling only when it occurs during (or with the possibility of) travel, and settling, either in the emotional or spatial sense, is stifling to them. For both zdamar and Kirchhoff, mobility is essential for their protagonists sense of sexual emancipation, though in different ways. zdamars protagonists traverse space in order to maximize the number of sexual partners they can connect with and to escape the patriarchal gender roles that dominate in the places in which they find themselves. For Kirchhoffs protagonists, by contrast, mobility means avoiding emotional attachment in places. When Kirchhoffs protagonists settle into spaces or places, they either have difficulty making heterosexual attachments, form heterosexual attachments that soon lead to their own or others destruction, or make attachments that do not operate along heterosexual lines. While zdamars characters move forward in an exploratory manner, seeking as many connections in as many spaces as possible, Kirchhoffs characters expell themselves from spaces where heterosexual encounters seem threatening to their sense of integrity. Kirchhoff and zdamar bring to literature a unique expression of the ambivalences inherent in heterosexuality: the attraction to and simultaneous anxiety about the Other (who is perhaps not so different after all), the interrelatedness of attraction and repulsion, and the need for the individual to retain his/her individuality while submitting to and merging with this Other. By thematizing deep-seated

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ambivalences that trouble their protagonists, these authors move beyond the conventional narratives of love stories, erotica, or straight-forward tales of sexual liberation. In this chapter, I first examine the ways in which zdamar employs the grotesque in her breakthrough prose work, the short stories Mutterzunge and Grovaterzunge, to mediate the narrators experiences of living in a foreign counry and to undermine the patriarchal structures that govern the narrators love relationship. I then briefly discuss the ways in which zdamars narrators in her subsequent autofictional (autiobiographically fictional) works traverse space in an exploratory manner.208 In these works, I argue, gender identity based on place is stifling, whereas sexual identity based on mobility is empowering. Moreover, encounters with grotesque bodies aid zdamars narrators in their search for sexual identity. In the second part of this chapter, I examine Kirchhoffs employment of the abject to depict his main characters anxieties toward both women and places in his larger body of work. I examine the need of these protagonists to traverse space in order to escape places that are inhabited by women, as well as their preference in later works for places in which connections with men are possible. I demonstrate how the abject changes character and function in his later works, facilitating tight homosocial bonds between men. Finally, I evaluate the implications of the grotesque and the abject for the sexual liberation of both women and men in the oeuvre of

208

Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf situates zdamars oevre within a tradition of authors who problematize the ostensible documentary function of autobiography. She writes that although the form autofiction was first established in the 1970s and is exemplified by Roland Barthess Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), J. W. Goethe had already experimented with the distinction between authenticity and fiction in Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811-1833). Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Autofiktion oder: Autobiographie nach der Autobiographie. Goethe Barthes zdamar, Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur 1. Grenzen der Identitt und der Fiktionalitt, hrsg. Ulrich Breuer und Beatrice Sandberg (Mnchen: Iudicium, 2006) 353-368.

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both authors, as well as their effectiveness in depicting heterosexuality as a positive sexual identity that can be characterized by ambivalence. Grotesque Sexuality and Empowering Mobility in zdamars Works Since the publication of her first novel, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei/hat zwei Tren/aus einer kam ich rein/ aus der anderen ging ich raus, in 1992, Emine Sevgi zdamar has been celebrated as a leading voice in Turkish-German Migrantenliteratur (immigrants literature).209 She has been hailed for her linguistic experimentation;210 her depictions of Turkish guest workers, artists, and intellectuals in Germany since the 1960s; her literary engagement with both Turkish and German political history, and specifically womens narratives within those histories;211 and her brave use of her own life story (if

209

Monika Shafi traces the recent trends in designating Turkish-German literature, first as Gastarbeiterliteratur in the 1970s, then as Auslnderliteratur in the 1980s and 1990s, and currently as Migrantenliteratur. I use the term Migrantenliteratur here as the most current term, and not necessarily as the term that would have been used to describe zdamars works earlier in her career. Monika Shafi, Joint Ventures: Identity Politics and Travel in Novels by Emine Sevgi zdamar and Zafer enocak, Comparative Literature Studies 40.2 (2003): 193-214. See also the discussion by Hendrik Blumentrath, et. al. of the term transnational with regard to Turkish-German literature and film. Blumentrath, u. a., Transkulturalitt. Trkisch-deutsche Konstellationen in Literatur und Film (Mnster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2007) 58-59.
210

For an overview of zdamars narrative strategies, see: Eva-Maria Thne, Mundhure und Wortmakler. berlegungen zu Texten von Emine Sevgi zdamar, Gedchtnis und Identitt. Die deutsche Literatur nach der Vereinigung, hrsg. Fabrizio Cambi (Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 2008) 305-319.
211

Agnes C. Mueller, Female Stories of Migration in Emine Sevgi zdamars Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei and in Toni Morrisons Beloved,Colloquia Germanica. Internationale Zeitschrift fr Germanistik 36.2 (2003): 303-314. Kader Konuk, Taking on German and Turkish History: Emine Sevgi zdamars Seltsame Sterne, Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 6 (2007): 232-256. B. Venkat Mani, Slouching Histories, Lurking Memories: Emine Sevgi zdamars Seltsame Sterne Starren zur Erde, Cosmopolitical Claims. Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007) 87-117. Regula Mller, Ich war Mdchen, war ich Sultanin: Weitgeffnete Augen betrachten trkische Frauengeschichte(n). Zum Karawanserei-Roman von Emine Sevgi zdamar, Denn du tanzt auf einem Seil. Positionen deutschsprachiger MigranInnenliteratur, hrsg. Sabine Fischer und Moray McGowan (Tbingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1997) 133-149.

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only loosely) as the basis for her autobiographical fiction.212 She has been lauded in feminist scholarship in German Studies for creating strong female characters who can navigate the precarious circumstances of being both foreign in Germany and a woman in patriarchal Turkish culture,213 as well as by Turkish German Studies for dismantling Orientalist stereotypes and normalizing Islamic culture for a Western audience.214 Finally, she has proven to be the ultimate Grenzgnger (border crosser), having spent her adult life writing about her travels between Turkey and Germany, between East and West Germany, and within Europe. In zdamars works, the body is central to the production of language, the traversal of space, and the development of sexual identity. What is more, this body is

212

Azade Seyhan likens the writing of autobiography to the act of unveiling. She states that until the 1980s, womens autobiographical voices were largely absent from Turkish literature, p recisely for its implications of exposure. Azade Seyhan, Scheherazades Daughters: The Thousand and One Tales of Turkish-German Women Writers, Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe, ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 230-248.
213

See: Irmgard Ackermann, Mit einem Visum fr das Leben. Formen weiblichen Schreibens am Beispi el dreier Trkischer Autorinnen, Migration und Interkulturalitt in neueren literarischen Texten, hrsg. Aglaia Blioumi (Mnchen: Iudicium, 2002) 147-155. Mahmut Karakus, Differenzen in der Frauengestaltung der interkulturellen Literatur: S. Scheinhardt und E. S. zdamar im Vergleich, Differenzen? Interkulturelle Probleme und Mglichkeiten in Sprache, Literatur und Kultur, hrsg. Ernest W.B. Hess-Lttich, u. a. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009) 409-418.
214

See: Margaret Littler, Profane und religise Intensitten: Die islamische Kultur im Werk von Emine Sevgi zdamar und Feridun Zaimolu, Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration , hrsg. Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009) 143-154. Nilfer Kuruyazici, Religise Wertvorstellungen in literarischen Texten und ihre Rolle bei interkulturellen Begegnungen (untersucht am Beispiel von E. Sevgi zdamars Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei), Differenzen? Interkulturelle Probleme und Mglichkeiten in Sprache, Literatur und Kultur, hrsg. Ernest W.B. Hess-Lttich, u. a. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009) 431-440. Azade Seyhan, Scheherazades Daughers: The Thousand and One Tales of Turkish-German Women Writers, Writing new Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe , ed. Gisela BrinkerGabler and Sidonie Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 230-248. Annette Wierschke, Auf den Schnittstellen kultureller Grenzen tanzend: Aysel zakin und Emine Sevgi zdamar, Denn du tanzt auf einem Seil. Positionen deutschsprachiger MigranInnenliteratur, hrsg. Sabine Fischer und Moray McGowan (Tbingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1997) 179-195.

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often a grotesque one that serves as the site for negotiating the protagonists identities vis--vis a foreign Germany. The protagonists describe their own bodies as animallike, as resembling for example a camel or a bird. They meet other female guest workers whose eyes bulge after working long hours in a radio factory and men whose penises seem to live and breathe on their own. The protagonists sexual education, moreover, is itself a grotesque endeavor, as older family members pass down stories of, for example, explosive first orgasms and flatulent spiritual leaders and describe genitals with euphemisms. As adults, these narrators travel to Germany, where they make love with men who have owl faces or a limp. By thematizing the grotesque body, zdamar creates an effective aesthetic mode for depicting the often bewildering experiences of entering adulthood, of first sexual encounters, and of living in a foreign country. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the grotesque has been assigned competing definitions within scholarship on literature and art, variously relating to its similarity with the absurd, the arabesque, caricature, the uncanny, the carnivalesque, and the ridiculous. Modern definitions of the grotesque derive from Wolfgang Kaysers Das Groteske. Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (1957). Here Kayer describes the grotesque as an aesthetic category that expresses a characters entfremdete Welt (estranged world).215 According to Kayser, the grotesque appears in literature and art

215

Wolfgang Kayser, Das Groteske. Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling Verlag, 1957) 198. The word grotesque stems from the Italian word grotta or cave and originally described a genre of antique art discovered in Roman caves at the end of the fifteenth century. This art had turned away from the previous conventions of depicting the world realistically and instead featured fantastic creatures that were hybrids of plants, animals, and people. Moreover, this art also moved away from symmetrical and realistic proportions to create distorted, often comical scenes. See Kayser 2025.

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when the everyday world suddenly becomes frighteningly foreign and thus alienating. For him, the most important dynamic of the grotesque is the interplay of the real and the fantastic, in which the latter intrudes upon the former and makes reality unfathomable. This dynamic disrupts our notion of what we understand to be true, important, and real, and thus reveals the real world itself to have been absurd or fantastic all along.216 According to Kayser, the grotesque necessarily combines not only reality and fantasy, but also horror and comedy. It involves distortion, hybridity, and hyperbole, both on the diegetic level and on the level of narration, and the most common motifs include monsters, particularly those that combine the human and animal, as well as deformed and distorted bodies. Moreover, Kayser emphasizes the importance of laughter for the grotesque. For Kayser, demonic laughterlaughter that expresses both humor and horroris a defining element of the grotesque.217 In his work Rabelais and his World (1965), Mikhail Bakhtin departs from Kaysers model to develop a paradigm for the grotesque human body.218 According to Bakhtin, the grotesque body is concerned with transgressing its own material confines
216

Peter Fu departs from this element in Kaysers discussion, arguing that the grotesque can be a medium of cultural change because it exposes many of what he considers to be important absurdities in society that are otherwise left unexamined. See: Peter Fu, Das Groteske. Ein Medium des kulturellen Wandels (Kln: Bhlau Verlag, 2001).
217

See Kaysers chapter Zusammenfassung. Versuch einer Wesensbestimmung des Grotesken 193-203. Laughter as an element of the grotesque is contested in the scholarship. Both Lee Byron Jennings and Christian Thomsen argue that Kayser places too much emphasis on horror in his description of the grotesque. For them, the grotesque aligns much more closely with the absurd and has more of a comical effect than a horrific one. See: Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963) 6. Christian Thomsen, Das Groteske und die Englische Literatur (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977). 142-161.
218

Bakhtin bases his concept on a reading of characters in various works by the sixteenth century French author Franois Rabelais, hence the title of the work. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans Hlne Iswolsky (1965; Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984) 303-367.

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and becoming part of the world surrounding it. This body has distorted and exaggerated features, particularly associated with the face (with often oversized nose and ears, gaping mouth, and/or bulging eyes), the belly, and the genitals. Furthermore, the grotesque body is linked with motifs such as excessive eating and drinking, sexual intercourse, defecation, urination, childbirth, and death, that is, those bodily functions that transgress the limits between the body and the world.219 The grotesque defies the modern notion of the individual as an independent entity within his/her environment, instead providing the author a means to view the subject as an integrated part of his/her world. Finally, Bakhtin amends Kaysers characterization of grotesque laughter as demonic, arguing instead that the grotesque body evokes laughter as a means of conquering fear. Rather than harboring both the humorous and the horrible, laughter, according to Bakhtin, is a defense against the horror of the grotesque.220

219

Bakhtin furthermore describes the relationship between the body and its world in topographical terms. He discusses a dichotomy between the upper stratum, which includes the head and mind, and the lower stratum, which includes the material body, and particularly the belly, bowels, and genitals. The upper stratum is connected to transcendence and the larger cosmos, whereas the lower stratum is associated with death and the underworld. The grotesque seeks to flatten these two strata, according to Bakhtin, as dualisms like death and childbirth are revealed to be two sides to the same coin and sexual potency becomes linked to all body parts (for example, the oversized nose becomes phallic). Bakhtin differentiates the grotesque body from what he calls the new body cannon, which in all its historic variations and different genres, presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual. That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off (when a body transgresses its limits and a new one begins) is eliminated, hidden, or moderated. All the orifices of the body are closed (320). This new body canon is one that delineates the individual body from both other bodies and the world and is concerned instead with privacy and psychological integrity. Bakhtin 303-367.
220

Bakhtin 336. Other theorists build from the concepts developed by Kayser and Bakhtin, describing the grotesque as a humorous and highly visual aesthetic that has its effect because the reader can easily imagine distortion and hyperbole. According to Lee Byron Jennings, the grotesque is most effective when human faces and forms come into play: The impression of humanness must not be too strong, the distortion not s o great that it obliterates all traces of the human figure; but, on the other hand, it must show a drastic departure from the elements of human appearance and personality that we commonly experience (9). The grotesque figure is most often a hybrid one that combines the human with animal or plant (Kayser 197 and Jennings 9). Additionally, according to Oliver Georgi, the grotesque finds its best articulation in travel

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In her debut prose work, a collection of short stories titled Mutterzunge (1990), zdamar establishes the grotesque as an aesthetic mode for exploring the themes that will shape her work over the next two decades: love and sexual desire, freedom within and against a restrictive patriarchal tradition, the traversing of spatial boundaries, and the exploration of the body. The first two short stories in the collection, Mutterzunge and Grovaterzunge, which one can read in tandem, are first person narratives of a Turkish woman living in divided Berlin. Far away from her family and home country, the narrator laments feelings of alienation from her mother tongue, Turkish, and seeks to reconnect with her native language by learning Arabic. However, her search for her Grossvaterzunge (grandfather tongue) soon becomes sexually and emotionally charged when she falls in love with her Arabic teacher. She must eventually choose between learning Arabic (and thus subordinating herself within the patriarchal system that her teacher adheres to) and her freedom to move through Berlin.221 For zdamar, language is part of a sensual, embodied, and topographically situated human experience, and the opening sentences of the short story Mutterzunge indicate this deep interconnection of body, language, and space: In meiner Sprache heit Zunge: Sprache. Zunge hat keine Knochen, wohin man sie dreht, dreht sie sich dorthin. Ich sa mit meiner gedrehten Zunge in dieser Stadt Berlin. Negercafe, Araber zu Gast,
literature, in which characters face the foreign Other who is both similar to and different from him/herself. Oliver Georgi, Das Groteske in Literatur und Werbung (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2003) 10.
221

The other two stories in the collection Karagz in Alamania, Schwarzauge in Deutschland and Karriere einer Putzfrau. Erinnerungen an Deutschland diverge thematically from the first two and focus on Turkish guest workers in Germany. For the purposes of focusing my argument on space, gender, and sexuality in zdamars works, I examine only the first two short stories of the collection Mutterzunge in this chapter.

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die Hocker sind zu hoch, Fe wackeln.222 Language, according to these opening sentences, is possible because of the non-linear, non-skeletal structure of the tongue, which allows the speaker to twist it at will in order to express him/herself. The imagery of this opening scene exhibits elements of the grotesque. The tongue is perhaps the most grotesque bodily organ that one sees on a regular basis and one that blurs categories like internal/external and thought/communication and is, moreover, implicated in the acts of eating and sex. This particular tongue, we soon learn, is twisted, meaning that it has lost its power of expression. The narrator feels estranged from her language in this moment, and this loss is related directly to her geographical situation. She sits in a Berlin caf frequented by other foreigners, occupying a space that marks her as a foreigner as well. The bar stools are too high for her, and her feet do not touch the ground. As Isolde Neubert has pointed out, the image of the narrators feet dangling above the ground suggests that she feels uprooted in this foreign city.223 The narrators long-term stay in Germany, which has resulted in her estrangement from the Turkish language and thus her twisted tongue, has other implications for the body as well. The narrator recounts visits to her mother in Istanbul, who comments on Germanys effect on the narrators body: Du hast die Hlfte deiner Haare in Alamania

222

Emine Sevgi zdamar, Mutterzunge. Erzhlungen (1990; Kln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2002) 9: In my language, tongue means language. A tongue has no bones. Whereever you twist it, it twists. I sat with my twisted tongue in this city Berlin. Negro caf, guest Arab. The stools are too high, feet dangle. (All translations of German quotes from Mutterzunge and Grovaterzunge into English are my own.)
223

Isolde Neubert, Searching for Intercultural Communication: Emine Sevgi zdamarA Turkish Woman Writer in Germany, Post-war Womens Writing in German: Feminist Critical Approaches, ed. Chris Weedon (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997) 153-168.

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gelassen. . . . [D]eine Augen sind an Alamanien-Lichter gewhnt.224 The loss of language is physical, and the narrator spends the remainder of the narrative attempting to determine precisely where, in which geographical location, she lost her mother tongue: in Stuttgart, after interacting with a Turkish-German prisoner? In Cologne, when she saw the Cologne Cathedral for the first time? Or in the restaurant car of an IC train? She cannot determine the location of her loss, and the story ends after she attempts to reconnect with her language by visiting the Brecht statue in the other Berlin. Indeed, Brechts theater was the impetus for her emigration to Germany.225 When even Brecht cannot help her, she decides to seek out an acclaimed teacher of Arabic in West Berlin and perhaps find a connection to Turkish again through Arabic. While Mutterzunge thematizes the effects of spatial distance from ones home on the body and language, the search for a native language turns sexual in the short story that follows. In Grovaterzunge, the narrator seeks out the teacher Ibni Abdullah, who gives Arabic lessons from his apartment. The relationship soon turns romantic, as the two connect emotionally in the ambivalent space of his classroom/bedroom. In initial meetings, the two speak about politics, her motivations for learning Arabic, and their families. Over time, however, their conversations turn to topics like first experiences with sex, their emotional intimacy with one another, and love. As their connection becomes stronger, the spatial parameters of their relationship also become narrower and

224

zdamar, Mutterzunge 9: You left half of your hair in Germany. . . . [Y]our eyes are used to German light.
225

Neubert 158. Isolde Neubert argues that the narrator turns to the arts as a starting point back to her mother language.

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more intimate. By the mid-point of the story, the narrator no longer leaves the apartment to practice Arabic in Berlin. Rather, Ibni Abdullah shuts her in the apartment, and she must eventually free herself from her emotional and spatial confinement. The heterosexual relationship in this story is complicated by the tension the narrator experiences between her need for mobility and her search for roots within a patriarchal system that mandates womens domesticity.226 Initially, the narrator sees the necessity to subordinate herself as a student in order to learn, and she uses patriarchal language to express her willingness to do so. Upon meeting her teacher for the first time she declares, Wenn mein Vater mich in Ihre Hnde als Lehrling gebracht htte, htte er mich in Ihre Hnde gegeben und gesagt, Ja, Meister, ihr Fleisch gehrt Ihnen, ihre Knochen mir, lehre sie, wenn sie ihre Augen und Gehr und ihr Herz nicht aufmacht zu dem, was Sie sagen, schlagen Sie, die Hand der schlagenden Meister stammt aus dem Paradies, wo Sie schlagen, werden dort die Rosen blhen.227 As the two fall in love and the teacher/student dynamic translates into a subordinating power relation of man/woman, the narrator feels a higher sense of spiritual connection between the two that trumps the gender paradigm. She subordinates herself to him willingly in order to experience the love that she believes binds them.

226

Stephanie Bird argues that the tensions between tradition and modernity, as well as between German and Turkish identity, are at the crux of all of zdamars work. She argues that zdamar subverts the readers attempt to understand identity as something that runs along binary terms by creating characters who negotiate these tensions and privilege neither side of the binary. Moreover, her narrators value and explore tradition, but without allowing themselves to be restrained by it. Stephanie Bird, Women Writers and National Identity: Bachmann, Duden, zdamar (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 157-216.
227

zdamar, Mutterzunge 15: If my father had put me in your hands as an apprentice, he would given me over to you and said, Master, her flesh belongs to you, her bones to me; teach her. If she does not open her eyes and ears and her heart to that which you say, hit her. The hand of the striking master comes from paradise; wherever you strike, roses will bloom.

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Although both the narrator and her teacher are marked intelligibly within the heterosexual matrix, she begins to imagine a free play of genders on their two bodies. 228 In several instances, she describes how either she or he, respective of the instance, exhibits double gender. In one instance, after Ibni Abdullah tells the narrator that he will leave Germany for a period to visit Arabien (Arabia) and refuses the narrators requests to accompany him, the narrator begins to feel that she is carrying his spirit inside her. The experience is intensely corporal: Ich hatte Schmerzen in meinem Krper, ein Fieber kam und trennte mich von anderen Lebenden, ich legte mich hin, sah, wie der Schmerz meine Haut aufmachte und sich in meinem Krper berall einnhte, ich wute, da in diesem Moment Ibni Abdullah in meinen Krper reingekommen war, dann war Ruhe, Schmerz und Fieber gingen weg, ich stand auf. Ich lief einen Monat lang mit Ibni Abdullah in meinem Krper in beiden Berlin.229 In much the same way as the narrator seeks a double gender of languagethe reunion of mother and grandfather within her own selfshe also experiences herself as containing both her own and Abdullahs gender while he is away. This scene has not only sexual imagerythe narrator experiences sensations of heat, an opening of her body to receive her lover, and a sense of peace afterwardsbut is also grotesque in the Bakhtinian sense. Her body transcends its normal material borders to connect with another body and with the cosmos as the two bodies meld into one. She harbors both male and female inside her body, and it is important to note that she mentions having this experience in Berlin, a city

228

See p41-2 in Chapter 1 for a definition of the heterosexual matrix.

229

zdamar, Mutterzunge 20-1: I had pain in my body. A fever came and separated me from other living beings. I lay myself down and saw how the pain opened my skin and sewed itself in everywhere. I knew that in this moment Ibni Abdulah had come into my body. Then came peace. The pain and fever went away. I stood up. I ran around both Berlins for an entire month with Ibni Abdullah in my body.

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that itself is characterized by its duality. The body mirrors the space it inhabits. In another instance, the narrator describes a similarly sexual and grotesque daydream, in which she accompanies Ibni Abdullah to a mens club wearing halb Mann-, halb Frauenkostm.230 The daydream soon turns into a sexual fantasy of him making love to her on a carpet. In both instances, the free play of gender results in not only a spiritual connection, but also a sexual one. The narrator does not only characterize herself with double gender; in two instances she describes Abdullah in similar terms. However, sleeping in both instances, he remains unaware of his bodys mutability: Ibni Abdullah lag neben mir wie eine Mutter, die ihr Kind gut zugedeckt hat.231 And later: Ibni Abdullah schlief da mit Ruhe, er war Mann und Frau, er lag da wieder wie eine Mutter, die ihr Kind gut zugedeckt hatte, sein Penis atmete wie ein Herz. Im Schlaf.232 Abdullah unwittingly illustrates the fertility of both genders to the narrator and thus to the reader: he is both a mother (hence a woman who has proven her fertility) and a man with a pulsing penis. He is both the protector, as a mother, and someone to be protected. The exposed penis (that breathes and is a heart) signifies vulnerability, love, and vitality. However, the narrator never tells him that she experiences him in this way and thus allows him to continue believing in the security of his masculine intelligibility within the heterosexual matrix.

230

zdamar, Mutterzunge 22: half mans, half womens suit

231

zdamar, Mutterzunge 33: Ibni Abdullah lay next to me like a mother who had covered up her child well.
232

zdamar, Mutterzunge 36: Ibni Abdullah slept there peacefully. He was man and woman. He lay there again like a mother who had covered up her chld well. His penis breathed like a heart. Asleep.

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However emotionally connected and sexually satisfied the narrator may feel with Ibni Abdullah, the patriarchal structure of their relationship soon becomes confining to her, in both the emotional and the spatial sense. After Ibni Abdullah explains to her that he needs the heilige Liebe (sacred love)that is, a traditional marriagehe divides the apartment with a curtain and confines her to the back half of the bedroom. The curtain forms a second Berlin Wall, playing on the motif of doubling that runs throughout the text, but also creating a forced separation of the two. The two remain separated within the apartment for much of the day, since Ibni Abdullah conducts his Arabic classes with the narrator out of sight. What is more, he also locks the narrator inside when he leaves. Abdullah believes himself to have the patriarchal authority to move freely while confining his lover to his domestic space, but the narrator soon proves she is unwilling to abide by her confinement. After forty days in the apartment (the narrator mimics a Turkish folk tale about a woman who waits forty days for her lover), the narrator escapes by throwing an apartment key into the courtyard for someone to free her.233 Stephanie Bird argues that the narrators possession of a key suggests that her captivity amounts to a voluntary purdah that she undertakes consciously as part of her search for cultural roots. This act of voluntary captivity is, moreover, one that defies a Western readerships notions of womens emancipation: What zdamar seems to be

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Stephanie Bird explains that forty is a magical number in Turkish literature and that zdamars ment ion of the number helps situate her story within a tradition of Turkish folk narratives. In Grossvaterzunge, the narrator recounts a story her grandmother once told her about a girl who has to wait forty days for her lover. She is deceived by another woman, whom the man marries instead, but eventually prevails because of her patience. Bird reads zdamars narrator as emulating this woman by practicing patience. In the end, however, this rewarding love is only a fantasy for which zdamars narrator is much too independent. Bird 157-216.

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suggesting here is that her narrators exploration of subjectivity need not comply with expectations of emancipation rooted in the western feminist tradition.234 Indeed, zdamars character walks a fine line between tradition and modernity, seeking out the roots of her cultural identity and subjugating herself according to the prescribed gender dynamic, but in the end choosing freedom to move through the city. The narrators selfdiscovery entails consciously and intentionally experiencing both Turkish and German cultures. The short stories Mutterzunge and Grovaterzunge demonstrate zdamars ability to negotiate the culturally rich roots of her Turkish culture while refusing the restrictions of its patriarchal traditions. By employing the grotesque body, zdamars narrator undermines the patriarchal authority of Ibni Abdullah, showing him to have sides of which he is unaware. She explores her Turkish identity by performing the role of the domestic woman and learning Arabic, but then reveals this role to be only a performance when she proves capable of effecting her own emancipation from it. In the autofictional works that follow, zdamars protagonists similarly move through foreign spaces in order to pursue their sense of sexual and individual identity. In this trilogy that draws heavily on, but also fictionalizes, zdamars own life, her narrators travel back and forth between Turkey and Germany, between East and West Germany, and throughout Europe. The trilogy begins with the narrators childhood and ends after the narrator has established her sexual, emotional, intellectual, and professional maturity. Throughout these three novels, zdamar continues to develop the themes of
234

Bird 164.

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heterosexualization and gendering, the relationship between cultural and sexual identity, and mobility as a means to self-discovery. In the first novel of the series, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei/hat zwei Tren/aus einer kam ich rein/ aus der anderen ging ich raus (1992), zdamars narrator recounts a childhood full of imagination, family love, humor and fear, poverty, and grotesque encounters with grown-ups in the Anatolia region of Turkey. She encounters frightening adults, like the deranged gardener Musa, who shows the young child his penis, and a disturbed neighbor who masturbates in front of her. Yet the horror of these frightening encounters is mitigated by her grandmother, who, rather than sheltering the child from adult sexuality, normalizes it for her by telling comical stories that serve to demystify sexuality and the body. With the help of her grandmother, the child learns to navigate the often comical, often frightening world of adult sexuality. As the child begins to enter adolescence toward the end of the story, she finds comfort in a community of women who help normalize her development for her. In all-female spaces like the Turkish baths, the narrator learns to groom and care for her developing body. She soon learns, however, that this community of support and normalization is also a community of regulation and that she must travel away from it in order to seek out her own individual identity and her own relationship with her body. The novel ends as the narrator boards a train to Germany to become a guest worker. She is unsure what she will find in Germany but is compelled to travel there by a disquiet she feels that is related to her newly developing sexual energies.

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Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei is a novel about heterosexualization. The narrator divulges her fears and ambivalences about becoming socialized and gendered as she leaves childhood and enters adolescence. As a child, the narrator has strange encounters with adult bodies that she finds frightening and intriguing; as an adolescent, she experiences her own body as grotesque. The moments of grotesque narration serve to mitigate the shocks of the adult sexual world with humor, as well as to depict the strange corporal experience of leaving childhood and entering adolescence. The second novel of the trilogy, Die Brcke vom Goldenen Horn, opens shortly after the narrator (who is presumably the same narrator as in Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei) has arrived in Germany and begins as a guest worker. When the community of female guest workers who live together in a womens dorm begin to replicate the oppressive patriarchal structures that dominate in domestic spaces in Turkey, the narrator learns that existing in new places and spaces does not in itself facilitate selfdiscovery. With the help of new friends, the narrator breaks out of the womens community to explore Berlin, where she resolves to become an actress. She sets of goal of losing her virginity, which she believes to be binding her to the patriarchal structure of the womens dorm community and holding her back from the experience she needs to be an actress. However, she must achieve this goal before returning to Turkey, where she will be under the watchful eyes of her parents. After four comical failed attempts with different men, many of whom she describes in terms of the grotesque (one is an Eulengesicht [owl face], and she calls another one der hinkende Sozialist [the limping Socialist]), the narrator finally achieves coitus and gains the experience she

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desires. The experience proves to be a defining moment for her, and she delights in sex with a series of men. By the end of the novel, the narrator has crossed the eponymous bridge several times, as well as the bridge from childhood to maturity. She has gained sexual maturity, has established a theater career, can speak fluent German and thus navigate both Turkey and Germany with ease, and engages politically in both Germany and Turkey. The grotesque in this novel serves to aestheticize the often strange, often comical experience of living in a foreign land and lends humor to the narrators mission to lose her virginity. The final novel of the trilogy, Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde. Wedding Pankow 1976/1977, begins a few years after Die Brcke vom Goldenen Horn ends. The narrator lives in West Berlin in 1976 and travels on a daily basis to East Berlin to intern at the Volksbhne (folk theater) under the direction of Benno Besson. She has recently left Turkey after the military putsch and resulting conservative regime have ruined her theater career there, as well as to escape a failed marriage. The narrator, by this point, has long established her sexual emancipation and experiments with free love. However, in this novel, free love is no longer an individual prerogative, but rather, part of a political statement. She lives in a left-leaning Wohngemeinschaft (shared apartment) and in which sexual experimentation and free love are intentional components of a program to increase individual freedom. Over the course of the novel, she travels repeatedly between Turkey and Germany, as well as between East and West Berlin, enjoying access to both sides of the Wall that few Germans have. This mobility not only gives her freedom, however. She experiences her mobility as a responsibility to interpret and communicate what she

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sees as unbalanced power relations in those spaces she traverses. She focuses specifically on describing the circumstances of prostitutesboth in Germany and in the Volksbhnes production of Bertolt Brechts Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechwan)and of Turkish guest workers who cross the border daily, raising families in East Berlin and working in the West. Although zdamars narrator enjoys the sexually liberal time and spaces in which she lives, she does not engage solely in casual sex; rather, she falls in love several times over the course of the novel. The narrative ends as the narrator boards a train for Paris to assist her director Benno Besson there after her latest lover proposes marriage to her. Much in the same way as the other two novels in the autofictional trilogy end, she is leaving her old place for a new one out of fear of restriction on her sexuality. Of the novels in the trilogy, Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde makes the least use of the grotesque. By this time, the narrator no longer experiences Germany as an absurd, foreign space, but has made it her own. She has normalized the experience of crossing the border between East and West Berlin, as well as of travelling between Turkey, Germany, and the rest of Europe. Her world is thus no longer entfremdet (estranged) in the sense that Kayser describes the grotesque world. Furthermore, she has reached sexual maturity and no longer uses her mobility to seek out sexual experience; rather, she examines and describes the ways she sees sexual politics functioning in the public sphere. In zdamars oeuvre, places are the bases for a stifled gender identity, whereas mobility enables the narrators to develop an empowering sexual identity. In stable places, patriarchy dictates the confinement of women to a limited number of spaces and

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behaviors. Even in places in which men are absent, for example the womens dorm in Die Brcke vom Goldenen Horn, patriarchy reasserts itself through the values and behaviors that women internalize. By travelling, zdamars narrators defy patriarchal dictates, encounter the cultural and sexual Other, and thereby develop their own sense of self. zdamar employs the grotesque in all of her works to express her narrators feelings of alienation in foreign spaces and to depict their sexual encounters with humor. Moreover, the grotesque provides each narrator with the requisite humor to face her challenges bravely. Germany is not frightening, but instead, absurd; sexuality is also not frightening, because bodies are comical. In the section that follows, I turn to the works of Bodo Kirchhoff, a writer who also focuses on the intersections of the body, sexuality, and travel. Like zdamars narrators, Kirchhoffs protagonists resist settling into spaces and places. However, unlike zdamars protagonists, who travel in order to make connections with as many sexual partners and places as possible, Kirchhoffs protagonists travel to escape connections with either sexual partners or with spaces or places. Rather than travelling in an exploratory manner, his characters travel reactively. Kirchhoffs protagonists also travel without humor; those moments of alienating encounter in his works are depicted in terms of the abject rather than the grotesque. Abjection in the Early Works of Bodo Kirchhoff Over the course of his thirty-year career publishing popular fiction, Bodo Kirchhoff has placed the intersections of the body, sexuality, and space at the center of his writing; yet his works have received relatively little scholarly attention. His early

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texts were dismissed as pornographic and trivial, and though his works since 1990 (with the publication of the novel Infanta) have gained some critical respect, Kirchhoff remains on the fringes of literary criticism and scholarship.235 Although his texts can legitimately be called pornographic, even misogynistic, his unique use of the abject as an aesthetic lens for exploring protagonists ambivalence toward heterosexuality and space warrants serious examination. In his works, Kirchhoff explores the fragility of the male sexual psyche as the material body declines, and most often, his male protagonists sense of integrity depends on the subordination of the women they encounter. In this chapter section, I examine the connections between domination, abjection, and mobility in Kirchhoffs fiction. R. W. Connells concept of hegemonic masculinity, Klaus Theweleits Krperpanzerung (body armor), und Julia Kristevas theory of the abject work well in tandem to describe how the threat of femininity is implicated in the production of masculinity and how abjection functions as an impetus for mobility in Kirchhoffs works. Much like the grotesque, the abject is concerned with those bodily functions that blur the limits between the body and its environment. In the case of abjection, however, the body does not seek to connect with its cosmos, but rather, to differentiate itself from that environment. According to Julia Kristeva in her seminal work Powers of Horror: An

235

Willi Winkler writes, Wegen der Symbole, die in ihrer Einfachheit eigentlich gar keine sind, hat es Kirchhoff mit seinen Kritikern verdorben: er sei banal und seine Erotik zu schmuddelig, als da man ihn anders als mit spitzen Fingern anfassen knne, um ihn dann gleich wieder wegzulegen. Willi Winkler, Die Erfahrung des unheimlichen Anderen, Deutsche Zeitschrift fr europisches Denken 39.6 (June 1985): 522-525. 522: Because of his symbols that actually are too simple to be considered as such, Kirchhoff has ruined his chances with critics. According to them, he is so banal and his eroticism is so filthy that one can only pick up his work with fingertips, and then only to put it down again right away. (my translation)

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Essay on Abjection, a subjects identity is configured around his/her desire to distinguish the material body from its spatial environments.236 Abjection, an extreme repulsion accompanied by a sense of disorientation, occurs when the subject encounters an object or substance that challenges the borders of the self. This substance may be an element from the environment, like dirt, filth, or polluted air, or it may be a bodily fluid like blood, urine, semen, vomit, or excrement. In some instances, even sexual partners and normal food can cause abjection. Regardless of its form, the abject object or substance reminds the subject that s/he is never independent of his/her environment and that his/her body will someday disintegrate and decay. In the moment of abjection, the subject must pull away from the source of the repulsion in order to reject whatever is threatening his/her bodily integrity and to reaffirm his/her sense of self. However, the intense desire to delineate the material body from its environment is a wish that can never be fulfilled, since the material body must eat, drink, breathe, have sexual intercourse, be born in a mixture of maternal bodily fluids, and disintegrate after death. The abject moment is completely horrifying and lacks the humor that characterizes the grotesque. In 1979, when Die Zeit called Bodo Kirchhoffs first published prose piece Ohne Eifer, ohne Zorn ein Debt zum Frchten, it did so with good reason.237 Kirchhoffs debut novella explores male sexual desire and the male body in various abject modes. The protagonist of Ohne Eifer, ohne Zorn, a writer named Branzger, is obsessed with

236

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (1980; New York: Routledge, 2000) 1-31.
237

Bodo Kirchhoff, Ohne Eifer, ohne Zorn (1979; Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 1986). a debut to be feared (quoted from the book jacket).

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body building, finding a prostitute who will engage in anal sex with him, and voyeuristically watching through his balcony window as a corpse decays in the apartment next door. The reader becomes implicated in the act of voyeurism, as s/he repeatedly watches Branzger masturbate, urinate on himself, experience difficulty evacuating his bowels, and search the city streets of Frankfurt for prostitutes. The single plot development in Ohne Eifer, ohne Zorn occurs when Branzger travels to Italy, where he meets a disagreeable German woman travelling with a child. He soon discovers he can spy on the two from his hotel window, and in a scene parallel to earlier ones, in which he watched his neighbors body decompose, he observes as the woman receives cunnilingus from the child. The protagonists own sexual preoccupations and lack of bodily control are relativized by the thematization of female desire as something much more perverse. Ohne Eifer, ohne Zorn is exemplary of Kirchhoffs earliest works, in which the diegetic worlds are populated by narcissistic males who are obsessed with overcoming their own bodily limitations and are overtly misogynistic and sadistic towards women.238 As exemplified in Ohne Eifer, ohne Zorn, male characters in Kirchhoffs works are desiring individuals whose subjective projects are tied to their embodiment, whereas
238

A self-described Lacanian, Kirchhoff works consciously with themes of bodily lack and unfulfilled desire. See: Uwe Wittstock, Der Autor hat nur eine Chance: Er muss den Kritiker berleben. [Interview]. Neue Rundschau 104.3 (1993): 69-81. He would later flesh out these themes in his 1995 collection of lectures, Legenden um den eigenen Krper. In these lectures, Kirchhoff claims that people build legends about themselves in order to compensate for the lacks and shortcomings that human bodies inherently have. His stories are populated with characters who have developed the most visible kinds of bodily legends: body builders, prostitutes, athletes, masturbators, actors, and actresses. Furthermore, the legends are supported not only by the language that individual uses to develop an identity, but also by Lacanian orthopedic supports: the weights, lipsticks, clothes, tennis rackets, sex toys, typewriters, and sexual partners that these characters depend upon in order to maintain the illusion of possessing whole bodies. Bodo Kirchhoff, Legenden um den eigenen Krper. Frankfurter Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995).

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women are not depicted as desiring subjects per se. Rather, female desire becomes the crutch of male corporal integrity and sexual confidence.239 The one independently desiring woman in Kirchhoffs early world, the German woman in Ohne Eifer, ohne Zorn, fulfills her desire through pedophilia, and the protagonist feels validated by encountering a female desire that is much more perverse than his own. Kirchhoffs protagonists strive to attain what R. W. Connell calls hegemonic masculinity, or the predominant masculine ideal within a given culture.240 Connell defines hegemonic masculinity as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women.241 She argues that hegemonic masculinity relies on a gender binary that posits masculinity as the norm and femininity as the deviation from that norm. While hegemonic masculinity is largely an unachievable imaginary ideal, it serves to legitimate real and functioning power dynamics that subordinate women to men.

239

For more on Kirchhoffs use of women as orthopedics, see: Cloude Foucart, Krper und Lit eratur Bodo Kirchhoff, Deutsche Literatur zwischen 1945 und 1995. Eine Sozialgeschichte , hrsg. Horst A. Glaser (Bern: UTB fr Wissenschaft, 1997) 666-669.
240

R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). For Connell, such definitions assume a static and ahistoric concept of masculinity. Masculinity, which is always conceptualized relationally most usually in its differentiation from femininitymust also be considered within its historical and cultural context and must also take into account competing and relational concepts of masculinity within that socio-historical framework.
241

Connell 77. Not only does hegemonic masculinity rely on the subordination of women, Connell goes on to say, but it also marginalizes other forms of masculinity, particularly gay masculinities. This gender dominance, however, is never stable according to Connell. It is contestable precisely because it differs according to both culture and historical period and because it represents an unrealizable ideal rather than a material manifestation. Hegemonic masculinity, then, might be understood as an imaginary construct within a given society that is exaggerated and idealized in order to maintain its authority and legitimacy.

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One of the means by which hegemonic masculinity functions in Kirchhoffs works is through his authoring of women who 1) are prostitutes and therefore purchasable by men, and 2) have much more significant bodily lacks than his male characters. While the men in Kirchhoffs early works are obsessed with overcoming their own bodily limitations, the women in these works have much more extreme deformities. For example, in his short story Mittelpunkt des Universums in the collection Die Einsamkeit der Haut (1981), the protagonist hires a prostitute with a thin leg after just having lost a tooth. 242 Instead of sleeping with the prostitute, the protagonist spends his hour with her in front of a mirror, obsessing about a gap in his teeth, examining his muscle mass and the measurements of his body (bodybuilders are common protagonists in Kirchhoffs early works), and staring at the prostitutes deformed leg in the mirror. In a second short story in the same collection, Zehn Minuten vergehen, the protagonist lusts after a one-armed prostitute he sees on the street. As he begins to imagine her everyday lifeparticularly, how she manages to dress herself with only one armshe becomes a curiosity to him rather than someone who awakens his sexual desire. The protagonists anxieties about his own sexual urgencies are allayed by watching this woman whose bodily lack can distract him from his own shortcomings. Kirchhoffs protagonists are globe-trotters, eternally on the search for new settings, yet always dissatisfied with their travel. Moreoever, the restlessness with which Kirchhoffs characters travel is entwined with the anxiety with which they engage with women. They experience a need while travelling to keep a distance, to dis-identify, and
242

Bodo Kirchhoff, Die Einsamkeit der Haut (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981).

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to Other both the spaces and the women they encounter. Encounters with respulsive women and spaces cause them to experience themselves as lacking, and they lose control of their bodies (particularly their bladders, bowels, and stomachs). The protagonists then must escape the woman or space. After experiencing abjection, these characters develop a Theweleitian Krperpanzerung (body armor) to protect their own subjective integrity against further threat. According to Theweleit, masculinity has been concerned throughout history with defending itself from the threat of feminization. Men in various historical contexts, most notably during wartime, have been obliged to undertake a Krperpanzerung, or a steeling up of the male body against the flowing and soft femininity that surrounds them in the form of mothers, lovers, and war enemies (who were often feminized through war propaganda).243 This Krperpanzerung contributes to a hegemonic masculinity in which men are to be muscular, athletic, and have control of their bodies and bodily fluids. Reading Theweleit in conjunction with Kristevas concept of the abject, one can understand Krperpanzerung as a defense against the abject feminine that is perceived to threaten the material borders of the male body.
243

Klaus Theweleit, Mnnerphantasien (1977; Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Roter Stern, 2005). Theweleit describes how Krperpanzerungen have existed in the cultural imaginary at least since the Middle Ages and culminated in the fascist body aesthetic of the Nazi period in Germany. He identifies the origin of the concept feminine threat not in discourses on war, but rather in the art and literature that depicts sirens, dangerous and seductive water nymphs, the Loreley, etc. (283). According to Theweleit, war discourses have borrowed from literature and developed the metaphor into real body practice. The soldier perceives danger not only from the actual female bodyfor distraction could be fatal on the battle fieldbut anything that flows feminine and thus makes battle difficult, like mud, rain, and blood. The soldiers task is to steel up his body in order to psychologically and physically defeat the feminine threat. Theweleit argues, finally, that the masculine individualism characteristic of Western culture depends on Krperpanzerung, which delineates the male body and allows the male ego to be conceptualized as separate from its environment. Theweleit, Mnnerphantasien 236-315.

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In Kirchhoffs earliest novel, Zwiefalten (1983), the eponymous protagonist takes a trip to Ethiopia, Bangkok, Hawaii, and Paraguay and experiences abjection in all those places.244 On every step of his journey, Zwiefalten fails to engage with locals and converses primarily with German citizens abroad. Zwiefaltens motivations for travelling are never explained, and his agenda is determined by little more than suggestions made by other Germans he meets on his trip. Furthermore, he visits only the safe places that already seem familiar to him through the homogenizing mechanisms of global advertising and franchised businesses. Indeed, the individual places themselves are often indistinguishable to the reader as mediated through the perspective of the disengaged protagonist.245 Zwiefalten has no apparent passion or curiosity for the places he visits, and an encounter with anything remotely exotic or unique produces too much anxiety for him. Indeed, Zwiefalten might be understood as the opposite of the colonizing traveler who, as proposed by David Spurr, appropriates the foreign space with his gaze. Spurr writes: [Colonial discourse] implicitly claims the territory surveyed as the colonizers own; the colonizer speaks as an inheritor whose very vision is charged with racial

244

Kirchhoffs novel Zwiefalten is constructed from a series of Kirchhoffs travel narratives published in the magazine TransAtlantik. See: Siegfried Steinmann, Bodo Kirchhoff, Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur, hrsg. Heinz Ludwig Arnold. 65. Nachlfg. (Mnchen, 2003).
245

As Willi Winkler has noted, Zwiefaltens experiences do little to awaken the imagination of the reader: Zwiefalten besttigt unsere Vorurteile, wenn er in thiopien wenig erfolgreich den Kommunismus am Werk sieht, in Bangkok die Freudenmdchen und ihre proletarischen Kunden beobachtet, in Hawaii einen Hurrikan erlebt und in Paraguay den ausgewanderten Mnchner Konsul Weyer spricht. Winkler 524: Zwiefalten confirms our biases when in Ethiopia he watches Communism ineffectively at work, in Bangkok he observes the sex workers and their proletariat costomers, in Hawaii he experiences a hurricane, and in Paraguay he speaks to the emigrated Konsul Weyer of Munich. (my translation)

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ambition.246 Unlike the colonial traveler who travels in order to see, and thus own, new spaces, Kirchhoffs protagonists travel in order to remain detached, to reject, and to escape spaces and people that repulse them. However, Zwiefalten is not wholly successful at keeping a cold distance from the places he visits and often experiences these places in the most abject manner. He encounters mud and muck, becomes ill, vomits, and has diarrhea. He perceives himself as having become contaminated by his environment and its inhabitants and experiences abjection as a result. Colonialist discourses would appear to support Zwiefaltens perceptions of an abject environment. According to Spurr, these discourses associate filth and defilement with the moral inferiority of colonized peoples, with the seductive dangers of the savage, and the threat of biological and (perhaps more significant) social contamination of the colonizer. However, in Zwiefalten, it is not the indigenous people who contaminateindeed, Zwiefalten has only very limited contact with thembut rather, it is the European traveler who cannot control his own filth.247 Instead, his bouts of illness can be understood as a psycho-somatic expression of his inability to come to terms with the foreign environment. Experiencing spaces as threatening to his physical well-being, Zwiefalten constantly seeks to keep an emotional distance from them. After experiencing a space too closely, he seeks an evacuation plan to leave the abjected space.

246

David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 28.
247

See: Spurr, Chapter 5 Debasement: Filth and Defilement 76 -91.

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Not only does Zwiefalten keep an emotional distance from the spaces he visits so that they remain relatively uniform and unthreatening to him, he keeps an emotional distance from the women he encounters. He is able to communicate with only two women in the text: his therapist in Frankfurt and a German woman named Maureen whom he meets in Hawaii. Although Zwiefalten makes contact with these German women he meets on his trip, he never attempts to engage with women of other ethnicities. The prostitutes in Bangkok are a source of potential sexual release, though Zwiefalten is too afraid to hire one, and in a scene with imagery that occurs repeatedly in Kirchhoffs works, he watches a woman masturbate in Paraguay. Although Zwiefalten assumes the colonialists eroticizing gaze insofar as he lusts after the anonymous exotic woman, he never comes close enough to unveil the exotic foreign body.248 Rather, women remain largely interchangeable to Zwiefalten, and only the Kinderbibelschnheit (childrens bible beauty) who appears in many of the spaces Zwiefalten traverses stands out among them (though even she is never described in any real detail). Indeed, just as Zwiefalten does not travel in order to conquer and appropriate spaces, he also does not attempt to conquer or appropriate the women he lusts after. As exemplified by Ohne Eifer, Ohne Zorn, the stories in Die Einsamkeit der Haut, and the novel Zwiefalten, Kirchhoffs early texts establish a corpus of themes that he will revisit and expand upon in his works of the 2000s. These themes include the incomplete male body and the protagonists search for corporal integrity, anxiety towards both sex and space, and mobility motivated by reactions to the abject. In the sections that follow, I
248

For more on the rhetoric of anonymity, repetition, unveiling, and eroticization in colonialist discourses, see: Spurr, Chapter 11 Eroticization: The Harems of the West 170 -183.

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trace how the intersections of mobility and heterosexuality change in Kirchhoffs more recent works when the aesthetic of the abject transforms into that of the grotesque. I then turn to his depictions of male friendship, which always border on the homosexual. In these tales of friendship, male identity stabilizes, the abject changes character, and stasis becomes the preferred modus operandi. Grotesque Stasis: Schundroman and Erinnerungen an meinen Porsche During the 1990s, Kirchhhoff turned away from his previous program of depicting both womens bodies and space in terms of the abject. His two major works of the period, Infanta (1990)249 and Parlando (2000),250 have received both critical and scholarly attention, and two other projects Der Ansager einer Stripteasenummer gibt nicht auf (1994)251 and Der Sandmann 252 prove to be among his most complex work.
249

The novel Infanta (1990) marked a shift for Kirchhoff, both in terms of critical reception and in the sophistication of his work. With Infanta, Kirchhoff moves away from the abjection of women and spaces. The novel takes places in the city Infanta on an island in the Philippines, where protagonist Kurt Lukas finds a home at a local monastery, falls in love with the Filipina cook Mayla, and becomes enwrapped in the local revolutionary political scene. Unlike the protagonists in Kirchhoffs earlier works, however, Lukas becomes attached to Mayla and the island and seeks both spatial and emotional stasis rather than a way out. However, this emotional involvement with both a place and a woman prove tragic for the sympathetic Lukas when his lack of an exit strategy leads to his unfortunate and untimely death on the island.
250

A second outlier in Kirchhoffs body of works, Parlando (2000) also gained him some praise from literary critics. Karl Faller, the protagonist of Kirchhoffs longest novel to date, is on a narcissistic journey around the world to trace the sexual footsteps of his father. Karl believes himself to be responsible for his fathers death some years before during a family vacation at the Gardasee. His father had been an author of travel guides, and Karl follows clues in these travel guides to accomplish his major project: to sleep with all the women his father has slept with. Parlando is an obvious attempt to update the Oedipus myth, as Karl sleeps with multiple mother figures (including his stepmother) and finds himself incapable of killing his father (as the narrative proceeds, it becomes increasingly doubtful that Karl can take blame or creditfor his fathers death). In completing the Oedipal motif, Karl slowly goes blind in the frame narrative of the story. Parlando is perhaps Kirchhoffs last major work to thematize global travel, and even in this work, the globe is only a background to the narrators narcissisti c project.
251

In the first person monologue Der Ansager einer Stripteasenummer gibt nicht auf (1994), a male striptease announcer must entertain an audience while the stripper Andrea is delayed coming on stage. To keep the audience occupied, the announcer describes what the stripper would do if she were to emerge on

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All of these works explore the thematic interstices of the body, space, mobility, and gender through aesthetic projects that turn away from the abject. They discuss the construction of gender and sexuality by thematizing the linguistic construction of the body, by reinventing older literary texts, and by employing various visual modes in the narration. However, in 2000 Kirchhoff abandoned his more experimental and complex work to return to his previous program of exploring heterosexual relationships through the aesthetic mode of the abject. These later works, however, depart slightly from his earlier aesthetic mode in that Kirchhoff explores his major themes with a touch of humor. With the addition of humor, the abject becomes grotesque. Although the grotesque

the stage and even mimics some of her movements. As the monologue wears on, the announcer begins to refer to parts of his own body that could be revealed if he were to do the striptease himself. By the end of the monologue, it is unclear whether the striptease was ever to take place in actuality or whether the striptease has already taken place in the minds of the audience through linguistic signification from the announcer. See Andrea Geier, wenn man es logisch zu Ende denkt, zieh ich mich selbst hier aus. Imaginationen des Geschlechtertauschs und erotische Geschlechterverwirrung in Bodo Kirchhoffs Der Ansager einer Stripteasenummer gibt nicht auf, Paradoxien der Wiederholung, hrsg. Robert Andr und Christoph Deupmann (Heidelberg: Universittsverlag Winter, 2003) 173-191.
252

In Der Sandmann (1992), radio announcer Quint is in the processes of divorcing his wife and travels to Tunis with his son, Julian, in search of Julians former babys itter Helen. Quint believes himself to be in love with Helen and after having received a postcard from her hotel in Tunis, travels after her. After checking into the hotel where Helen had previously resided, Quint is given access to the diary that Helen wrote there and that is being kept by the hotels owner Madame Melrose. Quint soon makes the acquaintance of a mysterious expatriate from Germany, a writer named Branzger, who lives on the roof of the building. Branzger befriends the young Julian, captur ing the childs imagination with his ability to make uncannily perfect paper airplanes. Over the course of the novel, Quint learns that Branzger is hardly who is he claims to be. After Quint discovers that Branzger is the real author of Helens diaryand after Branzger loses Julian in the crowded streets of TunisQuint pushes him from a rooftop of the hotel and kills him. The novel ends with Quint wandering the streets of Tunis searching for his child. For scholarship on Der Sandmann, see: Carlo Brune und Lenea Kraemer, KirchHoffmanns Sandmnner: Identitts- und Krperkonstruktionen in den gleichnamigen Texten Der Sandmann von E. T. A. Hoffmann und Bodo Kirchhoff, E.T.A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch 14 (2006): 1-23. Ortrud Gutjahr, Vom Unheimlichen an der Trennung. E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzhlung und Bodo Kirchhoffs Roman Der Sandmann, Trennungen, hrsg. Johannes Cremerius u. a. (Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 1994) 65-82. Raliza Ivanova, Der Schriftsteller zwischen Pygmalion und dipus: Bodo Kirchhoffs Der Sandmann, Mythos und Krise in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, hrsg. Maja Razboynikova-Frateva und HansGerd Winter (Dresden:Thelem, 2004) 55-64. Maria Rauchenbacher, In die Irre gefhrt. Zum Prinzip Tuschung in Bodo Kirchhoffs Der Sandmann, Sprachkunst 17 (2005): 310-326.

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quickly returns to the abject in many horrifying scenes in these works, the larger turn toward the grotesque promises that characters in these later works will seek connections with Others rather than rejecting them. These works also abandon Kirchhoffs previous program of sending his protagonists on travels through foreign spaces. Frankfurt becomes the place where anxieties play out and where men and women encounter one another, have sexual relations, and depart. Travel is limited to flight into or out of Frankfurt at the beginning or end of the stories. This new turn to humor and hyperbole, as well as to a more stable setting, can be illustrated best in two examples: Schundroman (2002) and Erinnerungen an meinen Porsche (2009). Kirchhoff revives his previous aesthetic of abjection in the humorous and exaggerated Schundroman, the title of which points reflexively to the less than serious tone and subject matter of the novel. In this pulp fiction style novel with larger than life characters, the heterosexual matrix becomes a place where exaggerated hypermasculinity meets oversexed and overeager hyperfemininity for a love made in soft porn heaven. The novel is structured along two story lines. In the first, the protagonist, a hit man named Willem Hold, has been contracted to assassinate the husband of the highly popular and sexually alluring author Vanilla Campus at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In the second story line, two detectives investigate the crime. In the opening scenes of Schundroman, Hold is coded as the perfectly hardened killer with a fully functioning Krperpanzerung. He has a high degree of mobility, as evidenced by his familiarity with transatlantic flight and his falsified passport. He also possesses a cool gaze, which is established in the opening sentences, as he peruses first

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the gold watch, then the body, of the woman sleeping next to him on his flight from Manila to Frankfurt: Willem Hold hatte sie schon whrend des Starts entdeckt, als sie unter dem rmel eines weien Herrenhemds auftauchte, infolge der Beschleunigung oder von Nervositt, die einen beim Abheben den Arm strecken lt, pendelnd um ein schmales Gelenk, schmal, aber weich . . . eine seiner Traumuhren . . . .253 Holds attention soon drifts from the watch to the beautiful woman who wears it, the high-class prostitute Lou Schultz who is suspected for art theft and murder in Frankfurt and who will turn out, predictably enough, to be Willems sexual match. It is significant, given the presence of one-armed prostitutes in Kirchhoffs earlier works, that the first image we get of Schultz is of her arm. Indeed, Schultzs corporal integrity is unique for prostitutes in Kirchhoffs works. Willem fixes his gaze on her mouth and cheeks: in Wahrheit sah Willem Hold nur auf ihren prachtvollen Kumund, umrahmt von zwei weichen Wangen . . . .254 In this traditionally gendered configuration of the gaze, Schultz is all bodyor perhaps better described, a collection of sexualized body parts held together through Holds gaze. Hold likewise demonstrates his bodily integrity through his Panzerkrper (armored body). Rather than sensing the feminine threat that will soon complicate his life, Hold experiences a desire to protect Schultz with his steeled up body.

253

Bodo Kirchhoff, Schundroman (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 2002). 9: Willem Hold had already discovered it during take-off, when it emerged from under the sleeve of a white shirt either because of the acceleration or from the nervousness that makes one raise ones arm. He saw it, hanging from a slender wrist, slender, but soft . . . one of his dream watches . . . . (All translations of quotes from Kirchhoffs works into Englsih are my own.)
254

Kirchhoff, Schundroman 14: Truth be told, Willem Hold looked only at her gorgeous, puckered lips framed by two soft cheeks . . . .

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The bodily integrity of the two characters soon begins to disintegrate, however, once they land. During his first (and failed) attempt at the hit on Vanilla Campuss husband, Hold is injured by the off-duty policemen assigned to Schultzs case when he jabs the end of a broken wine bottle into Holds face.255 Alles Weitere ging so schnell, da es jeden durchschnittlichen Filmregisseur zum Mittel der Zeitlupe verfhrt htte. Willem Hold scho nmlich auf Feuerbach und traf die Flasche, ein Zufall, aber kinoreif, whrend der nchste Schu, am Knie vorbei, sicher gesessen htte, wre da nicht schon die Flasche, am Boden scharfkantig abgerissen, auf ihn zugesaust. Sie traf sein verhlltes Gesicht, ihre lngere Spitze drang durch die Wollmtze und die darunterliegende Wange, ehe die Flasche oder ihr Rest einfach herunterfiel und zerschellte, whrend sich Hold, reflexhaft, an die durchbohrte Wange griff . . . . Der Maskierte stand vor einer neuen Situation. Aus seiner Wange oder Mtze flo das Blut . . . .256 For the remainder of the novel, Hold endures a painful hole in his cheek, an abject reminder of his failed Krperpanzerung and thus his bodily limits. The prostitute, instead of reconfirming the bodily integrity of the protagonist as in earlier works by
255

This scene mirrors an earlier one in which Willem attacks and inadvertently kills the famous literary critic Louis Freytag upon arrival in Frankfurt in an attempt to distract police who are on the lookout for Schutlz. Secondary literature on the novel has identified this Freytag as a literary rendering of Marcel Reich-Ranicki, citing the texts description of the characters features. See: Andrea Bartle, Erstochen, erschlagen, verleumdet. ber den Umgang mit Rezensenten in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur am Beispiel von Martin Walsers Tod eines Kritikers, Bodo Kirchhoffs Schundroman und Franzobels Shooting Star, Weimarer Beitrge: Zeitschrift fr Literaturwissenschaft, sthetik und Kulturwissenschaften 50.4 (2004): 485-514. Frauke Meyer-Gosau, Zufallstod, Randerscheinung. Wie und warum in Bodo Kirchhoffs Schundroman ein Grokritiker ums Lebe n kommt und was das mglicherweise bedeutetoder eben auch nicht, Jahrbuch fr Antisemitismusforschung 11 (2002): 317324. Christian van Treeck, Tod eines Autors. Houellebecq-Satire und Literaturbetrieb in Bodo Kirchhoffs Schundroman, Deutsch-franzsische Literaturbeziehungen. Stationen und Aspekte dichterischer Nachbarschaft vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, hrsg. Marcel Krings und Roman Luckscheiter (Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 2007) 239-56.
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Kirchhoff, Schundroman 59-60: Everything else went so quickly that the average film director would have been enticed to use slow motion. Willem Hold shot at Feuerbach and hit the bottle a coincidence rife for the movieswhile the next shot that zoomed past his knee would certainly have landed, had the bottle with its jagged bottom not already been hurled at him. The bottle hit his covered face. Its long, sharp edge cut through the wool cap and the cheek that lay under it. Then the bottle, or what was left of it, simply fell and shattered while Hold reflexively grabbed his pierced cheek . . . . The masked man faced a new situation. Blood flowed from his cheek or cap . . . .

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Kirchhoff, leads to its further disintegration when Schultz attempts to suture the wound with an unsterilized needle and thread, causing it to become infected.257 The wound also limits Holds mobility in Frankfurt. Since police can identify him by this distinguishing feature, Hold must remain indoors rather than moving freely about Frankfurt anonymously. Hold is revealed to be even more lacking corporally in the several instances in which Schultz attempts to give him sexual pleasure. Due to an instance of child abuse, in which his boarding school teacher poured lacquer over the tip of his penis, Hold cannot experience an erection without pain. However, Hold is soon overcome with joy at the beauty of Schultzs vagina, and in an episode in which he gives her oral pleasureand forces himself to experience both oral and genital painhe overcomes his inability. Willem griff sich an die Wange, er sagte kein Wort mehr, der Schmerz darin, dachte er, wre strker als alles andere. . . . . Lou glnzte zwischen den Beinen, er sah ihren zitternden Bauch, ihren Mund, der ihn suchte, sie war so offen fr ihn, da er in ihr versank. . . . So lagen sie einige Zeit, drei oder vier Bahnen fuhren vorbei; ganz still lagen sie, fast starr, bis auf kleinste Bewegungen, ein sachtes Rucken, von ihm oder ihr, kaum zu unterscheiden, Rucken wie das im Bauch einer Schwangeren, und mit jedem weiteren sachten Rucken verwischte sich in ihm immer mehr der Grund, warum er eigentlich in Frankfurt war. Erst im letzten Moment schwoll er an zwischen ihren Beinen und kam in einem Strahl, der ihn mitri, bis er jh vor sich selbst zu stehen schien, seiner mde, das kannte er; es war vorbei.258
257

The wound will finally healand become a useful plot point laterwhen the detective Helen Stirius is able to persuade Hold that she is a doctor and will properly tend his wound in return for information about Lou Schultz. Criminal and detectives then begin to work together to catch the dubious figure who has orchestrated the hit on Vanilla Campuss husband and implicated Lou a c ase of art theft and murder.
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Kirchhoff, Schundroman 153-4: Willem grabbed his cheek and said nothing more. The pain there, he thought, was stronger than anything else. . . . Loui glistened between her legs. He saw her trembling stomach, her mouth that searched for him. She was so open for him that he san k into her. . . . They lay that way for a time. Three or four trains went by; they lay completely still, nearly stiff except for the smallest movements: a gentle twitch from her or himit was hard to tella twitch like that in the belly of a pregnant woman, and with each new gentle twitch, the reason why he was in Frankfurt disappeared to him.

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In this scene, Schultz is excited sexually by Holds pain (as suggested by the glistening between her legs), and feminine desire is once again characterized as perverse rather than healthy. Hold finds himself capable of erection, penetration, and orgasm, but Schultz is not so much the agent of Holds sexual healing as the available body with which Hold can attempt to overcome his own bodily limitation. After overcoming this pain, Hold feels tenderness towards Schultz for her willingness to be open to his sexual experimentation. However, attachment proves fatal and Holds own bodily lack soon becomes relativized when Schultzs body is violated in an extremely violent anal rape and murder. Hold discovers her in her hotel room in the novels pinnacle of abject horror: Das erste, was er im Licht aus dem Flur erkannte, war ein Besen, mit den Borsten in der Luft, whrend der Stielund im nchsten Moment gaben schon seine Knie nachin Lous Hintern steckte; sie lag ber einem Berg blutiger Kissen, die Augen weit aufgesperrt, ber der Wange ein grnes Haarteil.259 Although the anal rape and murder of Lou Schultz is coded as a tragic event for Hold, the imagery is nevertheless reminiscent of Kirchhoffs earlier texts that fantasize about anal sex and deformed female bodies. Holds reaction also mirrors that of earlier protagonists when faced with anxiety about the female body: he loses control of his own body. He urinates on himself, bangs his head against a wall until he reopens the wound on his cheek, and

Only in the last moment did he swell between her legs and come in a stream that took him with it until he suddenly seemed to stand before himself, tired. He remembered that. It was over.
259

Kirchhoff, Schundroman 191: The first thing he recognized in the light from the hallway was a broom with the bristles in the air, and the handleand in the next moment his knees gavestuck in Lous behind; she lay on top of a pile of bloody pillows, her eyes wide open, on her cheek a green hairpiece.

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then vomits in the bathroom.260 These abject details are no longer purely gratuitous, as had been the case in previous works by Kirchhoff, but this time further the plot as Hold realizes that his DNA will be found in the urine stain on the carpet or perhaps in the toilet bowl where he vomited. Because of his inability to control his bodily fluids, he may be wrongfully accused of Schultzs rape and murder. Ultimately, the encounter with the abject female body (in this case, the violated corpse of Lou Schultz) operates along similar lines as in previous texts by Kirchhoff: as a mechanism for the male protagonists recovery of subjective and corporal integrity. In his search to avenge Schultzs murder, which he suspects must have been perpetrated by Zidona, his former boarding school teacher and, as it turns out, Schultzs first love, Hold steels himself up again, emerging more masculine than ever before. The hole in his cheek heals over, he has no more sexual pain, and he succeeds in killing both Vanilla Campuss husband (his original target) and Zidona. As prescribed by the conventions of the pulp novel, Hold escapes relatively unscathed with the sexy Vanilla Campus, who had been behind the hit on her husband all alongand who, significantly, has no knowledge of Holds previous sexual incapacities. Holds Krperpanzerung has been recovered and he regains his ability to move freely. In a final scene mirroring the initial one in which Hold and Schultz meet, Hold and Campus fly first class to Manila and engage in what the narrator calls jet stream love, that is, sexual activity at thirty thousand feet.

260

Kirchhoff, Schundroman 192.

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Schundroman marks a change in pattern for Kirchhoffs men. In previous works, these protagonists never fully recover from their bodily lacks, but rather, use women as means to achieve momentary senses of integrity. This new male protagonist who is capable of full recovery from bodily lack reappears in Kirchhoffs most recent novel to date, Erinnerungen an meinen Porsche (2009).261 If Kirchhoffs protagonists are typically highly mobile and sexual, his protagonist Danny Deserno in Erinnerungen an meinen Porsche comes to a screeching halt. Deserno, a high powered investment banker at the height of the recent global financial crisis, finds himself in a rehabilitation clinic and unable to walk after his former girlfriend Selma attacks his genitals with a corkscrew. The Porsche referred to in the title is the pet name Deserno has given his penis, which is now, as he calls it, a lifeless wreck. Deserno must adjust to life in the clinic, in which both his mobility and his sexual potency (which are directly linked through his reference to the Porsche) have been arrested. The narrative is motivated both by Desernos insistent retelling of the attack story, as well as his anticipation of a weekend in which the three women in his lifehis emasculating hippie mother, his former lover and attacker Selma, and the sexual healer and fellow clinic patient Helenewill converge at the clinic. Deserno is healed in a final scene when he and the two lovers become involved in a bizarre sexual act in which Helene brings him to orgasm manually while he feels Selmas pregnant bulge. As though healed by a religious miraclethis is the first erection and ejaculation in the ten months since the attackDeserno begins to walk. When the women are distracted by the clinics priest, who arrives at the shed for
261

Bodo Kirchhoff, Erinnerungen an meinen Porsche (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2009).

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his own sexual rendezvous with a nurse, Deserno makes his escape from the clinic and from the three women who have contributed to his crippling and healing. Deserno has regained both his sexual virility and his mobility. On the taxi ride to Frankfurt Airport, where he will catch a flight to India, he reveals that he plans to pursue a sexual relationship with his outsourced personal assistant in India, a woman whom he knows only through the mechanisms of global communication and the globalized service industry. In these later works that thematize male anxiety produced by heterosexual encounters with women, Kirchhoff grants his protagonists the ability to overcome their abjection vis--vis women and space. Unlike in earlier novels, in which protagonists are doomed to continue travelling alone, propelled by their abjection of women, protagonists in these later novels settle into a place, overcome their anxieties and bodily lacks, and move on. For overcoming their abjection, they are rewarded with satisfying (or at least potentially satisfying) heterosexual relationships. Although there is no promise that these relationships will endure, they are at least not anxiety-producing. Finally, for these men, regaining sexual potency also means regaining their mobility. Mobility has shifted as a signifier in Kirchhoffs works from being reactive to pro-active. It no longer means the abjection of women and space, but rather, the promise of heterosexual connection and relative psychological and physical integrity. Indeed, in Kirchhoffs later works, hegemonic masculinity can be achievedat least by larger than life charactersand mobility is its signifier. The Abject and the Homosocial: Wo das Meer beginnt and Eros und Asche

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While in the majority of his work, Kirchhoff creates emotionally isolated male characters who demonstrate only a limited ability to connect with women, in two of his later novels he depicts deep emotional relationships between men. Wo das Meer beginnt (2004) and Eros und Asche (2007) privilege their respective protagonists relationships with male friends over more complicated and ambivalent relationships with women. Although the novels thematize male intimacy, neither of the male-male relationships depicted in these final novels is explicitly homosexual. Female characters are the impetus for the meetings between men, and heterosexual sex is a frequent point of discussion. Indeed, the relationships exist in some undefined place on the spectrum that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has termed the homosocial. Sedgwick coined the term homosocial to blur the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual in male relationships. 262 The homosocial describes any arena of male life in which men interact in the absence of women, and a homosocial relationship can range anywhere from professional collaboration in the workplace to mens social gatherings (for example, to watch or play sports) to homosexual relationships. It is important to note that Sedgwicks concept is based on models from English literature, in which she reads heterosexual love triangles as foils for intense emotions between men. In many cases in which men compete for the love of a woman, she argues, the emotions and physical interactions that these male characters share is

262

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985). Sedgwick argues that historically in Western cultures, heterosexuality has been more compulsory for men than for women. Womens friendships have generally been understood as existing on a spectrum and never without an element of the lesbian. She argues that mens relationships should also be placed on such a spectrum and therefore never completely divorced from the homosexual. Sedgwick 2-5.

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often much more intense than their desire for the women ostensibly being fought for. Within the framework of compulsory heterosexuality that delineates strictly between hetero- and homosexual relationships, the female character dispells any suspicion that the men have romantic affection for one another. Although Kirchhoffs male characters do not compete for the affections of women, their homosocial bonds exhibit this triangulation. In Wo das Meer beginnt (2004) and Eros und Asche (2007), Kirchhoff explores a range of possible relationships across the homosocial spectrum, and in investigating these male relationships, Kirchhoff employs space and the abject differently than he had before. Stasis, rather than mobility, becomes the basis for the intimate male relationship. Similarly, the abject becomes an impetus not for alienation from other men (as had been the case with women), but rather, for care and tenderness for the other person. The title of Kirchhoffs 2004 novel, Wo das Meer beginnt, suggests with a spatial metaphor that indefinability will be a central theme in this text. The narrative centers on a series of conversations between the protagonist, a young man named Victor Haberland, and his former school teacher, Doctor Branzger, as they discuss Haberlands alleged rape of a female classmate on a school trip some twelve years before.263 The two men discuss the difficulty of categorizing a sexual interaction (to be sure, their conversations can be infuriating to the reader who recognizes echos of discourses that have functioned historically to excuse perpetrators of sexual assault), all the while their interactions and

263

Branzger is a name that reappears in several of Kirchhoffs texts, sometimes as a secondary characters and sometimes as the protagonist. This is an interesting feature of Kirchhoffs work that stands outside the scope of this project but that warrants further examination.

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behaviors toward one another imply a male relationship that itself becomes ambiguous and difficult to define. Three homosocial triangulations structure the text: the principal one including Tizia, the protagonists former schoolmate and victim of the alleged rape; the second including Frau Corde, the school teacher who led the campaign against Haberland in the subsequent teachers meetings and investigation; and the third including Kristine Kressnitz, the love interest and colleague of Branzger. In discussing these three women, Haberland and Branzger become emotionally intimate. Both the homosocial dynamic and the abject are established in the opening sentences of the novel. Branzger begins the novel by saying: Was ist mit dir, was denkst du? Du denkst, ich htte keine Phantasie, ich knnte mir nicht vorstellen, was an dem Abend zwischen dir und dem Mdchen war, aber ich kann es mir vorstellen, und wie ich das kann, sagte mein alter Lehrer, kaum saen wir uns zum ersten Mal bei einer Kanne lakritzeschwarzem Kaffee gegenber, ich noch beurlaubt und er krank geschrieben.264 The two men will attempt to reconstruct linguistically the event of the alleged rape in order to determine Haberlands guilt, and this reconstruction will become the basis for their friendship. The opening sentences also reveal that Branzger is sick, indicating to the reader familiar with Kirchhoffs works that abject corporality will be a theme in this novel. Because of Branzgers physical limitations, the novel takes place primarily within the interior spaces of his apartment, and this domestic space shapes the gender dynamic

264

Bodo Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 2004) 7: Whats the matter with you? What do you think? You think I dont have any imagination; I couldnt imagine what happened on that evening between you and that girl. But I can imagine itand how, said my old teacher. We had just sat down together for the first time over a pot of licorice-black coffee. I was on vacation and he was home sick.

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of their relationship. Both characters are coded unintelligibly at times, performing both male and female genders. For example, Haberland has employment in the public sphere and has a higher degree of mobility than Branzger. He works for a German cultural institute in Lisbon and travels between Lisbon and Frankfurt. Even within Frankfurt he moves freely, as he goes on dates with Frankfurts mayor (who is a woman in the novel), meets his family at the opera, and shops for Branzger. However, while Haberlands masculinity is signified through mobility, he takes on a more traditionally female role while in Branzgers home. He repeatedly does domestic tasks traditionally assumed by women, including cooking and cleaning, while Branzger allows himself to be served. Haberlands designation as the female of the relationship is, moreover, articulated explicitly in certain moments. For example, when Haberland opens a window in the apartment, Branzger calls him a woman: Ihr Frauen, und ich rechne dich einfach dazu, lftet, um etwas zwischen euch und mich zu schieben, so wie manche Frauen rauchen zu ihrem Schutz.265 While Haberland performs both masculinity outside the domestic sphere and femininity within it, Branzgers gender is even less intelligible because he performs both within the same space. He is sick, which confines him to the home and renders him more limited by his embodiment, both states of being that are traditionally associated with the feminine. This corporality also has sexual overtones in the same scene in which Branzger calls Haberland a woman. Haberland has just discovered him reclining on his bed in his underwear, and Branzger smiles at Haberland with his eyes.

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Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 185: You womenand I simply count you among themopen windows in order to put something between yourselves and me, just like some women smoke for their protection.

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His Kumund, noch voll moreover, appears berhaupt zu allem mglich imstande zu sein.266 The word Kumund (used also in the opening scene of Schundroman to describe the prostitute Schultzs mouth) codes Branzger not only as female, but also as overtly sexual. Perhaps flirting with or propositioning Haberland, he asks Strt dich mein Anblick, soll ich mich wieder zudecken? 267 He plays the role of the seductress, reclining and scantily clad, and when Haberland refuses to react, Branzger changes the subject to something more neutral. Indeed, just as gender trouble prevails in the domestic space, the differentiation between heterosexuality and homosexuality becomes blurred further when both men tell of instances in which they have been implicated in homosexual behaviors. Haberland recounts an exchange with Tizia just prior to the rape, in which she had noticed that he and his best friend Hoederer had slept in the same bed while on the school trip.268 Years later, when Haberland recounts this exchange with Tizia as a motivating factor in the rape, the reader understands the boys compulsion to comply with compulsory heterosexuality as a reaction to this challenge to his sexual identity. In another scene Branzger also tells of a friendship that may have been motivated by homosexual desire. He speaks of a friend in his young adulthood who lost his father and ended up in an unhappy marriage. At the climax of the story, he describes their relationship as deadly and then recounts a kiss between the two men: und seine Lippen sagten mir, da er zwar

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Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 185: puckered lips, still full and to be capable of anything at all Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 185: Does the sight of me disturb you? Should I cover myself? Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 92.

267

268

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noch nicht zu sterben bereit sei, den Tod aber von nun an einkalkuliere, womit sich seine Welt zum ersten Mal mit meiner vermischt hat, wir waren jetzt ein Freundespaar.269 The word pair in German, just as in English, can have romantic connotations, and the authors use of italics points to the double entendre. The implications that both Haberland and Branzger have been involved in very close homosocial (if not homosexual) relationships lend believability to the romantic aspects of the relationship developing between them in the diegetic present. Moreover, Kirchhoff employs the abject to express the intimacy between the two. Whereas in previous texts, the abject was employed most frequently to communicate male characters alienation from other people, and particularly from women, in Wo das Meer beginnt the abject body becomes the basis for affection, compassion, and domestic care. One of the first developments in the relationship between Haberland and Branzger occurs during their third meeting, a point at which Haberland for the first time feels comfortable enough to use the bathroom at Branzgers home. Von meiner Seite war es damals eher eine grundstzliche Scheu, da ich whrend der ersten beiden Besuche . . . kein einziges Mal das Bad oder auf deutsch die Toilette benutzt hatte, obwohl der Kaffee und berhaupt die ganze Situation den Tribut dieser Benutzung, und das hie, der Bitte darum, gefordert htten.270 Branzger seems pleased with Haberlands request to use his

269

Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 133: and his lips told me that he wasnt ready to die, but he counted on death from that point on. With that his world mixed with mine for the first time; we were now a pair.
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Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 50: It was because I had a fundamental timidity at that time that I didnt use the bathroomor in German, the toileta a single time during the first couple of visits, although the coffee and the whole general situation would have justified my request for it.

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bathroom and, with triumphant conciseness, gives him directions to what Haberland calls the most intimate room of the apartment.271 As the relationship between the two men becomes more intimate, Haberland encounters Branzgers bodily fluids. In one horrifying scene, Branzger dances in front of Haberland, cuts his foot on a shard of glass on the floor, and forces Haberland to watch him bleed: Es klaffte auf, sein Fleisch, und das Blut flo nur so, es gab daran nichts zu rtteln, es war wie es war, ich konnte kaum hinsehen, aber ich sah hin . . . . Ich erinnere mich an einen Mix aus Entsetzen und Bewunderung, als der Doktor mit wirbelnden Fusten vor mir getanzt hat, bis er in die Scherbe trat, mehr zu meinem Schrecken als seinem, und sich nach einem Blick zu mirals gehe ihn auch dieser Fu nichts mehr an, wie der Sommer und berhaupt sein Lebendas daumengroe, in Sekunden von Blut verdunkelte Glassstck mit einem Ruck aus dem Ballen zog, um es zu schwenken und den Tanz fortzusetzen, was mir zuviel war.272 Haberlands instinct is to call a doctor, but Branzger refuses and prefers instead to distract them with television. This pattern continues for the remainder of the novel; it becomes increasingly apparent that Branzger is detached from his own fluid, deteriorating body, and Haberland becomes increasingly compelled to care for him and to contain the mess. In another striking scene, Haberland arrives at Branzgers apartment to find it in abject disarray: Die Tr vom Bad war angelehnt, ich ffnete sie nach Polizeiart mit einem Ruck. Der Geruch kam aus der Wanne, von weilichen Klumpen rund um den
271

Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 50-1.

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Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 208-9: It gaped open, his flesh, and the blood just flowed. There was no doubt about it. It was what it was. I could hardly look at it, but I looked . . . . I remember a mixture of horror and admiration as the doctor danced before me twirling his fists until he stepped into the shards, which frightened me more than him, and after a glance at meas though the foot didnt concern him, just like the summer or even his lifepulled the thumb-sized, blood-smeared piece of glass out of the ball of his foot with one jerk, just to wave it around and continue his dance, which was too much for me.

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Abflu, einer verdickten Milch; die leere Tte lag auf dem Boden, locker verbunden mit der Wand durch eine Ameisenstrae.273 The most intimate room in the apartment has become the most abject, and in this moment Haberland realizes that his teacher is dying: Und in dem Moment, als die Angst, die nicht meine war, zuschlug, als Milchklumpen, Ameisenstrae und Stille pltzlich eins waren mit den Tablettenschachteln und sonstigen Flschchen, die unsere Doppelhaushlfte in eine Apotheke verwandelten, kam von jenseits der Tr der leise Anfang von Tell Me.274 This is also the first indication that Branzger might commit suicide. Whereas many of Kirchhoffs earlier characters would react to the declining and bleeding abject body as an impetus to escape from interior space and to travel once again, Haberland remains in the interior space and cares for his respected teacher. He bathes and grooms the elderly man, cleans the apartment, and shops for the most nourishing food. After Branzger commits suicide by cutting his wrists with a razor, Haberland intently cleans and re-wallpapers the apartment according to Branzgers wishes. 275 Haberland finally leaves the interior space only after having restored the respectability of his teacher for whomever might discover the corpse. In leaving the apartment, Haberland indicates that he is removing the last element of the abject: himself. Der Rest war

273

Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 173-4: The bathroom door was ajar. I opened it like the police do with one jerk. The smell coming out of the bathtub was from whitish clumps around the drain, thickened milk. The empty carton lay on the floor, connected loosely with the wall bya column of ants.
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Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 174: And in that moment, as the fear that wasnt mine struck, as clumps of milk, columns of ants, and the stillness suddenly became one with the boxes of pills and other little bottles that turned our half of the duplex into a pharmacy, the quiet beginning of Tell Me came from the other side of the door.
275

Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 279-287.

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Aufrumen, ich durfte nie hiergewesen sein; die Spuren, die zhlen, muten verwischt werden.276 By the end of the novel, the two men have determined that Haberland was probably guilty of raping Tizia. By removing all traces of himself from the apartment, Haberland removes any indication that Branzger had associated with a rapist in his dying days. Kirchhoffs employment of the abject in Wo das Meer beginnt adds weight to the depiction of intimate friendship. Whereas in most cases of the abject in Kirchhoffs work, the protagonist is repelled and moves on to other spaces, in this novel, Haberland time and again overcomes his own repulsion in order to respect and restore the dignity of his friend. Also by employing the abject to depict intense intimacy, Kirchhoff has created a story about a friendship that blurs the distinction between friendship and love. The intense corporal intimacy between the two men and the domesticity that ensues because of it lends the friendship the element of indefinability that the homosocial spectrum describes. Kirchhoff continues with his theme of the indefinable male friendship in a second novel, an autobiographical piece titled Eros und Asche. Ein Freundschaftsroman (2007).277 This non-linear novel recounts the narrators collected memories of his friendship with a certain M who has since died. The narrator recalls M as a person with whom he enjoyed various degrees of homosocial intimacy: as roommates in their boyhood boarding school, as travelling companions, and as adults who advised and cared
276

Kirchhoff, Wo das Meer beginnt 294: The rest was cleaning up. I should never have been here; the tracks that counted had to be wiped away.
277

Bodo Kirchhoff. Eros und Asche. Ein Freundschaftsroman (Frankfurt: Franfurter Verlagsanstalt, 2007).

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for one another emotionally. As in Wo das Meer beginnt, the preferred mode for male intimacy is stasis rather than mobility; although the two characters travel together, stasis marks their most intimate moments. The significance of the mens heterosexuality is relativized in this novel; they have relationships with women, but these relationships are far less important than their mutual friendship. The homosocial triangulations that operate in the novel are weak and gain significance only after Ms death, when the narrator discusses his relationship with M with both his wife and Ms girlfriend. The abject is completely absent for the first time in Kirchhoffs oeuvre. The narrator prefers to describe his friend not in terms of a declining or dead body, but as the person he wishes to remember affectionately as full of ambition, thought, conviction, and physical vigor. Over the course of his oeuvre, his employment of the abject undergoes an evolution. In his early works, abjection is employed as a means for his protagonists to compensate for their own bodily limitations by focusing on women with more severe corporal deficiencies. This misogynist abjection of women lends men a temporary sense of having an integrated ego. Later in his work, the abject becomes coupled with the hyperbolic and the humorous, putting it more in line with the grotesque. The grotesque and the abject mingle, as protagonists absurd worlds are often shaken by abject violence. Also in this turn toward the grotesque, mobility becomes equated with heterosexual connection and potency rather than abjection and lack. Finally, in some of Kirchhoffs later works, the abject becomes an impetus for male homosocial bonding, as men either care for the declining male body or overlook it in order to focus on the friends

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personality. In these later works, the abject loses its function of Othering, perhaps because it is applied to men who consider themselves same rather than to the female Other. Also unlike earlier texts that connect the abject with escape and travel, these later texts connect the homosocial and the abject with stasis and domestic harmony. However, even when the abject is coupled with care rather than violence, reader identification with the protagonists remains tenuous. Kirchhoffs employment of the abject gives the reader the critical distance to reflect both on the alienating heterosexuality that his characters experience and on the varying positions of male friendships across the homosocial spectrum. Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined the ways in which Emine Sevgi zdamar and Bodo Kirchhoff employ the grotesque and the abject to depict their protagonists often alienated relationships with both heterosexuality and the places in which they find themselves. Although neither author writes narratives in which there is a simple relationship between space and sexual freedom, both authors are concerned with empowering their protagonists by putting them in motion. Both zdamars and Kirchhoffs characters must travel in order to experience their sexualities fully and none is capable of settling at the end of the journey. Rather, the journey must continue for the protagonists to feel at ease with their sexualities and their relationships with places. Even in Kirchhoffs works that thematize the homosocial rather than heterosexual relationships with women, the protagonists are left floating at the end of the novel with the loss of the male partner who had anchored them in a place.

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zdamars narrators experience a more direct link between sexual emancipation and mobility, since there are certain spaces and places in which they simply cannot feel free. These coercive spaces and places include the domestic sphere of their parents homes, Turkey in general, and any domestic space with a sexual partner. In these places, zdamars narrators feel restles and are compelled to break off relationships in order to travel again. For Kirchhoff, travel is not a means for self-discovery and development. Rather, in his earlier works, mobility is a means by which male protagonists escape feelings of anxiety caused by encounters with women and alienating foreign spaces. In later works, it represents potency and corporal integrity. Neither zdamar nor Kirchhoff is concerned with the liberation of the other sex. zdamars narrators choice of sexual partner is often utilitarian. The men in her texts, though well developed and hardly interchangeable (in contrast to Kirchhoffs women), are often forgotten when the narrator moves on to her next sexual partner. Her ease of her narrators in detaching is not cruel, and her male characters are portrayed neither as objects nor as people left unsatisfied in their relationships with the narrators. This treatment of men stands in sharp contrast to the way women are treated in Kirchhoffs works. In Kirchhoffs world, women are mostly prostitutes who have neither sexual desire nor agency, and those few women who do display sexual desire or agency are revealed to be perverted. Men seek to develop their own sexual and psychological integrity by purchasing women or making use of women who are otherwise sexually available. Women serve solely as the vehicles to male sexual potency.

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By employing the grotesque and the abject, zdamar and Kirchhoff create the requisite critical distance to examine heterosexuality from an alienating point of view. zdamars narrators often describe themselves in cartoonish fashion as having bulging eyes or wild hair or as looking like a camel or a bird. They have sex with men with physical deformities or who likewise look like animals. This playful distancing of the protagonist disallows reader identification, titillation, or romantic identification. The narrator is, moreover, often distant from the self she is narrating. This playfulness and humor makes sex freer to take different forms. Gender, under this paradigm, also becomes playful and no longer restrictive. Femininity no longer need adhere to its traditional markings within the heterosexual matrix; zdamars narrators experiment with combining femininity and masculinity in playful gender performance. Kirchhoffs use of the abject similarly places emphasis on the distorted body and thus alienates the reader. However, unlike the grotesque, the abject does not make room for heterosexual play. Rather, in Kirchhoffs texts, heterosexuality is deathly serious and a source of great anxiety for his protagonists. Fearing their inability to achieve hegemonic masculinity, Kirchhoffs protagonists create Krperpanzerungen in order to stave off any interplay of the feminine and the masculine within the self. Masculinity is produced in Kirchhoffs works by subjugating women through a subordinating gaze and by dissecting and dismembering their bodies. It is perhaps for this reason that sexual liberation is nearly impossible in Kirchhoffs texts. Men who cannot treat women as sexually autonomous beings can never become sexually liberated and autonomous themselves. They must always depend on the feminine Other to boost their

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masculinity. On the other hand, in those relationships in which masculinity must not be defined against the feminine Other, but rather, is situated along the homosocial spectrum, Kirchhoffs men are most satisfied. The abject takes on new meaning in these texts, supporting a tight bond between men rather than alienating men from women. In the beginning of this chapter, I posed the questions: what can heterosexuality look like from an LGBTQ standpoint? How can literature depict heterosexuality as a positive sexual identity to be examined from an outside point of view? Whether consciously or not, zdamar and Kirchhoff achieve this by thematizing the ambivalences inherent in heterosexuality, and they do this by setting their characters in motion to encounter the sexual and cultural Other. Heterosexuality is unique in that it requires a melding of two opposites and a surrender of the individual to the experience of merging, but always with the danger that the individual may wholly lose his/her distinction as an individual. There can be both joy and anxiety in this act. In aesthetic renderings of gay/lesbian relationships, sameness is the characterizing factor, and in depictions of other queer sexualities and gender, blending is paramount. The ambivalent merging with and separating from the Other is unique to heterosexuality. Both the grotesque and the abject accentuate this ambivalence, though in opposite ways. The grotesque (according to Bakhtin) embraces Otherness in order to connect the individual with the greater world. Within the paradigm of the grotesque, the subject seeks to merge with the Other, and the result is hyperbole and humor. For zdamar, the grotesque functions as a means of aestheticizing her narrators mobility, that is, their quests to make connections in foreign spaces with the sexual Other. Kirchhoff employs

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the abject, on the other hand, to depict his protagonists desire to reject the Other in order to delineate themselves from the rest of their environments. Both these aesthetic categories effectively depict the ambivalences inherent in heterosexualitythe simultaneous attraction to and repulsion by the Other, as well as the process of joining with the Other and then differentiating the self once again. As evidenced by these texts, however, it seems that the grotesque is the more liberating aesthetic mode for heterosexuality because it accepts the Other while at the same time accentuating its Otherness. The abject simply rejects the Other and must be overcome in order for the subject to make connections with other people or spaces. Kirchhoff and zdamars works demonstrate that these ambivalences are what mark heterosexuality as a positive sexual identity. By reading Kirchhoff and zdamar, we see just how thrilling and anxiety producing the heterosexual encounter with the Other can be.

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Chapter 4: Poetically Queer: Androgyny and the Spaces of Gender Ambivalence In the first chapter of this dissertation, I outlined various definitions of queer that groups and individuals alike have used either to designate an identity category or to express a non-heteronormative position regarding gender roles and behaviors. In the chapters that follow, I have traced the employment of queer in contemporary German literature and film, demonstrating that queerness can appear not only in the form of LGBTQ characters, but also as a narrative standpoint or aesthetic framework. In this chapter, I turn to a model of gender ambiguity that long predates queer. Androgyny, I argue, no longer functions as an identity category in the age of queer; yet it endures as a specifically poetic form of queer in literature and film. I build my argument by first outlining the ways in which the androgyne has existed as a pervasive figure in Western culture since Greco-Roman antiquity and across multiple fields of inquiry, including literature, film, art, religion, and politics. I then turn to three examples from contemporary literature and film in which an androgynous figure plays a major role or in which a protagonist becomes androgynous, displaying either double gender or genderlessness. In each of these examples, the androgens tensions regarding gender are reflected in his/her engagement with space. For example, the figure Mavrocordato in Christian Krachts novel 1979 possesses a double gender that relates to his capacity to create new, utopian spaces, as well as to navigate spaces that are usually non-navigable. In a second example, I examine Judith Hermanns genderless first person narrator in the short story Sommerhaus, spter (Summerhouse, later), who resists settling into a gender as s/he refuses to settle into any particular kind of space.

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Finally, I discuss the figure Sibel in Fatih Akins film Gegen die Wand (Head-On). Sibels gender is perhaps the most complex of the examples discussed in this chapter, as it transforms multiple times in the film. During her life in Hamburg in the first half of the film, Sibel exhibits a femininity that is intelligible through the heterosexual matrix. Once in Istanbul, however, she becomes androgynous. Her androgyny oscillates between genderlessness and a double gender before she finally settles into an androgyny that stands in ambivalent relationship to the heterosexual matrix at the end of the film. By exploring these figures as androgynous rather than as queer, transgendered, transsexual, or intersex, I emphasize not their personal identities in the text, but rather how their bi-polar gender functions within literary and filmic configurations of gender, sexuality, and space. The figure of the androgyne endures as a specifically poetic form of queer. The Androgen A powerful, ancient symbol, the androgyn has figured polyvalently in the history of German literature and film. Combining male and female into a single body, s/he has served to personify ambivalent tensions that both individual characters and larger society face. Often, s/he has represented the conciliation of those tensions as well. At times, the androgyne has helped authors and screenwriters imagine new, progressive notions of gender, as s/he confounds traditional, binary gender categories established by the heterosexual matrix.278 At other times s/he has re-affirmed a binary concept of gender by

278

As I discuss in Chapter 1, the term heterosexual matrix was first coined b y Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Butler defines the heterosexual matrix as a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and

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positing heterosexual love as the appropriate combination of the two sexes. S/he has the unique ability to represent tension on the very surface of his/her body, but can also embody harmony (or at least peaceful coexistence) between two genders that are often depicted as being at odds with one another. Indeed, the androgyne has helped authors and screenwriters both express anxiety about a world in crisis and imagine a better world. Scholarship on androgyny in German literature credits the early German Romantics as the first literary movement to employ the androgyne as a common motif and for shaping it as a concept for later generations of authors. For such authors as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, who thematized yearning for a harmonious world (harmony between man and nature, man and God, and the profane and the spiritual), androgyny symbolized a potential for completeness, both in the material world and within the human psyche.279 According to the Romantics, wholeness could be achieved through the merging of complementary opposites, male and female, in the union of heterosexual love.280 Furthermore, androgyny operates not only as a theme in Romantic

make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality (Butler 151). Butler argues that while the heterosexual matrix is likely invisible to those who function well within in itwho perform heterosexual gender and sexual desire appropriatelyit is oppressive to those whose bodies, genders, and desires do not line up within the matrix (6-7, 35-38). In later works, Butler changes her terminology from heterosexual matrix to hegemonic heterosexuality. I maintain the term heterosexual matrix both because of the spatial implications of the term and because I do not read heterosexuality to be necessarily hegemonic or oppressive for all characters examined. Androgyny provides a useful counterpoint to the heterosexual matrix, confounds it, and can be considered a space outside of it. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
279

Sara Friedrichsmeyer, The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism. Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and the Metaphysics of Love (Bern: Peter Lang, 1983).
280

Friedrichsmeyer 45-61.

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literature, but also as part of the narrative projects of its authors.281 Authors like Schlegel, Novalis, and Clemens Brentano strove for an androgynous authorial voice, believing the male author must transcend his masculine identity in order to become an artist.282 By the end of the nineteenth century, the androgyne began to take on new significations in the cultural imaginary. In art and literature of the fin-de-sicle, the androgyne represents possibilities of sexual emancipation, exemplified in both the dandy and the androgynous emancipated woman.283 It was also employed to represent thematic connections between transcendental beauty and sterility and between homoerotic desire and death in Dekadence literature, since the androgyne, operating outside the heterosexual matrix, cannot procreate.284 Scholarship on the androgyne in fin-de-sicle literature reads Thomas Manns character Tadzio, the beautiful and sickly

281

Silke Horstkotte, Androgyne Autorschaft. Poesie und Geschlecht im Prosawerk Clemens Brentanos (Tbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004).
282

Although the androgyne served as an allegory for the authors transcendence beyond the perceived limitations of his gender for the Romantics, this ideal in fact supported a hetero-normative gender binary. Feminine qualities were seen as subordinate to masculine ones and merely filled in where masculine ones lacked. Interestingly, however, Silke Horstkotte reads J.W. Goethes female character Mignon in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as exemplifying this concept of the androgynous artist; Mignon departs from a traditional femininity to embody both the artist (coded masculine) and the muse (Horstkotte, 12). For a more complete overview of androgyny in Goethes work s, see Helmut Fuhrmann, Der androgyne Mensch. Bild und Gestalt der Frau und des Mannes im Werk Goethes (Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 1995).
283

Klaus Peter Luft, Erscheinungsformen des Androgynen bei Thomas Mann (New York: Peter Lang, 1998) 14-15.
284

See: Ralph Tegtmeier, Zur Gestalt des Androgyns in der Literatur des Fin de sicle, Androgyn. Sehnsucht nach Vollkommenheit, hrsg. Ursula Prinz (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1986) 113-117.

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young boy who becomes the object of the male narrators erotic desire in Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1912), as exemplifying the embodiment of these larger themes.285 In the early twentieth century, androgyny became an important aesthetic element in Weimar cinema. The androgyne was a fitting symbol for cinematic projects that focused on the expression of large scale social anxietiesanxieties about an increasingly fast paced speed of life, the perceived disappearance of individuality in the age of industrialization, and a feminization of the white collar work force. The character Cesare in Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari, (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), for example, is an androgynous man who has lost his agency as an individual (and as a man) and must submit to forces larger than himself. As in many films of the period, in Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari, masculinity in crisis is expressive of larger societal crises.286 Conversely, Marlene Dietrichs famous androgynous dress, which included mens suits, top hats, and cigars, represented a new agency for women to control their sexualities during the Weimar era. However, as Patrice Petro demonstrates, androgynous fashion for women was only briefly enjoyed. It was met with harsh social criticism from both the left and the right, as its critics feared a social castration of men. Both effeminate masculinity and masculine femininity would soon be squelched under the Nazi regime, as the range of acceptable gender roles became increasingly narrow. 287

285

Luft 16-19 and Tegtmeier 116.

286

See: Richard McCormick, From Caligari to Dietrich: Anxieties about Sex and Gender in Weimar Cinema and Culture, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 15-37.
287

Patrice Petro, The Joyless Streets (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989). See in particular pp220-22. See also McCormick, ibid.

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Perhaps not surprisingly, the androgyne again became an important symbol in post-war German literature written by women. In feminist fiction by Irmtraud Morgner and Christa Wolf, among others, the androgyne symbolizes the utopian ideal of a society without fixed gender roles.288 For example, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming and Vasiliki Karandrikas read the double gendered narrator in Ingeborg Bachmanns Malina, as exploring the fracturedness of the female psyche and the possibilities of psychic wholeness through the integration of the Jungian anima/animus or male/female aspects of all peoples personalities.289 Although the androgyne appears today almost exclusively in the aesthetic world (since other identity categories like transgender, intersex, and queer have replaced androgyny as viable identity categories in the real world), its roots predate the literature of the German Romantics and can be found in many different mythological, religious, cultural, and political discourses. One of the oldest depictions of androgyny comes from Platos Symposium, in which Aristophanes tells of an original race of people who possessed double bodies, some of whom possessed double genders. Zeus separated these double-bodies into single people with single genders to punish them after an attempted attack on the gods.290 Greek and Roman mythology give us many further

288

Armin Zger, Mnnerbilder-Frauenbilder. Androgyne Utopie in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur, Dissertation (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991). This dissertation catalogs the motif of the androgyne and its utopian implications in German literature since 1945.
289

Carol Anne Costabile-Heming and Vasiliki Krandrikas, Experimenting with Androgyny: Malina and Ingeborg Bachmanns Jungian Search for Utopia, Mosaic 30.3 (September 1997): 76-87.
290

In this race of people, there were three categories of gender: man-man, woman-woman, and manwoman. These double bodies were joined back to back and possessed eight limbs and two sets of genitalia. When these original people attempted to climb into the heavens, Zeus punished them for their hubris and

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instances of androgynous and hermaphroditic figures, including Tiresius, the doublesexed diviner; Hermaphroditus, the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite who became double gendered when a water nymph fused herself with him; the often androgynously coded Hermes, Dionysus, and Orpheus, among others; as well as the statue of Aphroditos, the bearded Aphrodite.291 In addition to its roots in Greco-Roman antiquity, the androgyne appears in many cultural and religious contexts around the globe, where it represents a primordial wholeness before the fall of man, as well as the promise of humankinds capability to reach that wholeness again in salvation.292 The ancient Jewish text Kabbalah depicts the first person, Adam (Adam Kadmon), not as a man, but as an androgen.293 This androgynous Adam appears again in Hermeticism and Gnosticism, as well as in the mystical cult Alchemy. For the Alchemists, the androgyne was a particularly important symbol. They believed they could achieve spiritual transcendence by creating perfect balances between earthly materials. The androgyne symbolized the balance of tension
split them into two bodies. Since that time, people have been driven to find a partner, or the other half lost in that generation of original people. See. Luc Brisson, Sexual Ambivalence: Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in Greco-Roman Antiquity, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 72-85.
291

For the most complete sketch to date on androgyny and hermaphroditism in Greco-Roman cultures, see ibid.
292

For essays on androgynous imagery and iconography in both Western and non-Western art and culture, see: Ursula Prinz, hrsg, Androgyn, Sehnsucht nach Vollkommenheit (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1986). Essays of particular relevance are: Helmut Uhlig, Androgynie in der buddhistisch-tantrischen Bildwelt, 237-242; Marianne Yaldiz, Androgynie in der indischen Kunst, 243-246; Monika Rohrbach-Benton, Die religise Bedeutung der Zweigeschlechtlithkeit in Indoneisien am Modell der Semar-Figur, 247-250; Peter Thiele, Yin and Yang, 251-254; Wolfhart Westendorf, Mann-weibliche Konzeptionen im Alten gypten, 255-261; and Josef Franz Thiel, Androgynie in Afrika, 262-268.
293

Ewald Jackwerth, Alchemie und Artverwandtes. Der Traum von der seelischen und materiellen Vollkommenheit. Einfhrung in eine merkwrdige Gedankenwelt (Bochum: Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, 2005) 91, 144.

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between male and female characteristics that the alchemists believed exist in all elements.294 The androgyne has also been an important symbol in the Christian tradition. The early modern Protestant mystic Jakob Bhme described spiritual transcendence for humans only as the androgynous reunion of Adam with his female side. This reunion could be achieved through a love of Christ, whom Bhme described as the androgynous masculine virgin, and through marriage, which Bhme described as an earthly manifestation of love for Christ.295 Furthermore, Renaissance painting depicts religious Christian iconography, including Christ, angels, and devils, as androgynous. In these paintings, androgyny figures ambivalently, signifying beauty (angels), evil (devils), and transcendence (Christ).296 Androgyny also finds its place in modern medical, legal, and political discourses.297 Perhaps the most relevant of such discourses for the topic at hand is the

294

Hans Biedermann, Das Androgyn-Symbol in der Alchemie, Androgyn. Sehnsucht nach Vollkommenheit, hrsg. Ursula Prinz (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1986) 57-74; Jackwerth 93-4.
295

Friedrichsmeyer 29-31.

296

Luft 9; Lutz S. Malke, Weibmann und Mannweib in der Kust der Renaissance, Androgyn, Sehnsucht nach Vollkommenheit, hrsg. Ursula Prinz (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1986) 33-56.
297

In his book Making Sex. Laqueur describes the medical professions hand since the eighteenth century in changing cultural perceptions of biological sex, from a one-sex model in ancient times (in which women were imperfect forms of men) to a two-sex model (in which women and men were separate beings, polar to one another and non-reconcilable). See: Thomas Laqueur, Chapter Three: New Science, One Flesh, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990). The most widely discussed and paradigmatic text in academic discourses analyzing the legal ramifications of double gender is Michel Foucaults introduction to the posthumously published memoires of Herc uline Barbin. Barbin was a nineteenth century French intersex person who was assigned a female sex at birth, only to be discovered to have male genitalia during his/her pubescent years and reassigned a gender before the courts. Although the humiliation and stigma of the discovery led Herculine to commit suicide, Foucault concludes that her/his ambivalent gender effectively confounded the binary knowledge created and mandated by the courts, as well as thwarted the capability of the courts to enforce their knowledge/power on her/his body. Michel Foucault, introduction, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a NineteenthCentury French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon, 1980) vii-xvii.

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way in which various schools of feminism have imagined their goals as congruous with the symbolism of androgyny. Carolyn Heilbruns Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973) was a highly influential and much debated call for androgyny as an ideal for gender equality. It was followed by a special publication of the journal Womens Studies in 1974 entitled The Androgyny Papers, devoted to the question of whether androgyny was a valid ideal within the larger goal of achieving gender equality. Perhaps most famously, Gail Rubin wrote of androgyny in her classic essay The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex (1975): The dream I find most compelling is one of an androgynous and genderless (though not sexless) society, in which ones sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love.298 In this influential essay, which formulated the defining distinction between sex and gender that would shape feminist thought about identity for the next two decades, Rubin envisions androgyny as a social program that could dismantle unequal power relations inherent in binary systems of gender. Although androgyny was widely debated in feminist spheres during the 1970s and 80s, however, it did not persuade all schools of feminism. In her book chapter Androgyny, Feminism, and the Critical Difference, Kari Weil describes counter movements, led in the United States by Elaine Showalter and in

298

Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex (1975), Feminist Theory. A Reader, ed. Wendy Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski (Mountain View: Mayfield Publishing Company, 2000) 242.

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Europe by the French Feminists, who considered androgyny to be a masculine ideal and instead urged women to embrace their femininity.299 Indeed, as illustrated in the examples above, the androgyne has served in multiple eras and multiple discourses as both a symbol of social instability and as a symbol of perfection and harmony. Yet since the late 1980s, the amount of scholarship examining androgyny as a motif in German literature and film has dwindled. A quick search of the MLA, WorldCat, and BDSL databases with the keywords Androgyn, androgyne, Zweigeschlechtigkeit (hermaphroditism), drittes Geschlecht (third gender), and similar terms yields numerous monographs, articles, and book chapters from the 1970s and 1980s. However, scholarship on androgyny trickled off into the mid- and late 1990s. This fact begs the questions: why would a motif that has endured since antiquity suddenly disappear in literature and film? If it still exists, why would it cease to interest scholars? My hypothesis is that it has done neither. The 1990s saw multiple major changes in the way we understand gender. Historically, the term androgyny has been used in an undifferentiated manner, becoming a catch-all category to describe hermaphrodites, bisexuals, effeminate males, and masculine women.300 Today, the terms have changed. A person or figure who

299

Karen Weil, Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992). See: Chapter Six: Androgyny, Feminism, and the Critical Difference , 145-169. Weil sees aspects of the utopian ideal of the androgyne persisting today, albeit in other forms of feminism, particularly the cyborg feminism proposed by Donna Harraway and in Luce Irigarays concept of a feminist ethics in which both femininity and masculinity can be preserved and respected as separate kinds of desires that meet in alliance of one another.
300

The term bisexual has also undergone a change in meaning in recent times. Prior to feminists differentiation between sex and gender, bisexuality meant displaying both sexes (and genders). Today

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might previously have been called androgynous is now gay, lesbian, queer, transgendered, transsexual, or intersex, to name only a few identity categories. Yet I wonder if we were too quick in giving up the term androgyny. While currently used terms like transgendered and queer serve to blend gender polarities and to free people from binary notions of personal gender identity, the term androgyny emphasizes a polarity that can be useful for understanding certain motifs in contemporary German literature and film. Christian Krachts 1979: Double Gender, Androgyny, and Non-Places In my first example, I turn to a text that draws on traditional associations between androgyny and utopias. The figure Mavrocordato in Christian Krachts novel 1979 (2001) demonstrates an ability to transform both his own gender and the spaces around him as he guides the anonymous narrator/protagonist through non-places.301 1979 is the absurd and frightening tale of the unnamed first-person narrators journey from Tehran to Tibet on the eve of the Iranian revolution in 1979. It opens as the narrator, a twentysomething homosexual German man and his lover, Christopher, arrive in Tehran to research Persian architecture for Christophers new book.302 At a party in Tehran that same evening, the narrator makes the acquaintance of a curious figure named Mavrocordato, who demonstrates a keen interest in the narrator. After Christopher

bisexuality refers to sexual attraction to both men and women. I use the term in this sentence in its historical sense, as someone displaying both male and female gender traits.
301

As I discuss on pp. 22-28 in Chapter 1, both Michel Foucault and Marc Aug have developed concepts of spaces that they term non-places. Mavrocordato and the narrator traverse and inhabit non -places of the Foucaultian variety.
302

Christian Kracht, 1979 (2001; Mnchen: DTV, 2006).

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overdoses on drugs at the party and dies in a public hospital later that same night, the narrator finds himself alone in Tehran. He is taken to Mavrocordatos home, from which point Mavrocordato sends him on a soul-searching journey to Tibet. While in Tibet, however, the narrator is arrested by Chinese military, is believed to be a member of the CIA because he looks American and speaks Chinese, and eventually finds himself doomed to a strict and brutal life in a Chinese prison camp. By the end of the novel, however, the narrator has reached a new psychological plane of being; he finds his insane happiness in relinquishing his individual identity and in conforming instead to the ideology and discipline of the camp community. Mavrocordato appears only twice briefly in the novel but is a key figure in the narrators journey. An alchemist and political subversive, Mavrocordato is capable of negotiating spaces that others cannot. He can also negotiate between two genders, at times transforming his own body to create the appearance of double gender. Mavrocordato demonstrates a clear-sighted overview of the political situation in Iran, has a mastery over the topography of the city of Tehran, and is capable of manipulating a narrator who lacks a firm identity. The narrator, who is coded in contrast to Mavrocordato as nave, disoriented, and passive, sees Mavrocordato as a prophet. By the end of the novel, however, it is unclear whether the narrators faith in Mavrocordato has led to his greater benefit or demise. 1979, like many of Krachts other works, has been described in the scholarship as an examination of the presumed binary of East/West and its destruction in the age of

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globalization.303 Kracht presents his readers with a harsh critique of Western individualist values, of American (and European) decadence, of postmodernisms preoccupation with the image, and pop cultures preoccupation with the superficial, without, however, giving preference to Eastern fundamentalist ideologies (represented in 1979 by Islamic fundamentalism in Iran and Maoism in China). Rather, Krachts narrator runs from one dangerous side of the binary (Western decadence, superficiality, and self-destructive indulgence in drugs,) to the other (an unyielding adherence to a militantly applied form of Maoism). Kracht demonstrates that both sides are managed by ideologies that lead to the self-destruction of its adherents, but he also shows the permeability of the binary East/West, employing pop references on both sides to show the ubiquity of Western popular culture. For example, in an early scene in China, the protagonist encounters a troupe of Tibetan monks, whose appearance he likens to something from Star Wars and who break into song, performing My Prayer by The Platters and dancing in choreography that reminds the narrator of Busby Berkeley musicals.304 Additionally, the figure Mavrocordato operates outside this binary.

303

See: Joannes Birgfeld, Christian Kracht als Modellfall einer Reiseliteratur des globalisierten Zeitalters, Aktien des XI. Internationalen Germanistikkongresses Paris Germa nistik im Konflikt der Kulturen, hrsg. Jean-Marie Valentin (Bern: Lang, 2007) 405-411. Oliver Flade und Christoph Rauen, Schwere Unterscheidungen und light entertainment Text/Kontext -Analyse am Beispiel von Christian Krachts 1979, Heuristiken der Literaturwissenschaft. Disziplinexterne Perspektiven auf Literatur, hrsg. Uta Klein, u. a. (Paderborn: mentis Verlag, 2006) 547-563. Martin Hielscher, Pop im Umerziehungslager. Der Weg des Christian Kracht. Ein Versuch, Pop, Pop, Populr. Popliteratur und Jugendkultur , hrsg. Johannes G. Pankau (Bremen: Universittsverlag Aschenbeck & Isensee, 2004). Richard Langston, Escape from Germany: Disappearing Bodies and Postmodern Space in Christian Krachts Prose, The German Quarterly 79.1 (Winter 2006): 50-69.
304

Kracht, 142. In Krachts work, globalization means the dissemination of popular culture and thereby the collapse of binaries like familiar/foreign. Kracht employs these themes associated with pop culture and globalization in his larger body of work, both in his journalistic and in his fictional texts. See: Birgfeld; Hielscher.

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Mavrocordato evokes themes of utopia, androgyny, and alchemy to dismantle conventional notions of space and navigation, thus giving the reader a key to understanding the narrators precarious position (both mental and spatial) in the prison camp at the end of the novel. 1979 is divided into two parts, the first titled Iran, Beginning of 1979 and the second China, End of 1979. This division of the novel into two major locations emphasizes the importance of the two settings of the narrators experience, as well as sets the historical and political contexts for the narrative. It also marks a division in the way in which the narrator engages with space. In the first half of the novel, the narrator demonstrates an incapacity to orient himself spatially and depends instead on his lover, Christopher, and later Mavrocordato, for orientation. In the second half of the book, the narrator finds himself on a journey that he must undergo alone. The relationship between the narrator and Christopher is coded less as an emotional intimacy than as a spatial dependency. Christopher is the source of the narrators mobility and orientation in the world, since Christophers work and education provides the opportunity for their travels. Both Christopher, an architect, and the narrator, an interior designer, work in fields dedicated to the production and arrangement of space, yet the narrator sees his career as inferior to and dependent upon Christophers. Whereas architecture deals with the larger structural integrity of materials and the shaping of public spaces, the interior decorator deals with small, manageable interior spaces, with surfaces, and with the decoration of the larger spaces produced by the field of architecture. Christopher reinforces the narrators sense of inferiority by calling him

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simple and empty and by belittling his knowledge of form, color, design, and designer labels. Christophers death in the early chapters of the book leaves the narrator in a disoriented state. During his first day alone in Tehran, the narrator expresses his incapacity to interpret either his feelings or his surroundings: Ich hatte whrend des langsamen Erwachens ein Gefhl des Nirgendwoseins . . . . Ich war berall, whrend ich aufwachte. . . . Ich lie mich, wie man sagt, von der Menge treiben . . . . Ich lief stundenlang durch die riesige Stadt. . . . Es schien, als gbe es kein Zentrum mehr, oder gleichzeitig nur noch ein Zentrum und nichts mehr darum herum.305 In this scene, the narrators sense of loss is depicted as spatial disorientation. Without the guidance of Christopher, the narrator has the feeling of existing nowhere (a spatial descriptor that will appear time and again throughout the novel). He cannot decide whether the world exists without a center or only as a center with nothing around it.306 Unable to take direction himself, he spends the evening wandering aimlessly, letting himself be led by the swarms of people in the city streets. At the same time as the narrator is coded as spatially disoriented, he also demonstrates an anxiety toward sex. In the opening scenes of the text, as the narrator and
305

Kracht, 92-94: As I woke up slowly, I had the feeling of being nowhere . . . . I was everywhere as I awoke. . . . I let myself be driven by the crowd, as they say . . . . I walked for hours through the enormous city. . . . It appeared as though there were no longer a center, or simultaneously only a center left and nothing around it. (Note: all translations of quotes from 1979 from German into English are my own.)
306

The description of Tehran as a city both with and without a center resembles Roland Barthes concept of the non-Western city in his essay Center City, Empty Center. Barthes describes the non -Western city as confounding the values invested in the Western binary center/periphery. He describes Tokyo (admittedly, a Tokyo of his own invention) as containing a center that is non-accessible and in which everything of material importance is situated on the periphery. The center possesses a forbiddenness that endows it with importance, though not precedence over the periphery. The city both has and lacks a center. Roland Barthes, Center City, Empty Center, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (1970; New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

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Christopher drive through Tehran by car, the narrator describes his relationship with Christopher as having long since lost both the intellectual and the corporal intimacy it once had. In one instance, the narrator wishes to touch Christopher, but feels inhibited: Ich wollte seine Hand in meine nehmen, . . . lie es aber sein.307 Soon after, he describes an emotional and intellectual distance between the two: Christopher und ich [hatten] uns leider seit ber einem Jahr nicht mehr viel zu sagen . . . das heit, es war schwierig geworden in letzter Zeit, mit ihm zu reden . . . .308 The narrators sexual identityhe clearly identifies as a homosexual manexists independently of possible sexual or emotional intimacy. The narrators sexual anxiety is further demonstrated in several instances in which the narrator is confronted with sexual advances from other men and is confounded and frightened by these advances. In an early episode, a taxi driver named Hasan attempts to dance with the narrator after locking Christopher and his wife out of their marital bedroom, but the narrator keeps his distance.309 In another instance, the narrator and Christopher find themselves in the middle of a hash forest behind the house where a party is taking place. The owner of the house orders Christopher and the narrator to undress themselves and then attaches a strange machine to his body, a box with several long hoses hanging from it. Presumably, the machine that has to do with either sex or drugs, or perhaps both, and the narrator refuses to participate in the sexual/drug ritual.
307

Kracht 25: I wanted to take his hand into mine . . . but let it alone.

308

Kracht 26: Christopher and I unfortunately [had] little to say to one another for over the past year . . . I mean, it had become difficult to talk with him lately . . . .
309

Kracht 28-29.

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Ich ekelte mich. Ich holte aus und schlug ihm mit der flachen Hand ins Gesicht.310 Later, in the public hospital where Christopher is treated after overdosing, the narrator witnesses two terminally ill men having sex in a hospital bed. Time and again, the narrator describes instances of sex that are frightening and alienating to him.311 In only one scene does the narrator indicate a comfort with sexual intimacy. In an obscure scene at the end of Part One, the narrator and Mavrocordato lie in bed together after having pulled a prank together using a security system in Tehran. The narrator hesitates to sleep in the same bed as Mavrocordato, but agrees after Mavrocordato assures him he wont bite. Given the imagery with which the narrator has depicted sexual advances in earlier scenes, this statement can be understood as Mavrocordatos assurance that he will make a sexual advance on the narrator. Seeking security in Mavrocordato and fearing the journey to Tibet that Mavrocordato has prescribed for him, the narrator expresses his wish to stay in bed with Mavrocordato.312 Instead of allowing the narrator to fall into a familiar patternin his previous relationship, the narrator had sought both emotional security and spatial orientation through ChristopherMavrocordato sends the narrator on a journey in which he will be responsible for his own orientation. Although Mavrocordato will not send the narrator on his journey to Tibet until halfway through the novel, his capacity to manipulate both the narrator and the spaces

310

Kracht 45: I was disgusted. I lashed out and slapped him in the face.

311

This theme in 1979 might be understood as a continuation from his earlier novel, Faserland, in which the heterosexual narrator/protagonist is also repulsed and frightened when encountered with the possibility of sex. See: David Clarke, Dandyism and Homosexuality in the Novels of Christian Kracht, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 41.1 (Feb 2005): 36-54.
312

Kracht 117-8.

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around him is established early in the text. Mavrocordatos connection with non-places (as well as their production and representation) is established in the first scene in which he appears. At the party in Tehran, Mavrocordato strikes up a conversation with the narrator which soon turns to a discussion of utopias. Mavrocordato introduces himself as the grandson of the founder of Cumantsa, an early twentieth century utopian anarchistDadaist experiment, a joke in the form of a state313 that was eventually dissolved by the government of Bucharest.314 The narrator and Mavrocordato find immediate common ground in the topic of utopias, when the former tells of having visited the ruins of Ibn-alSabbah, previously the site of a utopia-turned-prison. Mavrocordato becomes intrigued with the narrator, describing the narrator as pure, ein offenes Gef, wie der Kelch Christi (an open vessel, like the Holy Grail) and wide-open, recasting Christophers characterizations of the narrator as simple and empty as positive attributes.315 Mavrocordato then makes a prophecy, a riddle that remains unanswered at the end of the novel: Sie werden in Krze halbiert werden, um dann wieder ganz zu sein. . . . Es kann auch sein . . . da Sie halbiert werden, nicht Ihre Beziehung, sondern Sie krperlich, wirklich halbiert.316 Both the narrators

313

Kracht 51.

314

Richard Langston identifies an intertexual reference regarding Mavrocordatos grandfather in Peter Lamborn Wilsons essay A Nietzschean Prank dEtat. In this essay, the fictional character Georghiu Mavrocordato III has inherited and leads a fictional town with an experimental structure of self-rule based on Nietzschean philosophy. Langston 66.
315

Kracht 60 (original use of English and original emphasis).

316

Kracht 55-57 (original emphasis): You will soon be halved in order to become whole again. . . . It could also be . . . that you are halved, not your relationship, but you physically, literally halved.

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susceptibility to Mavrocordatos guidance as well as the foreshadowing that he will inhabit a utopian space are established in this first conversation. Mavrocordato is coded as having a special connection with space, and particularly the non-place of the utopia, because of his family history. This connection with non-places affords him a deep, secret knowledge that allows him to make prophecies. Mavrocodatos association with non-places is also evident in a later scene in which the narrator is introduced to Mavrocordatos living space. After the death of Christopher, the narrator wanders into a restaurant in Tehran and is then brought to Mavrocordatos apartment through a disorienting series of underground tunnels. Nach einer Weile hrte ich auf meine Schritte zu zhlen. . . . Links und rechts von mir ertastete ich mit den Fingern feuchte Lehmwnde, sie waren glitschig, und es roch nach Erde.317 The disorienting underground network of tunnels that connects Mavrocordatos apartment to other spaces in the city can be understood as operating under two models found in spatial theory: Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris rhizomes and Jacques Derridas crypt.318 The rhizome, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a structure without a logical or linear construction, rather like a tangled ball of plant roots. Any one

317

Kracht 101: After a while I stopped counting my steps . . . . I touched the clay walls to the left and right of me with my fingers. They were slick and it smelled like soil.
318

Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Introduction: Rhizome, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 3-25. Jacques Derrida, Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Foreword to The Wolf Mans Magic Word: A Cryptonoymy, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, trans. Barbara Johnson (1976; Minneaplis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) xi-xlviii.

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strand on the rhizome is connected to many others, randomly and without reason.319 The tunnels beneath the city of Tehran that connect Mavrocordatos home to the random restaurant (and presumably many other places in the city) can be understood to operate under the illogical structure of the rhizome. Mavrocordato belongs to a network of political subversives, and the tunnels that evade the conventional logic of mapping provide the appropriate avenue for communication and transport for subverting the political apparatus in operation above ground. Once arriving in the apartment, the narrator has the sense of being in an underground caveich hrte keinen Straenlrm, keinen Lautgenausogut knnte die Wohnung tief im Erdinneren liegen, so wenig hatte ich akustisch das Gefhl, zu wissen, wo ich war320and only discovers later, upon leaving the apartment, that it is situated on the ground floor of an apartment building. Located both subterranean and above ground, Mavrocordatos apartment evades the logic of mapping. It is both an unofficial, un-locatable space (and thus one fitting for political subversion) and an ordinary living space, a residential apartment in a side-street of Tehran. In that it exists on both planes, Mavrocordatos apartment resembles Derridas crypt, which exists both officially and

319

The rhizome provides an alternative model to the linear logic that shapes Western though, which Deleuze and Guattari symbolize with the tree. The tree has a definite linear structure, out of which certain parts grow logically from one another. The rhizome has no linear, logical structure, but rather, interwoven strands that more resemble the twisted roots of the tree. Deleuze and Guattari propose the rhizome as a model for their book, A Thousand Plateaus, as well as a model applicable to creative intellectual thought. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3-25.
320

Kracht 103: I heard no street noise, no soundthe apartment could just as well lie deep inside the earth, I had such little acoustic sense of where I was.

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hidden away in the city.321 As J. Hillis Miller writes, A crypt . . . upsets all the logic of this mapping. It is there and not there, neither inside nor outside, or both inside and outside at once. It cannot be located on any map. The avenues by which it might be approached confound the protocols of mapping.322 Derridas crypt builds on Freudian psychology, representing the impossibility of a completely separate conscious and unconscious. It represents the irrepressibility of those urges and traumas that normally reside in the unconscious and the inevitability that these traumas and urges will surface. With this framework, one can understand Mavrocordatos apartment as the site of political subversion, insofar as the crypt provides the space for the official and the unofficial to meet, for the unofficial to come to the surface and disrupt the official. The official has no access to the unconscious unofficial because the unofficial is unmappable. The unofficial however, has the capacity to surface through the crypt. Indeed, within Mavrocordatos living space, the official and the unofficial converge and provide the capability for subversives to plan attacks that disrupt the political apparatus in Iran. During the narrators meeting with Mavrocordato in his apartment, the narrative takes a sharp turn. Mavrocordato instructs the narrator to leave Tehran and undertake a task that awaits him in the East. But before leaving Tehran, Mavrocordato explains, the narrator must participate in a dangerous political prank. In preparation for this prank, Mavrocordato undergoes a gender transformation: Als er zurckkam, trug er die Haare

321

Derrida, xi-xxi. Hillis J. Miller, Derridas Topographies, Topographies (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1995) 291-315. 303.

322

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wieder hochgesteckt. Er hatte den Kaftan ausgezogen und war in ein schwarzes, enganliegendes Ensemble gestiegen, dazu trug er dunkelblaue, weiche chinesische Ballettschuhe mit einer Gummisohle. . . . Mavrocordato hatte lange seidige Wimpern.323 Mavrocordato is coded as possessing female characteristics when he fashions his hair in an up-do and wears ballet shoes, as well as when the narrator comments on his beautiful eye lashes. At the same time, the narrator describes Mavrocordatos outfit as enganliegend (tight), implying that the clothing delineates the contours of his male body. Mavrocordato belongs in this instance to the category of androgyny in which gender is doubled and in which both a female gender and a masculine sex are explicitly present. The narrator, by contrast, does not demonstrate the capability to transform gender, even after he also puts on ballet shoes. Mavrocordato then takes the dismayed and disoriented narrator on an unusual path to a rooftop, the site of their coup: Wir stiegen auf die Fensterbnke eines Gebudes, kletterten eine Feuerleiter hoch und hangelten uns vorsichtig an einem Sims entlang bis zum Vordach. Ich sah nach unten, der Blick war frei auf den groen Platz unter uns. Mir wurde leicht schwindelig.324 Underway both to and from the coup, the

323

Kracht 109: When he came back, he was wearing his hair up again. He had taken off the caftan and had climbed into a tight, black ensemble, which he wore with soft, dark blue Chinese ballet shoes with rubber soles. . . . Mavrocordato had long, silky eyelashes. This scene evidences Mavrocordatos capability to undertake multiple kinds of metamo rphoses. In addition to Mavrocordatos gender transformation, a dinner of black foods in this scene is designed to transform Mavrocordato and the narrator into invisible figures. Finally, the transformation of Mavrocordatos shadow into an insects is a direct reference to Franz Kafkas Die Verwandlung.
324

Kracht 110: We climbed onto the windowsills of a building, up a fire escape, and made our way carefully, step by step, along a ledge to the awning. I looked down; the view was open over the big plaza beneath us. I became dizzy.

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narrator repeatedly describes feeling disoriented, dizzy, and unsure of his location. Mavrocordato, by contrast, is capable of navigating usually non-navigable spaces like window sills, underground places like the tunnel beneath his apartment, and places up high, like rooftops. In the scene in which he plays his prank, Mavrocordato demonstrates his ability not only to navigate spaces, but also to transform existing spaces and even create new ones. Once on the rooftop of a building overlooking a public plaza, Mavrocordato pulls a small television monitor and cables from his backpack and proceeds to attach the television to the security camera mounted on the roof over the plaza. Mavrocordato then points the camera toward the television, creating an optical illusion on the monitor: Er drckte einen Schalter, und auf dem Monitor war jetzt der kleine Fernseher selbst zu sehen, in sich hundertmal gebrochen und verkleinert; er verlor sich in der Mitte des Bildschirmes im Unendlichen.325 The closed-circuit apparatus creates a feedback loop, and the guards watching over the plaza through the security camera will now see only an infinitely regressing series of television sets, a mis-en-abyme of empty screen space. Mavrocordatos prank functions in two ways. First, Mavrocordato is capable of rearranging space. By replacing the space of the plaza with the space of a blank television screen, Mavrocordato effectively undermines the power structures that regulate that plaza. Mavrocordato has turned the eye of surveillance in upon itself, and the space that is left there is only a fractured, depthless emptiness of screen space. A second reading of the prank yields the insight that Mavrocordato is not only the master of
325

Kracht 111: He flipped a switch, and on the monitor one could see then a small television, itself fractured and miniaturized a hundred times within itself until it disappeared in the middle of the screen.

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navigating and re-arranging space, but also a producer of new space. As Richard Langston argues, Mavrocordato participates in the postmodern production of images and simulacra, thereby creating spaces that are untouchable by real-world power: If, according to Baudrillard, hyperreality entails the looping of reality around itself in pure repetition, Mavrocoradatos unilateral gift is nothing more than a simulation of the simulation, a postmodern message to which the modern Iranian state apparatus in flux cannot respond. 326 Mavrocordato undermines power structures not merely by turning the eye of surveillance on itself, but rather, by creating a space that cannot be governed by anyone. The space within the camera screen represents a non-place, a utopia in which power structures no longer function. This screen space is reminiscent of Michel Foucaults utopian mirror. In his essay Of Other Spaces, Foucault describes utopias as sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.327 Like the mirror, Mavrocordatos technological trick creates a space that both does and does not exist. It mirrors back to the guards the structures of surveillance that they impose in the real world. Yet the space it reflects is real only in the sense that it exists on the material surface of a monitor screen. What it depicts belongs to space outside of space. This nonspace of the television monitor has, however, a real effect on the space of the outside

326

Langston 65. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces (1967), trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22-27.

327

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world. The plaza that is to be monitored through this surveillance camera is no longer under surveillance. It has become a temporary free zone that exists outside the power structures normally enforced by surveillance. Mavrocordatos prank also creates the illusion of space without time. Although the apparatus records in real time, the result is a static image, more like a photograph than a video. Images have an inherent time element to them. Video in real time describes (or at least purports to describe) the fluid forward motion of the present; photographs depict an unalterable historical past. Mavrocordatos trick, however, confounds this connection between the static image and time, and the result is a utopian space. The utopia is, by archetype, timeless. Its system of time and space functions outside the forward progression of history. In a utopia, therefore, a static image may not differ substantially from a real-time video image. The utopian space must then be understood as symbolic rather than real, once the element of time has been made irrelevant. Mavrocordatos prank is a symbolic one rather than a real political strategy, though his symbolic prank does have at least temporary effects on the real world. However, Mavrocordato knows that his utopia cannot endure. This is evidenced after the completion of the prank, when Mavrocordato urges the narrator to hurry: Kommen Sie, wir mssen verschwinden. Es hlt nicht einmal eine ganze Nacht, wenn wir Glck haben, dann wenigstens ein paar Stunden. . . .Wir mssen jetzt los.328 The two live in a real world in the midst of large historical change. There exist political consequences for those who wish to hinder the

328

Kracht 111: Come on! We have to disappear. It wont last the entire night; if we have any luck, at least a few hours. . . . We have to go now. (original emphasis)

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political apparatus by disrupting authoritarian uses of space and time; the utopian image has its function, but ultimately cannot endure in the real world. It is no surprise that Mavrocordato is capable of creating utopian space, for we know that the creation of utopias is in his family history.329 The key to understanding Mavrocordatos gender transformation, however, lies in his description of his prank as alchemy. Within the ancient form of mysticism known as alchemywhich sought spiritual perfection through the accomplishment of material perfection, most famously the transmutation of elements and minerals into goldthe androgyne was an important symbol of balance. In his search to achieve perfection, the alchemist strove to balance the male with the female aspects that were presumed to exist in all elements, as well as within himself. Androgyny was thus something to be striven for in the alchemical world. 330 Mavrocordato considers himself an alchemist, and so his gender transformation may be understood as necessary for creating the balance to perform the feat of transforming space. Just as alchemists believed androgyny to be benefitial in their endeavor to transform more common elements into gold, Mavrocordato exhibits both male and female characteristics in order to transform a normal structured space into a utopian one. The imagery of the rooftop scene also has explicitly androgynous elements. The camera is often conceived of as a phallic apparatus in feminist film theory and one that

329

See: Birgfeld 408-409; Langston 66-67. Jackwerth 91-94, 253-257.

330

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determines the symbolic order of the visual field.331 When turned toward the television set, it finds its counterpart in the dark abyss of the screen. In this scene, penis and vagina are turned in on one another, creating a closed-circuit system that undermines the phallic visual order of the normally functioning surveillance system. Not only has Mavrocorato created a utopian space in his coup, he has created one through an androgynous apparatus. After the episode of the coup, Mavrocordato prepares the narrator for a journey to Tibet. The narrator must complete a task, presumably having to do with Mavrocordatos prophecy the evening before. The narrator must first travel to Mount Kailasch. Dieser Berg wird in vielen Religionen als das Zentrum des Universums angesehen, als WeltLotos. . . . Vier der grten Flsse Asiens entspringen fast genau unter ihm. Kailaschs vier Seiten entsprechen dem Lapislazuli und Gold, dem Silber und Kristal.332 He must then circle the mountain clockwise in order to erase his personal offenses and thereby bring a degree of order back into the world. This scene mirrors the earlier one in which the narrator describes the world as being a center with nothing around it. If Mount Kailasch is the center of a universe in chaos, then the narrator will restore its centrality by circling it, that is, by being the peripheral something that reinforces the center.
331

Laura Mulveys influential essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) posits the cinematic apparatus as adhering to a patriarchal visual system that gives heterosexual males a two-fold scopophilic pleasure in identifying with male protagonists while also sexualizing women onscreen. Feminist film theorists like Mary Anne Doane, Miriam Hansen, Molly Haskell, Amy Lawrence, Gaylyn Studlar, and Linda Williams, among others, have debated the validity of Mulveys claims and used it as a springboard for their own readings of the ways in which gender is implicated in the visual (and aural) cinematic apparatus.
332

Kracht 114-5: This mountain is considered by many religions to be the center of the universe, as the world-lotus. . . . Four of the Asias largest rivers spring from almost exactly beneath it. The four sides of Kailasch represent lapis lazuli, gold, silver, and crystal.

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During the second half of the book, the narrator slips slowly into insanity. He undertakes the journey that Mavrocordato prescribes for him, but with one deviation. He does not circle Mount Kailasch only once, but rather, joins a troupe of Tibetan monks and circles the mountain multiple times because he is so pleased with the experience of being part of a collective, far away from his individualist concerns in the West. He is soon arrested by Chinese military who mistake him for a Tibetan (and later for a CIA agent) and is eventually placed in a Chinese labor camp. The narrator reads the works of Mao Zedong and quickly adapts himself to the camp community. He learns to be a good prisoner, to do the work demanded of him, to undertake self-critiques before the other prisoners, to give blood even after his body weight plummets an unhealthy amount, and to supplement his own meager food rations by raising insects and maggots in the garbage.333 By the end of the novel, the narrator has the feeling of being in a place that does not exist: Nicht einmal Vgel waren am Himmel zu sehen, der Ort, an dem wir und tausende anderer Menschen lebten, war ausgestorben, so leblos wie die Oberflche des Mars. Wir waren verschwunden, es gab uns nicht mehr, wir hatten uns aufgelst.334 Imprisoned amid a Chinese desert where the prisoners can see atomic bomb testing in the distance, the narrator finds himself in a non-placeand he could not be happier. Far

333

Kracht intentionally employs images that recall the Holocaust and the Nazi era in both Faserland and 1979. The narrator in Faserland suspects all elderly people of having participated in Nazism and treats them accordingly with disrespect; in 1979, the image of the swastika (with its multiple layers of historical meaning) appears in the scene in which the narrator arrives at Mount Kailasch.
334

Kracht 181: Not even birds were to be seen in the sky. The place where we and thousands of other people lived was dead, as lifeless as the surface of Mars.

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from his former world of decadence, beautiful objects, drugs, and a sexual identity that caused him much anxiety, the narrator is satisfied fitting into the community in which his roles and tasks are clearly defined, the rules strictly enforced, and his identity relinquished. Ich war ein guter Gefangener. Ich habe immer versucht, mich an die Regeln zu halten. Ich habe mich gebessert.335 By the end of the novel, the narrator is proud of his accomplishments in the prison camp. His crowning achievement, he boasts, is that he did not eat human flesh while imprisoned. He is also proud of having reduced his weight to thirty-eight kilograms, a degree of weight loss of which he had never been capable in the outside world. This passage reads with a frightening irony, as the reader realizes what the narrator does not: both that he is starving to death and that he no longer operates within a society that aestheticizes thinness. No longer able distinguish between the demands of the two worldson the one hand, the restrictive body aesthetic of the Western world that often requires dieting, and on the other, the ideology of the camp that requires even more severe bodily sacrificethe narrator finds his bliss in simply obeying. The end of the novel leaves many questions unanswered. The reader is left only to speculate at Mavrocordatos reasons for taking interest in the narrator, for involving him in the prank in Tehran, and for sending him to the East. It is unclear whether Mavrocordatos intentions are genuine or political, and Mavrocordato does not appear again in the second half of the book to explain himself. However, Mavrocordatos prophecy that the narrator will be halved in order to become whole again (the riddle
335

Kracht 183: I was a good prisoner. I always tried to abide by the rules. I improved myself.

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that drives the narrative) fulfills itself on multiple levels. The narrator has lost his lover and is halved in the aristophanic sense.336 He has also lost his reason by the end of the novel, the half of the self that, according to Western thought, elevates humans above the animals. Finally, the narrator mentions at the end of the story that his body weight is down to half of his previous weight, thus confirming Mavrocordatos prediction that the narrators body would be halved physically. However, Mavrocordato also prophesizes that that narrator will become whole again, which is not the case by the end of the narrative. We leave the narrator in a frighteningly reduced state. His final sentences Ich war ein guter Gefangener. . . . Ich habe nie Menschenfleisch gegessen indicate that he has been reduced beyond even the basest level of human dignity. 337 As Richard Langston writes: In the end, the reader is left with but a fragment of a character whose remaining identity claims are few.338 If psychological integrity is a measure of wholeness, then the narrator is still halved at the end of the novel, and Mavrocordatos prophecy has proven incorrect. On the level of narration, however, we have evidence of someone who has perhaps transcended that fractured condition (if, perhaps, to find a different kind of wholeness from what the reader would expect).339 The descent into madness is narrated lucidly by the first person narrator who stands in an unspecified time and space
336

See footnote 290. Kracht 183: I was a good prisoner. . . . I never ate human flesh. Langston 64.

337

338

339

Flad and Rauen address the problem of the narrator in their work, reading him as an unreliable narrator (554). I believe the narrator has transcended the binary sane/insane and is thus capable of narrating both his previous sanity and his descent into madness.

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outside the framework of the narrative. Perhaps one can understand Mavrocordatos prophecy, then, not as predicting the protagonist we know at the end of the story, but rather, the condition of the narrator telling us the story much later. This narrator inhabits a non-place that transcends binaries like East/West, time/space, sane/insane, and perhaps even male/female and heterosexual/homosexual. To get there he has taken a journey through physical non-places like the ruins of the former utopia Ibn-al-Subbah, the nonspace of Mavrocordatos apartment, the alchemical non-space of the television monitor, and that of the prison camp in China. By taking a journey through non-places, the narrator has been halved, emotionally (through the loss of Christoper), psychologically (through the loss of his reason), and physically (losing half his body weight). Yet he exists somewhere afterward, capable of telling his often frightening, often absurd story. The narrator is no longer halved and exists in non-space. Judith Hermanns Sommerhaus, spter: Genderless Androgyny and Smooth versus Striated Spaces In her short story, Sommerhaus, spter, Judith Hermann creates a figure who exhibits a second type of androgyny. Rather than possessing characteristics of both genders, as Mavrocordato in Krachts text does, the narrator-protagonist of Sommerhaus, spter seems to possess no gender at all. This unnamed first person narrator is never referred to with a gendered pronoun, but rather, with only ich and du. Furthermore, the narrator practices bisexual, non-monogamous sex and can therefore not be oriented within the heterosexual matrix of gender. Secondary literature on Sommerhaus, spter assumes a female narrator without grounding this assumption

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in textual evidence or argument. Only Georg Mein mentions the possibility of a nonfemale narrator, but dismisses the possibility as immaterial to his argument. However, even the central relationship that structures the plot is gender ambiguous, as the narrators friend and former lover, a man named Stein, is coded as both heterosexual and bisexual in the text. With Sommerhaus, spter, I contend, Hermann puts her reader in a precarious position vis--vis the narrator. The narrator resists settling into a gender identity, as the reader is challenged to resist the inclination to imagine a gender for him/her.340 Equally as interesting as the narrators androgyny is his/her inability to settle into any particular space or place.341 The most important categories organizing space in this short story are the urban spaces of Berlin and the rural spaces of Brandenburg, a division that regulates social identity for the narrator.342 The narrative codes Berlin as a place where free love and a bohemian lifestyle are possible, while Brandenburg represents a

340

Georg Mein, Judith Hermann: Sommerhaus, spter, Erzhlungen der Gegenwart. Von Judith Hermann bis Bernhard Schlink (Mnchen: Oldenburg, 2005) 69-78. 70.
341

The very title of the story, Sommerhaus, spter (Summer House, Later), indicates the narrators incapability of settling into space. S/he avoids settling into space by suspending the decision in time. Secondary literature on Sommerhaus, spter has focused on the time element in the title. See Antonie Magen, Nichts als Gespenster. Zur Beschaffenheit von Judith Hermanns Erzhlungen, Verbaltrume. Beitrge zur deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur, hrsg. Andrea Bartl (Augsburg: Winer, 2005) 29-48. Marc Schweska, Judith Hermanns Glcksgefhle,sthetik & Kommunikation 34 (2003): 151-154.
342

Helga Meise argues that the connection between movement through different spaces and the search for a stable identity is a common theme in contemporary literature written by women. She reads protagonists in Hermanns Sommerhaus, spter, Julia Francks Liebediener (2001) and Inka Pareis Schattenboxerin (2001) as moving through Orten mit Idenititt, Relationen und Geschichte und solchen ohne Idenitt, Relationen und Geschichte (places with identity, relations, and history and those without identity, relations, and history). That is, they move through Augan places and non-places in their searches for identity. Helga Meise, Orte und Nicht-Orte bei Julia Franck, Inka Prei und Judith Hermann, Fruleinwunder literarisch, ed. Christiane Caemmerer (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2005) 125-150. For a discussion of Augs non-places, see Chapter 1 of this dissertation, pp. 26-28.

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heterosexual, bourgeois way of life. However well delineated this binary might be for the narrator, however, s/he remains incapable of making any active decision regarding which space or place to inhabit and thus remains in a precarious position regarding space and identity in the text.343 The narrators difficulty settling into places (and thus into a social and gender identity) is further complicated through his/her relationship with Stein. Coded as both bisexual and heterosexual in the text, Stein has the capability of navigating both urban and rural spaces and therefore problematizes the binaries the narrator sets for him/herself regarding gender, space, and place. At the same time, as a result of the romantic relationship with Stein, the narrator feels unease at the potential of being assigned a female gender and thus being oriented within the heterosexual gender matrix. Sommerhaus, spter depicts a direct relationship between space and social identity. My queer reading of this narrator (taking cues from the text to read the narrator as androgynous rather than as female) will demonstrate how concretely gender identity is entwined with the habitation and traversal of spaces for Hermanns characters.

343

Secondary literature describes a larger trend in Judith Hermanns works of characters who prefer to passively dream about happiness and a stable identity rather than to actively seek them. Characters continually remain in a precarious position regarding space and identity. See: Thomas Borgstedt, Wunschwelten: Judith Hermann und die Neuromantik der Gegenwart, Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 5 (2006): 207-232. Antonie Magen, Nichts als Gespenster. Zur Beschaffenheit von Judith Hermanns Erzhlungen, Verbaltrume. Beitrge zur deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur, hrsg. Andrea Bartl (Augsburg: Winer, 2005) 29-48. Christian Rink, Nichts als Gespenster. Zur Idenitittsproblematik in den Erzhlungen von Judith Hermann, Grenzen der Identitt und der Fiktionalitt, hrsg. Ulrich Breuer (Mnchen: Iudicium, 2006) 112-125. Uta Stuhr, Kultur der Sinnlosigkeit oder die Paradoxien der modernen Sinnsuche. Judith Hermanns Er zhlungen Nichts als Gespenster, Fruleinwunder literarisch, hrsg. Christiane Caemmerer (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2005) 37-51. Brigitte Weingart, Judith Hermann. Sommerhaus, spter, Meisterwerke. Deutschsprachige Autorinnen des 20. Jahrhunderts, hrsg. Claudia Benthien und Inge Stephan (Kln: Bhlau, 2005) 148-175.

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Sommerhaus, spter opens as the narrator receives a phone call from Stein, a former lover who has just bought a house in Brandenburg and wants the narrator to be the first person to see it. Surprised at Steins wish, the narrator reluctantly agrees. The drive out of Berlin into Brandenburg provides a frame narrative for the narrators reflections on his/her previous relationship with Stein: Die Beziehung zu Stein, wie die anderen das nannten, lag damals schon zwei Jahre zurck. Sie hatte nicht lange angedauert und vor allem aus gemeinsamen Fahrten mit seinem Taxi bestanden. Ich hatte ihn in seinem Taxi kennengelernt.344 The narrator explains that Stein is, in a sense, homeless and both works and lives in his taxi when he is unable to live with friends. S/he describes their brief bout at domesticity some two years before, when Stein had moved into his/her apartment and s/he threw him out three weeks later. Within that time, he had entered the narrators circle of friends and since then proceeded to live successively with other members of the group, sleeping with them all, both men and women: Er zog zu Christiane, die unter mir wohnte, dann zu Anna, zu Henriette, zu Falk, dann zu den anderen. Er vgelte sie alle, das lie sich nicht vermeiden, er war ziemlich schn, Fassbinder htte seine helle Freude an ihm gehabt.345 Two years later, Stein has bought a house in rural Canitz, and the narrator disapproves of Steins decision to leave Berlin.

344

Judith Hermann, Sommerhaus, spter (1998; Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2003). 140: The relationship with Stein, as the others called it, had already been over for two year. It hadnt lasted long and consisted mostly of rides together in his taxi. I had met him in his taxi.
345

Hermann, Sommerhaus, spter 142: He moved in with Christiane, who lived in the apartment beneath mine, then to Anna, to Falk, then to the others. He slept with them all, which was unavoidable. He was quite attractive. Fassbinder would have been delighted with him.

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The narrators previous experience with Brandenburg consists of group outings, in which his/her circle of friends rented country homes as spaces in which to indulge in drugs and sex. For the narrator, Brandenburg represents a set of values opposite to those that s/he associates with Berlin: Wir saen . . . in den Grten und Husern von Leuten mit denen wir nichts zu tun hatten. Arbeiter hatten da gelebt, Kleinbauern, Hobbygrtner, die uns haten und die wir haten. Den Einheimischen gingen wir aus dem Weg, schon an sie zu denken machte alles kaput. Es pate nicht. Wir klauten ihnen das Unter-unsSein, entstellten die Drfer, Felder und noch den Himmel, das kriegten sie mit, an der Art und Weise, wie wir da umhergingen im Easy-Rider-Schritt, die abgebrannten Jointstummel in die Blumenrabatten ihrer Vorgrten schnippten, uns anstieen, echauffiert. Aber wir wollten da sein, trotz allem.346 The narrator and his/her friends reaffirm their identity as bohemian Berliners through the sharp contrasts between city and country, conservatism and free love/drugs, and bourgeois and artist types that their presence in Brandenburg illustrates.347 The circle of

346

Hermann, Sommerhaus, spter 143: We sat . . . in the gardens and houses of people we didnt have anything to do with. Workers had lived there, small farmers, and amateur gardeners who hated us and whom we hated. We avoided the locals. Even to think of them ruined everything. It wasnt right. We took from them their sense of being just among themselves, blemished the villages, fields, and even the sky. They got that from the way we walked around with our Easy Rider gait, flicked the burned butts of our joints in their flower beds and front lawns, rough-housed with each other, excited. But we wanted to be there, despite everything.
347

Katja Stopka points out that characters in Hermanns larger body of works tend to inhabit spaces outside of Berlin with grostdtische[m] Selbstbewutsein, (urban self -confidence) whether in the countryside in Sommerhaus, spter, in the Caribbean, the United States, or elsewhere. Katja Stopka, Aus nchster Nhe so fern. Zu den Erzhlungen von Terzia Mora und Judith Hermann, Bestandsaufnahmen. Deutschsprachige Literatur der neunziger Jahre aus interkultureller Sicht, hrsg. Matthias Harder (Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 2001) 147-166. Helmut Bttiger likewise describes the characters incapability to engage with the places they inhabit:Auch diese Orte sind austauschbar, berall findet man jenes fremde, schne und hliche Berlin, die Figuren...finden doch immer wieder dasselbe (Also these places are interchangeable. Everywhere, they find that foreign, beautiful, ugly Berlin. The characters always find the same thing). Helmut Bttiger, Nach den Utopien. Eine Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Wien: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2004). Bttiger attributes this characteristic to being the first generation to have grown up with globalization. Biendarra connects Hermanns characters inabilities to engage with their surroundings with their inabilities to communicate or to make real connections with one another. Anke S. Biendarra, Globalization, Travel, and Identity: Judith Hermann and Gregor Hens, Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 5 (2006): 233-251.

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friends shows its disrespect for bourgeois values and aesthetics by using the houses for free love and indulgence in cocaine and marijuana, by disposing of their joints in the neighbors flower beds, and by presenting a marked casualness with their bodies in their dress and mannerisms. Helga Meise describes Berlin in Hermanns story as an Augan non-place that does not provide spaces for stable identity formation.348 Rather, Berlin consists of streets and transitional spaces where people pass by one another without forming real relationships. Berlin can only be determined negatively as a place when the characters leave it for Brandenburg. In Sommerhaus, spter Berlin wird geographisch vor allem in ihren Auenbezirken oder in den Straen greifbar.349 Brandenburgers participate in this reciprocal affirmation of identities by painting Berliner raus! (Berliners leave!) on their fences.350 Yet even as clearly delineated as the divisions between Berlin and Brandenburg are for the narrator, s/he expresses ambivalence toward Steins purchase of a country home. On the one hand, the narrator sees his/her skepticism validated. The house is old and dilapidated, and the narrator is afraid to go near it: Das Haus sah aus, als wrde es jeden Moment lautlos und pltzlich in sich zusammenfallen. . . . Das Haus war ein Schiff. Es lag am Rand dieser canitzschen Dorfstrae wie ein in lange vergangener Zeit gestrandetes, stolzes Schiff. . . . Das Haus war schn. Es war das Haus. Und es war eine

348

Helga Meise, Orte und Nicht-Orte bei Julia Franck, Inka Prei und Judith Hermann, Fruleinwunder literarisch, ed. Christiane Caemmerer (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2005) 125-150.
349

Meise 145: [Berlin] is geographically tangible mainly in its suburbs or in the streets. Hermann, Sommerhaus, spter 142.

350

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Ruine.351 At the same time, however, s/he sees beauty in the proud ruin, the stranded ship. Stein is wholeheartedly enthusiastic and speaks of renovating it. He wants to create a place for the narrator to visit him, even live with him.352 Incapable of sharing Steins enthusiasm, the narrator expresses his/her disapproval of the house and disappoints Stein. The two drive back to Berlin in silence. The narrators relationship with Stein begins and ends in an automobile. Their romantic relationship begins when the narrator hires Stein to take him/her to a party, and their friendship ends, essentially, after the two have visited Steins house two years later and he has driven the narrator back to Berlin. In the cultural and literary imaginary, the automobile has multiple, often contradictory significations. It represents the freedom of mobility, can make foreign space familiar, and can make familiar space seem foreign. More importantly, perhaps, is its potential to represent sexual freedom (Germany has long imported images from American television and cinema that sexualize the experience of driving a car, as well as of backseat sex in parked cars and taxis), but this freedom is stipulated as a fixed, monogamous, heterosexual one. The automobile figures ambivalently in Sommerhaus, spter, as it evokes these multiple paradoxical associations. Steins taxi has the capacity to transform the narrators perceptions of

351

Hermann, Sommerhaus, spter 148 (original emphasis): The house looked as though it would collapse into itself, suddenly and silently, at any moment. . . . The house was a ship. It was situated on the edge of a village road in Canitz like a proud, long-stranded ship. . . . The house was beautiful. It was the house. And it was a ruin.
352

Georg Mein reads the ship and ruin metaphors as an expression of Steins hopes for the relationship between the narrator and himself. The house represents vestiges of a past; he hopes to renovate the house just as he hopes to re-initiate his past romantic relationship with the narrator. Mein 73-77.

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space. It also signifies sexual freedom and mobility, while at the same time preparing the way for a heterosexual, bourgeois relationship between the two. The taxis capacity to transform space is illustrated most clearly in the scene in which the narrator recalls cruising the Frankfurter Allee with Stein for the first time. S/he describes traversing the rainy boulevard, repeatedly, for an hour, smoking and listening to music, until s/he becomes disoriented and alienated from the familiar spaces of the city: Mein Kopf war vllig leer, ich fhlte mich ausgehhlt und in einem seltsamen Schwebezustand . . . . Die Stalin-Bauten zu beiden Seiten der Strae waren riesig und fremd und schn. Die Stadt war nicht mehr die Stadt, die ich kannte, sie war autark und menschenleer, Stein sagte: Wie ein ausgestorbenes Riesentier, ich sagte, ich wrde ihn verstehen, ich hatte aufgehrt zu denken.353 Stein and his automobile create a context in which the narrator becomes alienated both from the familiar spaces of the city and from his/her own sense of self. The narrator employs both corporal and spatial metaphors to describe his/her experience of disorientation and alienation. S/he describes both him/herself (his/her head in particular) and the streets as empty. S/he feels hollowed out and in a state of suspension, just as s/he describes the city in similar terms. The narrator has stopped thinkingthat is, s/he has stopped relying on a sense of self or a coherent identityin the moment in which s/he can no longer interpret the spaces of the city. The scene reads like a drug-induced experience, beautiful but ambiguous, romantic and post-apocalyptic. Of course, the city is quite unlikely to be empty. The
353

Hermann, Sommerhaus, spter 141: My head was completely empty. I felt hollowed out a nd in a strange state of suspension . . . . The Stalin-era buildings on both sides of the street were giant and foreign and beautiful. The city was no long the city that I knew. It was autarchic and uninhabited. Stein said: like an extinct prehistoric animal, and I said I understood him. I had quit thinking. Georg Mein points out a parallel between this scene and the scene in which the narrator visits Steins house. In both instances, the old and extinct are described as beautiful . Mein 72.

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Frankfurter Allee is a major boulevard in Berlin and is never without traffic or people. For the narrator, however, Stein and his taxi are capable of transforming the Frankfurter Allee, ridding the urban space of its distinct characteristics and social significations. To borrow terms from Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Stein and his taxi have the capacity to transform striated space into smooth space.354 In their work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari conceptualize two main categories of space: striated and smooth. Striated space is marked and delineates specific places, differentiated spaces, structures, and organizations of space. The city becomes striated when we look at buildings in terms of our own use for them, assign them specific meaning, and situate them in relation to other buildings that have meaning for us. In striated space, the point, and not the vector, is important. In smooth space, on the other hand, the differentiation of kinds of spaces becomes less important and the movement through space takes precedence. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the two kinds of space are not physically different; nor are the categories oppositional. Rather, they describe different subjective experiences of space that can even flow into one another for the individual. For example, a space as smooth as an ocean or desert can become striated when one tries to navigate it; likewise, a city can become smooth for the city nomad or the flaneur, who walks aimlessly to experience the motion and energy of the city.

354

Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, 1440: The Smooth and the Striated, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 474-500.

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In this particular scene in Sommerhaus, spter, the normally striated spaces of Berlin become smooth. The individual landmarksthe buildings, intersections, and specific points on the map that make the Frankfurter Allee distinctare no longer important; more significant is the narrators experience of travelling through space past them. Moreover, the narrator experiences the city not only visually, but rather through multiple (perhaps even heightened) sensory perceptions. As they drive, Stein and narrator smoke and listen to music; they feel their motion through the city sensorially rather than interpreting it intellectually. Smooth space, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is space that one experiences through the senses. The narrators description of him/herself as empty, hollow, and in a state of suspension in this scene fits the narrators character on a larger scale. As the narrator moves through space, as well as in and out of relationships, s/he demonstrates his/her propensity to suspend any stable identity. Throughout the story, the reader learns more about the identities of the narrators friends, where they work and what they like to do, than about the first person narrator.355 Helmut Bttiger has written that in her larger body of works, Judith Hermann geht es darum, das leere Zentrum zu benennen356 and in Sommerhaus, spter, one can read the narrator him/herself as the leere[s] Zentrum (empty center). After this initial driving scene, the narrator tells of riding in Steins taxi through the boulevards of Berlin, down country streets, and on the highways. The narrator enjoys driving with Stein because he has the capability of keeping them in
355

Mila Ganeva describes the anonymity of the narrator as serving a narrative strategy that lends the reader a sense of uncertainty. The readers uncertainty belongs to the aesthetic effect of the text. Ganeva 270.
356

Bttiger 295: For Judith Hermann, the point is to name the empty center.

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smooth space, that is, in a space where identity can be suspended. The narrators relationship with Stein thrives on being in a constant state of motion. There is, however, a basic problem with the narrators attraction to Stein and his taxi. The automobile implies freedom, but also has heteronormative implications. When two people ride together, one person drives while the other person is driven around. In this relationship, Stein always drives and navigates, taking the active role, while the narrator takes the passive (and thus in the heterosexual matrix, female) role.357 Furthermore, the car makes for an exclusive relationship. When Stein and the narrator ride in the car together, they are not among their circle of free-loving friends. They exist only in relationship with one another, at least for the duration of their time in the car. In addition to having heteronormative implications, then, the car also creates the structure for a monogamous pairing. The relationship between Stein and the narrator thus always borders on the heterosexual monogamous while they are in his taxi. Steins purchase of a house in Brandenburg marks a further step toward a traditional gender order that the narrator is not wholly willing to partake of.358 The

357

Even if we were to read the narrator as biologically male, his/her gender can still be considered intelligible as female, given Judith Butlers concept of a heterosexual matrix that establishes gender through the performance of roles aligned with binaries such as active (masculine)/passive (feminine). See Judith Butler, Chapter 2: Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
358

Antonie Magen reads the house as a symbol of Steins utopian notion of social stability and family. Magen 45. Katja Stopka reads it as a symbol of masculine fantasy of domesticity that goes up in flames when not reciprocated by the narrators adherence to a female domestic role. Stopka 162. Helga Meise reads the house as a place, with identity and a history, as opposed to the non -places like streets and transit spaces Hermanns characters are used to inhabiting . Meise 146 -7. Christian Rink and Thomas Borgstedt discuss the house in terms of a conservatism in Hermanns larger body of work, expressed through the repeated thematization of domesticity, as well as in her non-experimental narrative style and in her unwillingness to engage with political issues in her work. Rink117-118; Thomas Borgstedt,

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purchase of a house is a clear, traditional signifier for a long-term, monogamous, perhaps even reproductive relationship. The imagery of domesticity becomes even stronger when a neighborhood child insists on watching as Stein and the narrator explore the house together. However, the narrator has indicated his/her disavowal of domesticity in multiple instances earlier in the story, first when the narrator describes having ejected Stein from his/her apartment after only three weeks of living together and then later more explicitly when s/he describes his/her disdain for conservative bourgeois values that s/he sees existing in the rural space of Brandenburg. Perhaps most importantly for the narrator, Steins purchase of a country home represents his rejection of both Berlin and of the migratory lifestyle symbolized by his taxi. It is a rejection of the smooth spaces that had been the basis of his relationship with the narrator and a wish to settle into a specific kind of space, a striated space that represents heterosexual monogamy. For the narrator, the house represents the opposite of what s/he identifies with in Berlin. There is no freedom to move through space or to practice bisexual free love. Gender, sexuality, and space are striated to accommodate a bourgeois, monogamous, hetero-normative framework. If the narrator were to move to the countryside with Stein, s/he would also be choosing to settle into a (female) gender. The narrators description of the house as a stranded ship expresses his/her feelings toward settling in this manner. Unlike the automobile, which can move freely through the streets of Berlin and the countryside, the stranded ship is a symbol of lost freedom, that is, of a mobility that has become arrested.
Wunschwelten: Judith Hermann und die Neuromantik der Gegenwart, Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 5 (2006). 207-232.

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It is curious, however, that the narrator never completely rules out moving into the house with Stein. After the two return to Berlin, Stein disappears, and after some time the narrator receives postcards from him asking him/her to visit. S/he keeps the postcards in a drawer, always putting off the decision to go to Stein. In the final scene of the story, the narrator is in bed with Falk (a man in the group with whom Stein has also had an affair) and reads a newspaper article that Stein has sent anonymously. In the newspaper article s/he learns that Steins house has burned down and that the police suspect arson. S/he sets the newspaper article aside with the postcards and thinks, later. Although the narrator despises the lifestyle that the country house represents to him/her, s/he puts off the decision either to move in with Stein or to reject his offer. The decision can always come later; it can always be suspended. Helga Meise describes this temporal delay in spatial terms: [D]as Ich geht auf Steins Angebot, zu ihm zu kommen, nicht ein, sondern verschiebt die Entscheidung auf spter. Die Suche nach einem festen Ort wird zum Aufschub, zur Distanznahme, gleichsam zur Verschiebung des Ortes selbst.359 The space can remain abstract, less striated, and less real for the protagonist if the decision to either move to it or stay away from it remains suspended temporally. This final scene has strong implications for gender. In a final act that both affirms and destroys the heterosexual order, Stein has taken the active role in making the decision to destroy the house, and thus the possibility of domesticity, while the narrator remains passive. The narrator remains in the realm of free love, drugs, and city life. S/he remains
359

Meise 137: The narrator does not respond to Steins offer to visit him, but rather, delays th e decision until later. The search for a stable place turns instead into a deferment, an act of keeping oneself at a distance, also a distancing of the place itself, as it were.

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suspended from gender identity or clear sexual orientation. S/he remains with Falk, the falcon, the road map. Stein, the stone, the sedentary, is no longer a possibility.360 Hermann draws direct connections between gender and space in this short story. Gender and sexual identity are closely connected with the spaces the narrator inhabits and traverses as s/he negotiates the possibilities of living in the country or the city and of living in a monogamous heterosexual relationship or remaining in an open, bisexually androgynous community. The narrator also describes emotional experience and the suspension of identity in both corporal and spatial terms in the scene in which Stein smoothes space for him/her. The concepts of smooth and striated space take on another dimension when one uses them to examine gender in this text. For the narrator, smooth space represents freedom from one stable identity and from the confines of one particular gender. The striated space of the country house connotes domesticity, monogamy, and a heterosexual order. Settling into a house would also mean that the narrators gender is striated, determined, delineated. The narrator would become female, and this gender would be a reference point for his/her identity within the relationship with Stein, as well as in the community. Stein, however, represents a bridge between the striated and the smooth; he is capable of operating in both realms. He smoothes space for the narrator at the beginning

360

Secondary literature notes the symbolism of Steins name (Mein 73, Rink 117) while leaving Falks name to interpretation. I see two possibilities for interpreting Falks name. One could read it as a derivative of falcon, and thus a symbol for freedom. One could also read it as referencing the Falk company, which produces German road maps. Either possibility would be fitting for understanding the narrators choice of partner at the end of the short story.

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of the story, and then asks the narrator to live in striated space. Stein is both mobile and domestic; he is both bisexual and heterosexual.361 His taxi represents this paradox; it provides both sexual freedom and the context for a restrictive life within the heterosexual matrix of gender. Stein bridges these dichotomies, but his trajectory toward a heterosexual monogamous lifestyle is ultimately the wrong choice for the protagonist. And yet there is a sense of loss at the end of the story. When the protagonist says later as the last word of the narrative, one gets the sense that s/he is no longer referring to the decision to move in with Stein (this would be illogical, since the possibility has been destroyed). Rather, one gets the sense that later is when s/he will deal with the emotional loss of his/her friend, as well as the loss of a possibility. This is a very ambivalent loss, typical of the emotional state of Hermanns characters, as Brigitte Weingart describes them: Verluste [werden]von Utopien wie von Liebesobjektennicht betrauert, sondern in die ambivalenten Gefhle der Melancholie berfhrt.362 The protagonist will remain suspended, emotionally, sexually, and in terms of gender.

361

Georg Mein points out other binaries operating in the text, the two most important being Rausch Realitt; KunstWirklichkeit (intoxicationreality; artreality). Mein 71. Stein collapses these binary divisions. He is always a part of the group (which belongs to the binary side of Rausch and Kunst [intoxication and art]), but never completely. He is also working class, working in his taxi and renovating houses. This puts him also on the side of the binary including Realitt and Wirklichkeit (reality).
362

Weingart 169: Lossesof utopias as well as of love objects[are] not mourned, but rather converted into the ambivalent feeling of melancholy. Weingart alludes to Freuds distinction between mourning and melancholy in this description of the sense of loss at the end of Hermanns short story. According to Freud, the melancholic person is incapable of overcoming loss and incorporates the lost person unhealthily into his/her sense of self, whereas the person in normal mourning integrates the memory of the person without altering his/her own personality. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957) 243-258.

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Fatih Akins Gegen die Wand: Androgyny, Heterosexuality, and Transformative Urban Space In this chapter so far, I have examined characters from contemporary literature who display two different models of androgyny. Mavrocordato in 1979 displays a doubled gender that is related to his capacity to maneuver in different kinds of spaces, as well as his ability to create and transform spaces. In a second example, the first person narrator in Sommerhaus, spter exhibits a genderlessness that represents this characters unwillingness to settle into the striated space of a country home and into a heterosexual lifestyle. In this final section, I turn to an example from film. Fatih Akins character Sibel in Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004) transforms her gender from a clearly intelligible femininity in the first half of the film to androgyny in the second half. Moreover, Sibel has the capacity to adapt her androgyny, changing from a genderless androgyny to double-gender androgyny, and finally to strike a balance between femininity and androgyny by the end of the film. As Sibel seeks freedom from the misogynist patriarchal structures that regulate her sexuality, both her femininity and her multiple modes of androgyny reflect her attitudes toward and modes of engagement with the spaces she inhabits. Gegen die Wand tells the passionate and violent love story of Sibel Gner and Cahit Tomruk, two Turkish-Germans living in Hamburg who meet in a treatment clinic after each has attempted suicide. Sibel has cut her wrist in an attempt to escape the patriarchal control of her father and brother, and Cahit has just driven his car into a wall in mourning for his late wife. At the clinic, Sibel proposes they marry so that she can

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escape her patriarchal family, and Cahit eventually agrees. The marriage of convenience soon turns romanticand then devastating when Cahit attacks and inadvertently murders an acquaintance who insults both Sibel and Cahit by questioning the nature of their relationship. Cahit is subsequently incarcerated, and the two are forced to part. Sibel is disowned by her family and moves to Istanbul to live with a cousin, where she expresses her mourning by cutting her hair and wearing baggy clothing that make her appear androgynous. In Istanbul, she endures multiple instances of corporal violence, as those around her cannot abide her androgyny. After being released from prison, Cahit travels to Istanbul to find Sibel, but only to discover that their lives have transformed irrevocably. In the final scenes of the film we learn that Sibel has become a mother and has a boyfriend. She makes the decision to remain in her current relationship and stay in Istanbul; Cahit travels on to Mersin to explore the origins of his family. The intensity of the love story told in Gegen die Wand is supported by an aesthetic of motion and speed, achieved through both a rapid pace of editing and the employment of multiple kinds of space. Sibel and Cahit spend the majority of their time not in the domestic space of their apartment, but rather in bars, clubs, streets, hotels, waiting rooms, hallways, and stairwells, that is, public spaces that are designed for transit, transition, and temporary habitation. Indeed, for the majority of the film, the two characters demonstrate an incapacity to settle into interior domestic space. Unwilling to adhere to the social terms that regulate places (both Sibel and Cahit repeatedly pick fights and cause scenes), they are ejected time and again from interior places into the less

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structured space of the streets.363 These unstructured between spaces become the sites of both serious trouble and intense passion. The title itselftranslated literally as Against the Wall364 indicates the ways in which space is thematized in this film. A wall is both a creative and a limiting factor in the division and determination of space and can mean both protection and prohibition. The title also describes an emotional intensity, a sense of desperation that both characters possess at the beginning of the film, which is depicted visually in the scene in which Cahit drives his car literally into a wall. As both a limiting and a creative structure, however, the wall foreshadows both Sibels and Cahits capability to overcome limiting obstacles and re-create their own sense of identity by the end of the film. Secondary literature on Gegen die Wand discusses Akins use of space as symbolizing the two protagonists position between cultures in a bicultural society. Scholarship on the film focuses on the identity formation of the protagonists who, as second-generation Turkish-Germans, no longer belong to the margins of society, but rather the interstices or the between spaces.365 Scholars see Akins (and his

363

Examples of this pattern are numerous. In the opening scenes of the film we watch as Cahit initiates a bar fight after rejecting the advances of Marin, a friend with whom he sometimes sleeps. In a later scene, Sibel and Cahit are ejected from a city bus after fighting and are forced to walk the remaining distance back to the clinic in anger. In another example, Cahit throws Sibel out of his apartment on their wedding night after she asks about his late first wife. Later, on the night in which Cahit discovers that he is in love Sibel, he gets into a fight at a night club after a man makes advances on Sibel. The two are subsequently kicked out. In a final example, Sibel is expelled from the bar in Istanbul after she has been raped.
364

The official translated title is Head-On, which appropriately conveys the sense of intensity with which the characters approach their lives. It also refers to Cahits head-on crash at the beginning of the film. However, the original title, Gegen die Wand, has spatial elements that are lost in the official translation.
365

Indeed, discourses on Akins film focus on his multicultural themes, as well as Akins position as a second generation Turkish-German filmmaker. Scholars Matthias Knopp and Karin Lornsen, among others, describe Akins characters in Gegen die Wand, as well as in his larger body of filmic work, as

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contemporaries) films as departing from a traditional minority cinema that expresses oppression through imagery of claustrophobia. In contemporary Turkish-German cinema, both men and women break through the confines of home, workspaces, and even prisons (a common trope in Turkish-German cinema) to traverse urban spaces and cross both national and continental boundaries.366 Indeed, Akins films depict the particular social difficulties that ethnic minorities in Germany face. Not limiting himself to a discussion of only Turks and Turkish-Germans, Akin has created characters in other films that are Greek, Italian, and Serbian. However, his use of space reaches far beyond the terms of the scholarship focused on multiculturalism. Stephan Schindler and Lutz Koepnick depart from this body of scholarship to discuss Gegen die Wand as exemplary of a generation of German films in which identities are negotiated not within the national context, but within an international world marked and marred by ever more transnational streams of influence and transaction.367 They write,

representing a larger change in Turkish-German cinema; rather than depicting the down-trodden immigrant worker disenfranchised by his geographical and political situation, Akin and his contemporaries (like Thomas Arslan, Kutlug Ataman, and Sinan etin, among others), create characters who utilize their position as a site of multiple possibilities for signification, self expression, and identity. See: Sava Arslan, Head-On, Head-Off: How the Media Covered a Former Porn Actresss Rise to St ardom, Film International 36 (2008): 62-71. Rob Burns, Towards a Cinema of Cultural Hybridity: Turkish-German Filmmakers and the Representation of Alterity, Debatte: Review of Contemporary German Affairs 15.1 (April 2007): 3-27. Mattias Knopp, Identitt zwischen den Kulturen: Gegen die Wand, Kontext Film: Beitrge zu Film und Literatur, hrsg. Michael Braun und Werner Kamp (Berlin: Schmidt, 2006) 59-77. Karin Lornsen, Where Have All the Guest Workers Gone? Transcultural Role-Play and Performative Identities in Fatih Akins Gegen die Wand (2004), Finding the Foreign (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007) 13-31.
366

Burns 11-13. Petra Fachinger, A New Kind of Creative Energy: Yade Karas Selam Berlin and Fatih Akins Kurz und Schmerzlos and Gegen die Wand, German Life and Letters 60.2 (April 2007): 243-60.

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Akins world is one in which geographical, ps ychological, and emotional boundaries determine peoples trajectories yet never entirely contain their lives and movements. It is a world in which the crossing of extant cultural borders, the traversal of physical landscapes as much as of psychological mindscapes, the reconstitution of ones identity between old and new is experienced as the order of the day.368 Indeed, Akins characters not only inhabit the between spaces of Turkish-German culture, but also transcend those between spaces to negotiate their identities in multiple spaces and places around the globe. Akin sets Gegen die Wand within the topographies of two cities, Hamburg and Istanbul. The film posits Hamburg and Istanbul in many ways as parallel universes, and the cinematic audience experiences both cities as places where transformation in gender (and other forms of) identity is possible. The cinematic audience watches as Sibel navigates the streets, bars, clubs, and work spaces in both cities, as well as rejects the domestic spaces that she finds stifling in both. Both cities are traversable by foot, according to this film which thematizes the act of walking as an expression of freedom. Moreover, both cities are presented as multicultural and multilingual, and Sibel navigates similar looking neighborhoods and operates bilingually in both cities.369

367

Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick, eds., Introduction: Against the Wall? The Global Imaginary of German Cinema, The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007) 4.
368

Schindler and Koepnick 6.

369

Indeed, the one urban space that stands in contrast to the Hamburg and Istanbul that Sibel inhabits is the Istanbul represented in the six musical interludes featuring a traditional Roma band. This static shot depicts the band members in front of a panoramic scene of the Bosporus River and the skyline of Istanbul. The plasticity of the scene emphasizes an idealness of place and deep -rooted ethnic identity belonging in that place. Blumentrath, et al, have likened the composition of this scene to that of a postcard that stands in sharp contrast, both aesthetically and thematically, to the rest of the film, as Sibel traverses the seedier sides of both Istanbul and Hamburg, searching for an identity to settle into. Blumentrath, et al, Transkulturalitt 116.

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Indeed, because of the similarity of the two places, the main visual indicator of a change in setting is Sibels habitus.370 In Hamburg in the first half of the film, Sibel seeks her individual freedom through sexual practice, and she seduces successfully by performing an effective form of femininity within the heterosexual matrix. Several scenes are devoted to Sibels make-up ritual, and the audience watches as Sibel outlines her eyes with smoky eyeliner and reddens her lips with lipstick. She wears low cut shirts and short skirts that delineate her contours, high heeled boots, well-coiffed hair, and dramatic eye make-up. Sibel knows not only how to present her body in order to achieve the freedom she seeks; she also knows which spaces to seek out. In Gegen die Wand, bars and clubs are places for Sibel to find sexual partners, and streets are spaces for enjoying her freedom. We watch in several scenes as Sibel walks through the streets, her clothing flowing around her as she smiles and enjoys her sense of freedom. The most striking is perhaps the first such scene, in which Sibel walks in slow motion through the streets in her wedding dress the morning after she has married Cahit. The wedding dress functions as a duplicitous signifier, one that the audience understands as signaling Sibels achievement of sexual freedom through marriage, but a signifier that the characters in the diegetic world presumably do not understand as such. Having just wed, Sibel is now free to sleep

370

According to Pierre Bourdieu, individual subjects are shaped by both adhering to and reacting against the multiple power matrices that make up a social system. These subjective developments manifest themselves not only in conscious and unconscious actions, but more tangibly on the bodies of the subjects themselves. Habitus describes the embodied way in which subjects operate within a social system, adhering to certain standards while resisting others, all with the purpose of differentiating themselves individually. We read Sibels relationship with society on her body, e.g. in the way she dresses, handles her body, uses her body to interact with others, and performs gender. See: Bourdieu, Practical Reason 113.

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with as many men as she wishes. She walks proudly and smiles, having experienced her first instance of freedom, the long skirts of her wedding dress flowing freely around her.371 Sibels sense of freedom is depicted in several similar scenes in which Sibel walks carelessly, even dreamily, through public spaces. Walking has multiple meanings, according to Michel de Certeau in his book The Practice of Everyday Life. First, he states, to walk is to lack a place,372 and this lack is certainly true of Sibel, who resists settling into interior places and prefers instead to roam the less structured spaces of the city streets. Indeed, one might understand Sibels sense of freedom as adhering to the dynamics of space rather than place. According to de Certeau, a place is a fixed set of points in relation to one anothera constellation one finds on a map. A place has a name, some degree of social meaning, and a fixed relationship to other places that people inhabit. A space, on the other hand, is dynamic. It is activated by the people who inhabit and traverse it, and its form and meaning change as the subject moves through it.373 Sibels preference for spacesparticularly streets over places, signifies her desire to determine her own freedom. She activates, and therefore determines the meanings of, the spaces she inhabits and traverses. De Certeau further likens walking in a city to a speech act. He argues that in the same way in which language creates the structures and vocabulary through which the

371

We see this constellation reflected in later scenes as well. In one sequence we watch Sibel walking to the grocery store, and later, through a carnival, hair and clothes flowing. In the first instance, she is beaming because of her newfound freedom and in the second instance, her love for Cahit.
372

De Certeau 103. De Certeau 117.

373

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subject makes utterances, the city offers a structure of possible movements, as well as interdictionsa grammar of movement, so to speak: Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it speaks. All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker.374 In Sibels long poem of walking375 she activates the spaces around her, triggering the actions that will take place in those spaces as she reacts to people and as people react to her. Through Sibels walks, both she and the cinematic audience experience Hamburg as a city where sexual freedom is possible, even when this freedom has consequences for those who inhabit the citys spaces. After Cahits incarceration, Sibel expresses her loss in both a change in location and a change in habitus. It is significant that the first scene in which the audience sees Sibel in Istanbul is in the transitional space of an airport. Emerging androgynous, she has a short, boyish haircut and wears no make-up. Her loose male-cut clothing hides her frame, and tennis shoes have replaced her sexy boots. Sibel continues to walk, but her walk is no longer unencumbered and joyful. She walks through the airport with a determination that indicates that her relationship with space is no longer carefree. During her time in Istanbul, Sibel displays multiple kinds of androgyny. In early scenes in Istanbul, she displays a genderlessness in which neither femininity nor masculinity is explicitly expressed, but rather, is confused. She neither looks completely

374

De Certeau 99. De Certeau 101.

375

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like a boy, nor does she retain the femininity she had displayed in Hamburg. In an early scene in Istanbul, Sibel works as a maid at her cousin Selmas hotel, and her discomfort with femininity is signaled by the awkwardness with which she wears the uniform dress and heels. In the scenes in which Sibel walks through Istanbul in her androgynous clothing, her mannerisms are androgynous as well. She walks not with her hips, as she did in Hamburg, but rather with hunched shoulders and long, heavy strides. In one scene, she sits heavily, plopping down onto the seat at a kebab restaurant, attempting to look like one of the boys. When the other two young men at the table ask her youre not from here, are you? their rhetorical question expresses through spatial metaphor that Sibels habitusher clothing, mannerisms, and genderis unintelligible to them.376 Sibel demonstrates control of her habitus in a scene in which she transforms her androgyny in order to score drugs. Standing before a mirror, she applies eye makeup just as she had done before in Hamburg, and the cinematic audience recognizes Sibels intention to seduce. This time, however, the sexy eye makeup is paired with mens clothing. Her gender is neither intelligibly feminine nor is it genderless, but rather, both explicitly male and female. Her expression of positive double gender (as opposed to her previous negative confused gender) signals that she is taking agency in acquiring what she desires.

376

Note: All English translations of German and Turkish quotes in Gegen die Wand are taken from the English subtitles.

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The positive expression of both male and female also signals that Sibel is beginning to integrate behaviors characteristic of Cahit into her sense of self.377 Sibels double gender soon becomes dangerous, as she indulges in the same kind of selfdestructive behavior that Cahit displayed earlier in the film. In the final night life scene of the film, Sibel spins out of control. After staggering drunkenly around the dance floor and passing out face-first on the floor, the bartender rapes her from behind. The constellation of this scene implies an androgynous rape that could be read in two ways. The rape can be understood as an attempt on the part of the bartender to establish a heterosexual order. He rapes her, controls her, and thereby establishes both her own femininity and his masculinity. However, the visual constellation of the rapeof a man raping another male figure (the camera position and dark lighting of the scene show the characters involved in silhouette rather than in detail)undermines a reading of this rape as a clearly heterosexual act. The tenuous distinction between homo- and heterosexuality is depicted visually in this scene, and Sibels sexuality/gender is left undetermined.378 Once on the street, Sibel experiences a second attack, this time an explicit attack on her androgyny. Leaving the club, Sibel encounters three men who taunt her for being a woman unaccompanied on the street at night. (The fact that the men recognize Sibel as a woman might signify that her femininity was indeed made intelligible by the rape.)
377

Sibels self-destructive incorporation of Cahits behaviors and mannerisms might be understood as a Freudian melancholy. Freud believed that when a subject refuses to accept the loss of a loved one, s/he finds him/herself incapable of normal grief and instead incorporates the other person into his/her own sense of identity. See footnote 362 on Freuds Mourning and Melancholia.
378

Time and again, the attempt to establish Sibels feminine gender and heterosexuality leads to violence in this film. Earlier in the film, Cahit attacks Nico when provoked by questions about her promiscuity. In this scene and the scene that follows, Sibels androgyny is a pro vocation to the men around her. These men find her unintelligible and wish to establish her feminine gender but fail repeatedly.

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Sibel uses sexually charged language to pick a fight, challenging their masculinity and heterosexuality by calling them Hurenshne (sons of whores) and Schwulen (gays). The men threaten her sexuality, employing a power dynamic intended to assert their masculinity and hence determine her femininity. After three rounds of fighting that leave Sibels body broken and bloody, one man stabs her in the stomach, an act of penetration, a symbolic rape, meant explicitly to reestablish his masculinity against a woman who has problematized both his gender and her own. The next time we see Sibel after the stabbing scene (in a scene that occurs after a musical interlude and several scenes focusing on Cahit), she is holding a child. Sibels androgyny has taken a third form. Although she continues to wear a short, boyish hairstyle and no makeup, her features are softer, and she wears feminine clothing. A pair of gender-neutral glasses now frame her eyes, rather than the smoky, dramatic eyeliner that had signaled her femininity earlier in the film, and they lend her the appearance of seriousness and calmness. Her androgyny no longer signals a withdrawal from social life, but now, a reintegration into society with the help of family and friends. She is the androgynous mother, and she has settled into the interior spaces of her cousins and her boyfriends apartments.379 The presence of Sibels child indicates that some time has passed since we last saw her lying bloody on the streets of Istanbul. However, the logic of the editing gives us

379

In the final scenes of the film, we see two versions of mothers. Selma holds Pamuk and paints her fingernails, serving as a proxy feminine mother while Sibel remains the androgynous mother. Selma, Sibel, and Pamuk create a triangulated configuration of femininity, in which Pamuk represents the potential to develop a gender anywhere on the spectrum represented by the two adult women.

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a clue to the father of the child. The three successive scenes depicting Sibelshe is raped, then stabbed, then holds a childindicate that Sibels child may be the result of the violent rape. The child was born out of violence, but also represents a rebirth of Sibel after that terrible night.380 The presence of a child also indicates that the heterosexual order has been reestablished, if only tenuously. Sibels androgyny, as well as the fact that her relationship with her boyfriend has not yet been finalized into a marriage, indicates that Sibel participates only ambivalently in the heterosexual matrix. Cahit also emerges transformed toward the end of the film. Having been banished to the container space of the prison, he has also been expelled from the screen for the duration of the time we have followed Sibel through Istanbul. Cahits transformation has less to do with gender, however, than with a transformation into maturity, patience, and mental and corporal health. This transformation is signaled visually through an aesthetic of stasis; we see fewer cuts and longer camera shots in the second half of the film, as Cahit waits in his hotel room in Istanbul to hear from Sibel. Although Sibel and Cahit meet again in Istanbul, the violent intensity of their relationship has subsided. The two have sex for only the second time in their relationship, a symbolic act that expresses both their emotional intimacy and their independence from one another. If their first sex act in Hamburg consummated their marriage, this second act in Istanbul releases them from it. Sibel cannot travel on with Cahit to Mersin because she has built up an integrated lifestyle in Istanbul that consists of places rather than spaces. She has settled into emotional balance and belongs to
380

Cahits change is marked on his body as well. He is cleaner and healthier, and this change is signaled in two different scenes by his consumption of water rather than beer.

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interior places now. Cahit is also a more balanced person after his love affair with, and then separation from, Sibel. However, his development is not yet complete. In order to find his own network and structure, he must find the origins of his family. To that end, he will travel to Mersin, where he too will presumably settle into a place. Although the film ends with both characters finding stable gender identities and stable positions in space, it ends on an ambivalent note. In the last scene in which we see Sibel, she sits on a bed with her packed suitcase. A tension is created in the scene by the visual composition of her packed suitcase, which cues the promise of movement, and her static seated position. Sibel remains emotionally conflicted with the decision she faces. As Sibel remains seated, however, it becomes clear that she will remain where she is. Her emotional ambivalence is expressed in her gaze as she looks out the window and beyond the frame of the screen, longing perhaps once again to leave her interior place for the less structured spaces that she might share with Cahit. This ambivalence is paralleled in the final scene in which we see Cahit, sitting alone on the bus to Mersin. He also gazes out the bus window, perhaps toward Istanbul and the places Sibel might inhabit, rather than looking straight forward. Cahit is again set in motion at the end of the film, but this motion is not the same self-destructive motion that introduced him in Hamburg. It is a slower, steadier, and more positive motion, one that will presumably lead to his own stability in Mersin. Nevertheless, for both Sibel and Cahit, whose love relationship has thrived on a dynamic of motion and on the tug and pull of proximity and distance, settling into places proves to be a difficult and ambivalent undertaking.

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Conclusion: Spatial Disorientation and Androgyny versus Drag Each of the texts discussed in this chapter constructs a different constellation of gender, sexuality, and space. In 1979, Mavrocordato transforms his male gender into an androgynous double gender to achieve the right balance to navigate normally unnavigable spaces and to create alchemically new, utopian non-places. In Sommerhaus, spter, the first-person narrators genderless androgyny and bisexuality hinder the reader from situating him/her within the heterosexual matrix and therefore also from assigning him/her a gender. The narrator avoids settling into a gender and sexual identity as s/he avoids settling into the heterosexually striated space of the country home. In Gegen die Wand, Sibel must undergo several phases of androgyny before settling into a steady heterosexual relationship, the place Istanbul, and social stability. By undergoing androgynous phases and finally striking a balance between androgyny and femininity, Sibel changes the heterosexual matrix that she knew as patriarchal (with her parents) and self-destructive (with Cahit). Although these texts construct the relationship between gender, sexuality, and space differently, they share common underlying themes. A metaphor common to each of these examples is that of orientation versus disorientation. In 1979, the narrator repeatedly experiences vertigo, and this spatial disorientation is closely connected with his emotional state after the loss of his boyfriend. Mavrocordato, on the other hand, displays an androgyny that is directly related to his navigational capabilities. The narrator benefits from (or is at least directly influenced by) Mavrocordatos androgyny, as Mavrocordato gives the narrator direction in the second half of the book. Sibel in

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Gegen die Wand is coded as having a strong sense of orientation; she knows precisely what she wants and how to get there for most of the film. As opposed to Mavrocordato, however, Sibel becomes disoriented when she becomes androgynous. She spins out of control, and her degradation comes to a peak in the scene in which she falls onto the floor of a club in a drunken stupor and is attacked. In Sommerhaus, spter, the narrator describes his/her sense of vertigo in corporal metaphors in the scene in which s/he experiences Berlin as smooth space. S/he prefers this feeling of disorientation and lingers there at the end of the story. Closely related to the theme of orientation and disorientation is that of freedom from oppressive power structures. In Gegen die Wand, Sibel escapes patriarchal power by giving the pretence of entering into the established heterosexual institution of marriage. In both her feminine and her androgynous phases, however, her behavior turns self-destructive, and it is only after striking a balance between femininity and androgyny that Sibel can settle into stable relationships and stable interior spaces of her own free will. In Sommerhaus, spter, the narrator-protagonist also flirts with the ambivalent heterosexual power structures present in the dynamic of driving/riding, only to reject these by the end of the story. Mavrocordatos androgyny in 1979 is directly linked with his ability to disrupt the power apparatus in Iran when he becomes androgynous in order to dismantle a surveillance system. Finally, all three texts employ uninhabitable spaces as sites to examine gender dynamics. In Gegen die Wand, Sibel and Cahit inhabit spaces like bars, clubs, streets, hallways, and stairwells, avoiding the domestic spaces that house traditional heterosexual

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marriages. Their apartment is only a front for their sham marriage. The spaces where the two experience their true freedomas well as their intense passion and its real social consequencesare the streets. In Sommerhaus, spter, the narrator-protagonist feels most at ease in the ambivalent space of Steins taxi, since it is capable of smoothing spaceand thus suspending gender identityfor the protagonist. In 1979, the uninhabitable non-places of the utopia become habitable. The narrator finds peace (though perhaps also insanity) in the prison camp in which he is able to relinquish his personal identity. To reach that prison camp located nowhere, he passes through a series of other non-places, including the site of the utopian experiment at Ibn-al-Sabbah, the rhizome and crypt-like non-place of Mavrocordatos apartment, and the utopian mirror space of the closed network television screen. If androgyny has served a tradition of utopian thinking in the history of German literature and film, as well as in Western and mystical thought, in its most recent manifestations, literary androgyny departs from that program. Only Mavrocordato in 1979 hints at that tradition of creating utopian spaces, but in the end, the consequences of his androgyny are frightening. For Sibel in Gegen die Wand, androgyny is an expression of her melancholy caused by the loss of Cahit. It also signals a withdrawal from society and self-destructive behavior. In Sommerhaus, spter, androgyny has a much more positive program, though it is far from utopian. Genderless androgyny allows the narrator to resist settling into a gender identity and striated space, which would be stifling for him/her. However, the narrator does not feel wholly satisfied with this state of being,

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and the reader is left with a sense of dissatisfaction and melancholy at the end of the story. As discussed in previous chapters, gender ambiguity finds multiple kinds of expression in contemporary literature and film. For example, in Chapter 2 I discuss how transvestites in Angela Kraus Die berfliegerin perform doubled gender by layering different kinds of clothing. What distinguishes androgyny from this kind of masquerade, however, is that with the androgyne, the polarity of gender is presented as tension within one body rather than as a series of layers or as an act of blending. Drag and masquerade also play on bipolar tensions between genders, but they imply a degree of agency with regard to gender that androgyny does not. Androgyny is a bipolar tension that the subject cannot control. Admittedly, under this distinction, Mavrocordatos double gender would be more appropriately categorized as drag/masquerade (even if the narrator experiences Mavrocordato as androgynous), as would Sibels double gender when she actively manipulates her habitus to score drugs. Yet Sibels drag proves to be a failed performance, an attempt to gain control of her world when she is emotionally and spatially disoriented. Mavrocordatos drag helps him gain orientation, whereas Sibels does not. When her drag fails, she remains androgynous. Androgyny has specific implications for the subjects experience of space. In every example discussed in this chapter, androgyny represents a phase in which the protagonist is uncertain about his/her own gender and sexual identity, and this uncertainty manifests itself as spatial uncertainty as well. As opposed to the person who performs drag/masquerade and who thus takes agency in expressing his/her gender, the androgens

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in these examples are coded as disoriented, both spatially and in terms of gender. By figuring an unstable relationship between space and gender, androgyny has departed from its roots in utopian discourse and offers a new turn in contemporary German literature and film.

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