German Women in the Colony: Union of Gender Politics and Cultural Imperialism

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-49
Author(s):  
HyunBack Chung
Author(s):  
Robert J. C. Young

‘Gender, queering, and feminism in a postcolonial context’ explains how recently, ‘queer’ and ‘queering’ have been adopted to describe a strategy of shifting social or intellectual perspectives out of their dominant binary forms. It is often in societies of the Global South that patriarchal norms remain strongest. It is also where the greatest resistance can be found to more flexible ideas of genders and sexualities, which are sometimes portrayed as yet another instance of Western cultural imperialism. Queering the norms of such cultures—in Africa, the Middle East, or the Caribbean, for example—has become a major, sometimes controversial, arena of postcolonial gender politics.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Kihl ◽  
Vicki D. Schull ◽  
Sally Shaw

Author(s):  
renée c. hoogland

Considered odd, obscene, a genius nonetheless, at the time she created her best-known works, French photographer and writer Claude Cahun (1894-1950) cuts a particularly unruly figure in literary criticism and art history. Her recalcitrant faux autobiography Aveux non avenus, [Disavowals, or, Cancelled Confessions] (1930), a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages, have encouraged the artist’s association with High Modernism and Surrealism while her photographic self-portraits have been claimed for an affirmative (feminist) gender politics. However, the proliferous and mercurial nature of Cahun’s disavowed confessions and self-stagings defy easy “domestication.” Instead she constructs a continuously shifting configuration of fragments and collages: assemblages of singularities that are always in a multiplicity, in a pack. Escaping dominant forms of expression, Cahun’s work has nothing to do with recognition or imitation, nor does it constitute a relation of representation. The chapter argues instead that Cahun presents us in both her writing and in her photographic work with the successful experience of becoming in the absence of any final term or form. A becoming-animal that moves beyond destruction into the zone of indiscernibility where a work, or, perhaps, an oeuvre comes into view—an oeuvre that nonetheless remains decidedly outlandish.


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