GS/HS/SO 335 - Gender Discourses in Historical Perspective

Gender is, and always has been, a topic of debate. This course examines key concepts, theories, and developments of gender as played out in German history from the late 18th to the 21st centuries. Viewed through a constructionist lens, analyzing “gender debates” will help us understand the ways in which gender and sexual identities are socially and discursively constructed rather than being essential or biological. The course will focus on Berlin, which has always been a laboratory of political, social, and cultural trends. It was the “birthplace of homosexuality”, as the central concepts were developed and fought against here. In the 19th century it mirrored the ambivalences of modernity by hosting several emancipation movements and counter movements. The fight for suffrage and women’s emancipation was surrounded by decades of debate and political fights. Berlin became the site of the world’s first institute of sexual science, where a. o. transsexual identities were recognized for the first time in history. The 1960s brought the fight for sexual and gender liberation to Berlin’s streets. In the 1920s and again today, Berlin has become Europe’s queer capital, hosting Europe’s first queer museum and numerous queer festivals. At the same time, a political backlash seems to bring back “völkische” gender ideologies and diversity is again being questioned.

The course combines both a longitudinal and a cross-sectional perspective: along a historic axis, it looks at important discourses of the intertwined history and politics of gender during successive periods – Prussia, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, NS-Germany and WWII, the post-WW II period with West Germany and the GDR, unified Germany and contemporary Berlin. A central question here is: what do the respective gender politics of a society tell us about its norms and values? In the cross-sectional perspective we will analyze gender representations in the arts, media, film and marketing- and we will talk to representatives of different (religious) communities and activists.