Emily Spiers

Introduction: Re-viewing literary celebrity

What is literary celebrity, and why should people working in other areas of either literary or celebrity studies care about it? Our answer is threefold. First, as a socially urgent topic (how authors are recognised and valued in the western world), it is something of a lifeline to literary studies, which, towards the end of the twentieth century, came dangerously close to running aground on self-regarding analyses of self-regarding texts (Jameson 1991, Eagleton 2003, English 2010, Felski 2015). Alongside postcolonial and feminist studies, as well as recent trends in queer theory and ecocriticism, literary celebrity has offered a bridge to those scholars who want to think literature back into the bigger picture of society. Seminal works by, for example, Moran (2000), Glass (2004) and Jaffe (2005) set it out as a particular, historical response to the emergence of mass culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Subsequent studies have argued with various different aspects of this premise: whether this is to contest the moment and material mode of literary celebrity’s genesis (Mole 2007, 2009) or the unacknowledged gender bias underpinning the very concepts of ‘fame’ and ‘celebrity’ (Hammill 2007, Weber 2012). Surveying the by now substantial body of research on literary celebrity in 2014, Ohlsson et al. (2014) argued for yet greater diversification of the field of study: to include all forms of fiction, and to differentiate between literary contexts across time and in various geopolitical spaces. This necessarily brief overview of the field brings us to the second point about literary celebrity’s significance: it is increasingly obvious that literary celebrity constitutes less a specific phenomenon within the history of literature than a necessarily multipronged methodological approach to the study of literature. Thinking about issues of reputation and writers’ relations with readers focuses the critical theorist on the innate constituents of literature: authors, readers, texts, ideas of affect, representation and self-fashioning. But it does so in such a way that also permits the study of literature to go beyond itself and to ask how ideas of literary value intersect with other predominant notions of social and economic value at any one time or place; to consider the material and pecuniary aspects of the book trade alongside the aesthetic techniques evolved in anticipation of a work’s wider appropriation; and to take seriously the demonstrable relationship between the author’s literary work and the marginalia of everyday life (as Foucault [2000, p. 207], in the case of Nietzsche’s laundry lists, implicitly does not). Looking at the ways in which authors’ lives jostle with their works, and how both their lives and works become inserted into other, non-literary discourses, requires a multi-faceted, multi-

THE LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS: FROM ALICE SCHWARZER TO POP FEMINISM AND THE NEW GERMAN GIRLS

Abstract The feminist campaigner Alice Schwarzer, West German feminism’s media figurehead since the 1970s, was openly challenged in the mid-2000s by the authors of several neo-feminist volumes. These volumes include Susanne Klingner, Meredith Haaf and Barbara Streidl’s ‘Wir Alpha-Mädchen: Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht’ (2008) and Elisabeth Raether and Jana Hensel’s ‘Neue deutsche Mädchen’ (2008). Others, such as Sonja Eismann’s ‘Hot Topic: Popfeminismus heute’ (2007), seek to build bridges between the second wave and new, pop-inflected feminisms. This paper examines intergenerational feminist relations by drawing on theories of postfeminism as well as Foucault’s insights into institutions. Viewing Schwarzer herself as an institution reveals the dynamics of authority, resistance and normalization at play in the encounter between established feminism, popfeminism and postfeminist patriarchal institutions. The paper goes on to examine the dual modes of resistance and collaboration with regard to the second-wave in two contemporary novels: Charlotte Roche’s ‘Schoßgebete’ (2011) and Kerstin Grether’s ‘Zuckerbabys’ (2004).

Performing the “quing of berlin” : transnational digital interfaces in queer feminist protest culture

Abstract This paper employs the figure of the “interface” to explore the work of German feminist rapper and spoken-word performer Sookee (Nora Hantzsch), who constitutes an ideal case-study for examining the interface between digital technologies, transnational feminisms, and local activism. Sookee is an underground hip-hop artist and queer political activist in Berlin, a location which features in her work as a site of subcultural dissent and contested identities. Sookee is also an academic; a youth outreach worker; a significant online presence; and an international creative collaborator. As such, she navigates the interfaces between multiple social groups, media, discourses, and cultural contexts—regional, national, and transnational. This article focuses on the digital circulations of Sookee’s material against the backdrop of her local performative and activist work. Her transnational collaborations with women MCs and poets from South Africa and America, as well as Europe, celebrate cultural, linguistic, racial, and ethnic difference by bringing in a diverse range of feminist voices to the German context.

‘Making it’: practitioners’ views on literary celebrity

This Forum offers a view on literary celebrity from professionals working outside the academy. As a deviation from the usual practices of Celebrity Studies, these Forum contributions are not intend...

ATTITUDES TO FUTURITY IN NEW GERMAN FEMINISMS AND CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION

Abstract Drawing on Clare Hemmings’ work on feminist narratives, this article explores attitudes to the future in recent German-language pop-feminist volumes, including, amongst others, Meredith Haaf, Susanne Klingner and Barbara Streidl’s Wir Alpha-Mädchen: Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht [We Alpha-Girls: Why Feminism Makes Life More Beautiful] (2008) and the feminist memoir Neue deutsche Mädchen [New German Girls] (2008) by Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether. After analysing the rhetoric of linear progress deployed in these texts and the ways in which their authors consign second-wave feminism to the past in the name of a normative future, I go on to examine future-thinking in two complex first-person novels: Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill (2010) and Antonia Baum’s Vollkommen leblos, bestenfalls tot [Completely Lifeless, Preferably Dead] (2011). I demonstrate how these novels invoke a sense of disorientation and asynchronous temporality that is productively queer. Their disruptions of time and space, of language and form, combine with decentred central protagonists to throw doubt on the figure of the coherent sovereign subject who lurks persistently behind the new German feminists’ configuration of the self-empowered “individual.” Finally, this paper contends that the queer refusal of normative futures enacted by the novels allows the opportunity to imagine alternative modes of being that are potentially politically transformative.

Split Infinities: German Feminisms and the Generational Project

When, in the second half of the nineteenth-century, the German womens movement took off, female activists/writers expressed a desire for their political work to initiate a generational project. The achievement of equal democratic rights for men and women was perceived to be a process in which the ‘democratic spirit’ was instilled in future generations through education and the provision of exceptional role models. The First Wave of the womens movement laid the ground, through their writing, campaigning, and petitioning, for the eventual success of obtaining womens suffrage and sending female, elected representatives to the Reichstag in 1919. My part of this article, drawing on the essays by Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919) analyses how the idea of womens political and social emancipation is phrased in the rhetoric of a generational project which will, in the short term, bring only slow changes to the status quo but which will enable future generations to build on the foundations of the (heterogeneous, but mostly bourgeoisie-based) first organised German womens movement, and which was intended to function as a generational repository of womens intellectual history. When, in the mid-2000s, a number of pop-feminist essayistic volumes appeared in Germany, their authors expressed the desire to reinvigorate feminism for a new generation of young women. Their texts focus in part on the continuing need to ensure equal democratic rights for young women in terms of equal pay, reproductive capacities and child care. Yet they simultaneously register their dissatisfaction with the legacy of the New Feminism and, more specifically, with the role models it produced. Although in their written interventions these new German pop-feminists often draw on the generic and rhetorical strategies of their feminist forebears, they employ the generational metaphor as a means of producing a narrative of ‘progress’ (Hemmings, 2011) which signifies a departure from previous feminist discourses and firmly ‘others’ their exponents. This type of narrative resonates troublingly with wider social and political narratives which situate feminism firmly in the past. Strikingly, German pop-feminist volumes share the deployment of this progress narrative with similar publications in Britain and the US. Yet the German volumes generally — and uniquely in relation to those three contexts — avoid textual engagement with the writing and protagonists of the first womens movement in Germany. This section of the article examines the feminist historiographical narratives told in pop-feminist volumes across all three contexts, enquiring after the local specificities of generational thinking, its caesurae, emphases and omissions, and revealing the broader transnational commonalities — and political implications — of feminist stories.

Fractured Legacies: An Introduction

Very often, when one reads primary texts by German feminists of the nineteenth century as well as historical analyses of those texts, one encounters striking similarities to the public gender and feminism discourse of the 1970s, to pick one symbolic decade, as well as to the same debates being carried out in the early twenty-first century, in various media such as newspaper columns, scholarly and political blogs, and not least on social media like Twitter. One sobering observation for the nineteenth-century scholar is this: the media of the debate may have changed but the topics remain, if not the same, then very similar to the ones held over the second half of the nineteenth century. Equally striking, and perhaps more troubling a realization, is the apparent lack of productive dialogue between German feminists representing different age groups today. This is often accompanied by a sense that younger German feminists remain unaware of the historical dimensions and protagonists of earlier German feminisms. The metaphor of the ‘wave’ with which feminism in its historical form is commonly described in the anglophone context seems to be misleading; the cycle, or the spiral, appears to be more appropriate considering that similar ground is covered again and again, with adjustments in rhetoric and focal points of ideology made for the respective decades. For example, Ann Taylor Allen makes the following point in her influential study Feminism and Motherhood in Germany:

Killing ourselves is not subversive:Riot Grrrl from zine to screen and the commodification of female transgression

Abstract: This article draws on material from the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York Universitys Fayles Library to examine the culture of ‘zine’ production in riot grrrl communities in the United States during the 1990s. After investigating the relationship between the political issues and aesthetic strategies explored by riot grrrl literary producers, the author analyses the points of tension arising within the movement, which become illuminated by zines’ revelatory confessional modes, or what Mimi Thi Nguyen has called riot grrrls ‘aesthetics of access’. The author subsequently enquires after the implications for riot grrrl politics of understanding experiences of oppression and transgressive behaviour as cultural commodities. Finally, the author goes on to trace the commodification of the transgressive feminist gesture in mainstream popular culture and contemporary online feminist activism in the United States.