Carrie Smith-Prei

Digital feminisms: transnational activism in German protest cultures

Abstract This Introduction provides the context for the articles in this special issue and identifies a set of reoccurring themes. After offering some historical background on the developments of feminist activism and feminist movements in the German context, the editors particularly highlight two main and interrelated thematic strands: feminist activism under or in neoliberalism and the complexities of negotiating questions of race and difference between women in feminist activisms in the highly visually determined digital age. Reflecting on the arguments in the different contributions in this volume, this Introduction seeks to suggest ways in which the ambivalent messages that digital feminist activisms create in the contemporary political moment become politically productive.

“Knaller-Sex für alle”: Popfeminist Body Politics in Lady Bitch Ray, Charlotte Roche, and Sarah Kuttner

Germany has seen a recent upsurge in publications proclaiming that feminism is again an urgent matter for a new generation of women. Faced with the reactionary demography debate and the hegemony of second-wave feminism, young writers, musicians, journalists, and critics call for new models of feminism relevant to women today. As one of these viable models, popfeminism draws on dominant trends in mass culture, on pop’s forty-year history as a cultural prefix in Germany, and on traditional feminism in order to create a new, ostensibly apolitical, feminist subculture based in self-stylization and individual autonomy. Shared by many popfeminist sources is the depiction of negatively coded female corporeality. This article begins with a theoretical analysis of writings on sexuality and the body in recent (pop)feminist nonfiction. It then examines the negative corporeal self-stylizations in Turkish-German rapper Lady Bitch Ray’s performances since 2006, in former music video host Charlotte Roche’s novel Feuchtgebiete (2008), and in media personality Sarah Kuttner’s novel Mängelexemplar (2009). Ultimately, these negatively coded bodies are shown to uncover popfeminism’s political intent.

Digital Feminisms and the Impasse: Time, Disappearance, and Delay in Neoliberalism

This collaborative essay considers the way feminist activism takes shape in the context of time-based feminist performance art. We argue that the formal and aesthetic interventions into digital culture of Noah Sow, Chicks on Speed, and Hito Steyerl articulate political resistance within feminist impasses and neoliberal circularities. Our analysis focuses on how these artists engage digital platforms to make visible otherwise imperceptible aspects of the present, including consumerism, wellness, imperial warfare as crisis ordinariness, and modes of digital hypervisibility, perception, and representation. Not only do these works uncover, grapple with, and potentially dissolve the bind of feminism, but they also work against the imperceptibility of neoliberalism as second nature or common sense. In the form of this essay (with comment bubbles and hyperlinks), we highlight our process of thinking about these works and expose the collaborative process of feminist academic writing in the digital age as yet another form of searching for spaces of political resistance and solidarity. Should be viewed with current versions of Firefox, Safari, or Adobe PDF viewer/reader.

Notes on Opening Access to German Studies

When at the 2010 Congress in Montreal Harvard Library Director Robert Darnton spoke in support of rapidly changing digital publishing models, the most recent global financial collapse was going into its third year and the words crisis and humanities were firmly linked in the academic imaginary (4Humanities). In his talk, Darnton outlined the hard numbers with which libraries must contend in this economic climate, highlighting in particular the increasing fees for journal subscriptions, even as journals and other publishing venues continue to multiply. Open access publishing is one manner in which academic libraries may enact cost-saving measures, and this is perhaps why discussions surrounding open access seem to always begin, and often end, with the libraries. The week beginning 22 October 2012 was Open Access Week around the world, and fittingly it was celebrated on the campus of the University of Alberta by library-sponsored events related to publishing and research archiving. But the open movement more broadly, and open access specifically, also offers us a mode of thinking about the perpetual crisis of the humanities beyond numbers and dollar value. I was introduced to this mode of thinking through practice. While I became an open access practitioner by chance, through my continued contact with its models for publishing and knowledge circulation, I have come to think very deliberately about the potential disciplinary considerations that the open movement brings with it. Further, I come to it as a junior scholar who is deeply concerned about how the rhetoric of the crisis of the humanities and the scepticism surrounding digital cultures, even as, or perhaps because, digital humanities is on the rise, is impacting academic culture in a way that perpetuates disciplinary navel-gazing. In publications, talks, and responses since the 2010 Congress, Darnton has outlined how open access and digitization offer not only a way of saving university libraries but also – as the title of a talk published on falling-walls.com contests – the democratization of culture (Darnton). Humanities disciplines can be positively transformed through direct engagement with the open movement and just such a democratization of culture, beginning with but not limited to open access and non-standard modes of knowledge dissemination. I use the term discipline transformation here to mean not simply greater circulation of knowledge or cost-saving measures for economically strapped departments and libraries,

Digital media and feminist futures: awkward cooptions in the impasse

no longer on reality television? That remains to be seen. But we also should not have to wait for people to ascend to what may be perceived to more legitimate social spaces before we pay attention to them and value what they say. If we give so-called low-brow popular culture such as reality television and social media the same consideration that we do more widely accepted genres in pop culture we might find the value in the representations and the feminist work that is happening across all forms of media.

Riot Grrrls, Bitchsm, and pussy power: interview with Reyhan Şahin/Lady Bitch Ray

Abstract Dr phil. Reyhan Şahin—also known as Lady Bitch Ray—earned her M.A. in Linguistics, German Literature, and Education in 2004 and her doctorate in Linguistics in 2012 at the University of Bremen. Her alter ego, Lady Bitch Ray is a rapper, performer, fashion designer, and author. The following interview introduces Şahin’s work as a performer and as an academic and sheds light on the negotiation of feminist politics in a neoliberal context as well as how the complex politics of difference play out in contemporary, digital feminisms in the German-speaking context. By speaking in two voices, the academic and the performer/artist, the interview emphasizes the playful possibilities of the urgently political.

Poor, But Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes ed. by Geoff Stahl (review)

The collected volume Poor, But Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes, edited by Geoff Stahl, offers unique insight into a variety of cultural aspects of contemporary Berlin. In an introduction and ten chapters, it discusses the German capital’s clubs, music, party, and design arenas. In this, three areas of interest emerge as common across many of the contributions: the concept of the scene, the appearance of local and global flows, and the tension between creation and capitalism. The collection uses as one of its primary organizing factors the “scene” (Will Straw). Stahl discusses the concept of the scene in the introduction as a cultural space that contains institutions allowing for the intersection of social and cultural acts that inform one another (11). The scene is therefore a very apt descriptor for approaching the wide variety and importance of Berlin’s creative industries. Differing somewhat from the often-used idea of event culture, the scene allows for a large cross-section of analysis that includes not only the institutions, people, and cultural or social resonances within the scene but also its time and space. The chapters thus “provide aspects of urban life in Berlin that evince different kinds and degrees of the quality of life made (or not made, in certain cases) available to the city’s denizens [. . .]” (15). In chapter 4, for example, the discussion of underground parties by Carlo Nardi shows that even in tending towards a participatory and global model of urban experience, to varying degrees these parties both control and illustrate how a variety of different categories of people – including natives, residents, visitors, and tourists – have different access to the city (87). Chapter 1 by Kira Kosnick, examining the queer migrant clubbing scene of Gayhane, offers a reading of the sociality that emerges in these club scenes – whether intended or unintended by the organizers – as crucial to offering a different reading of minority life beyond notions of identity (28). What emerges in the analysis of these scenes is a different approach to discussing the forces of globalization and the appearance or reification of the local. Chapter 4 focuses on the extreme locality that emerges in the organization and advertisement of the underground party (89). Chapter 2 offers a look at the longrunning party “Russendisko” (held at Berlin’s Kaffee Burger) for its exposure of a troubling generalization and exoticization of former Soviet territories. DavidEmil Wickström shows how the “Russendisko” is local (based in Berlin), transnational (in that the DJs, organizers, and music hail from differing Eastern European countries), and virtual (44). He writes that it “reflects an ethnoand religion-centric (as well as deeply egoistic) perspective of Western Europe that is more fitting of nineteenth-century colonial powers than of the twenty-first-