Christa Binswanger

Turning Points and the 'everyday' : Exploring agency and violence in intimate relationships

In this article the authors1 approach material and symbolic violence through transdisciplinary readings of theoretical debates, fiction and empirical narratives. They make use of the concept of turning points which disrupt dichotomous and static categorizations of victim and survivor, and their association with passivity and agency respectively. In situations of violence, turning points represent temporality instead of timelessness, dialogism instead of monologism, multilayering rather than any fixed identity. The authors draw on the theorists Bakhtin and Certeau, whose work highlights the significance of meaning-making between self and other. They analyse empirical and fictional narratives to understand the creation of dialogic spaces, a space that both subordinates and subverts. Pointing to the procedural nature of turning points within the everyday, the authors argue that women, despite the pain and trauma, are neither just a victim nor just a survivor in a violent relationship.

Palimpsests of Sexuality and Intimate Violence : Turning Points as Transformative Scripts for Intervention

In this article, we explore transdisciplinary understandings of scripts as transformative interventions. Script refers, on the one hand, to cognitive, routinized behavioural patterns; on the other hand, it is a multilayered process of enacting, interpreting, and rewriting interaction within a specific context. The metaphor of the palimpsest, embodying and provoking interdisciplinary encounters, links the various layers of practised and narrated scripts. The interrelation of the scripts of the palimpsest is marked by inextricability as they use the same space and create an illusionary intimacy. We develop our ideas about script as intervention, reflecting on scripts of violence and sexual experience. We make use of the psychoanalytic term “cryptic incorporation”. Cryptic incorporation entails the idea of an experience psychically “swallowed whole” by the subject and therefore not accessible to conscious reflection, once incorporated. Our methodological readings are both empirical and fictional. The empirical example is based on an interview with one respondent, who has experienced intimate violence during the course of her life. The autobiographical text of Shedding, written in 1975 by the Swiss author Verena Stefan, is an example of fiction. Both texts engage in the inextricability of vulnerability and intimacy. Analysing these narratives, we pay special attention to “turning-points”. As turning-points represent decisive changes within evolving life-stories, they are read as palimpsestuous scripts of a transformative process. Thus, we focus on the human ability to change scripts, to rewrite biographical events. We look for a productive entanglement of our scientific writing, understanding the writing process itself as a palimpsestuous layer of script as intervention.

Queering the Palimpsest: Affective entanglement beyond dichotomization

ABSTRACT In Cultural Studies, the affective turn is a response to the so-called crisis of representation. Insisting on a crucial difference, some theorists separate representation as it is addressed in psychoanalytic accounts of the subject, from pre-individual bodily capacities, as they are developed in affect theory. In our article, we are revisiting Freud’s model of the mystic writing pad and present a metaphor enhancing an inclusive approach to both: the palimpsest. Following Ahmed and Butler, we understand subjectivity as a constant process of affective surfacing, in which intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions constitute each other. The metaphor of the palimpsest offers a way to theorize subjectivity as structured by power relations yet open to potentiality, paying attention to the intrapsychic as affective force within encounters between subjects. “Queering the palimpsest” disrupts the dichotomization of ontology versus epistemology, the dichotomous ways of gendering the subject and the “either-or-option” of affect theory and psychoanalysis.

„Depressed? It Might Be Political!“

Bibliographie: Schreiner, Anna/Binswanger, Christa: „Depressed? It Might Be Political!“, FZG, 2-1014, S. 111-114. https://doi.org/10.3224/fzg.v20i2.17138

Sexy Stories and postfeminist empowerment : From Häutungen to Wetlands

This article explores shifts in feminist and postfeminist discourse on sexuality using two influential novels about women’s sexual agency and empowerment as a case in point. The first novel, Häutungen [Shedding], appeared in the mid-1970s at the peak of the New German Women’s Movement and went on to become one of the most important feminist fictional texts. The second novel, Feuchtgebiete [Wetlands] was published in 2008 in the wake of what has been called postfeminism. Both books are discovery narratives about young women coming of age and both have been heralded by the media as having ruptured sexual taboos and old ways of talking about women’s bodies and sexuality. In different ways, both have also been influential in feminist and postfeminist debates about the possibilities for empowering women as sexual subjects. Both texts show how fiction can draw upon and help shape a transgressive sexual politics, making it instrumental in women’s sexual empowerment. In this article, we examine the resonances and the differences between these two texts, paying particular attention to the kind of narratives that are produced and how in each case a sexual subject is constructed in and through the text. Specific exclusions in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality are explored, as well as the sexual political strategies that each text generates with an eye toward the possibilities each creates for women’s sexual (dis)empowerment and critique of normalised sexuality.

Tagungsbericht: Due Diligence : Die Verantwortung des Staates für die Menschenrechte der Frauen

lang eher selten explizit gemachte Kontroversen auf dialogische Weise herauszuarbeiten. An anderer Stelle glückte dies weniger: So waren die Ausführungen zur Systemtheorie von Wembach nur denjenigen zugänglich, die sich mit den Grundlagen auskannten, an dieser Stelle wäre die »Übersetzungsarbeit« von Aulenbacher besser vor d e m Beitrag von Weinbach platziert gewesen. Vor allem auf die Systemtheorie fokussiert kam die Frage nach dem systematischen O r t von Geschlecht in der Soziologie eher zu kurz. Vorherrschend waren vor allem in den Arbeitsgruppen — Beiträge, die die verschiedenen Theor ien der Soziologie gegenstandsbezogen auf ihren Gehalt hin befragten. Dass Streitfragen im Feld der G e schlechterforschung explizit aufgegriffen wurden , hat den Re i z der Jahrestagung ausgemacht und gezeigt, welches In ter esse die Sektion nicht nur an Kontroversen, sondern auch an neuen Zugängen hat. Dieser Of fenhe i t stand ein irr i t ierend dominanter R e k u r s auf ein »feministisches Erbe« gegenüber, obgleich der Terminus »feministische Wissenschaft« leider nicht explizit in die t i telgebende R e i h u n g »FrauenMännerGeschlechterforschung« aufgenommen und bearbeitet wurde. Häuf ig blieb die Krit ik neuer A n sätze bei d e m professionspolitisch durchaus berechtigten Einwand, diese beachteten die »feministischen Vorarbeiten« nicht, stehen, fruchtbare Anknüpfungsmöglichkeiten wurden damit frühzeit ig ad acta gelegt. Auffällig war zudem, dass der beispielhaft angeführte Kanon dieses Erbes sich fast ausschließlich auf deutschsprachige Autor innen bezog. Dabei zeichnet sich die soziologische G e schlechterforschung gerade durch die frühzeitige Rezep t ion zumindest angloamerikanischer Literatur aus. In den eher gegenstandsbezogenen Arbeitsgruppen hingegen wurde zwar engagiert, aber konstruktiver und spezifischer debattiert. Die auf der diesjährigen Tagung der Sektion Frauenund Geschlechterforschung angeschnittenen grundsätzlichen Fragen laden zum Weiterdenken und -diskutieren ein: etwa mit der Lektüre des bald erscheinenden Tagungsbandes (Westfälisches Dampfboot) . Helen Schwenken, Charlotte Ullrich