This dissertation examines the impact of modernity, in the form of modernization, rapid industrialization and the introduction of Western ideas about nationalism and female emancipation, on gender and gender relations in contemporary Malaysian film and literature. Drawing upon theories ranging from Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonialism, nationalism, existentialism to theories about fascism, I examine and critique the representations of gender from the predominantly middle-class writers and the works of the new wave Malay filmmakers. I make the case that these films and literary works reflect the outcome of the National Economic Policy (1971-1990) and, in my analyses, show that these modernizing imperatives, though received positively, are sometimes greeted with a cautionary ambivalence, depending on one's class, gender, ethnicity, and political and religious beliefs. Such ambivalence towards feminism, for example, appears in K.S. Maniam's portrayal of independent female characters, whom I call "fascist 'feminists'," or in the representations of hypermasculinity or male violence in current Malay cinema. Films and literature by some Malays reflect a desire to recover Malay custom, adat, while forging a unique, modern, postcolonial identity that distinguishes itself from the West, other former British colonies and other Muslim nations. However, this subversive postcolonial move must be treated with caution to ensure that it does not replicate prevalent negative stereotypes of women as sexualised beings. A key distinction in this dissertation is that the representations of the modern Malay woman vary according to the gender of the cultural producer: male writers and filmmakers portray the negative impact of modernity on women, whereas their female counterparts portray women at ease with modernity.

Zugl.: Berlin, Freie Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2004

This dissertation is a critical examination of selected Tsonga novels by male and female writers. Positive and negative images of women by these authors are analysed, compared and evaluated from a feminist perspective. Emphasis is laid on the manner in which Tsonga writers portray female characters in a changing society and the extent to which the images of women in this literature represent the present day woman. Adherence to ideological, cultural and traditional values as well as the differences in portrayal of women by male and female writers is also investigated. Through a comparison of novels written by male and female writers it is established that because of patriarchy these writers differ markedly in their portrayal of female characters. In all the novels analysed, the sociol-cultural context influences the way in which these writers portray female characters. Male writers promote traditional values which female writers strive to discard by portraying female characters who predominantly undermine stereotypical cultural sex-roles. / African languages / M.A. (African languages)

The aim of this study is to offer a critical analysis of representations of gender violence and resistance to such violence in selected novels by Zimbabwean women writers. A great deal of scholarship on Zimbabwean women writers focuses on well-known authors such as Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Even here, the critical emphasis tends to be on the representation of women’s suffering under patriarchy and their status as victims. Although the exposure of gendered suffering is important, these studies often fail to take into consideration the female characters’ agency and survival strategies, including how they go about rebuilding lives and identities in the aftermath of violence. This thesis argues that the fictional texts of other, lesser known Zimbabwean authors are similarly worthy of critical scrutiny, yielding as they can important insights into female characters’ resistance to gender violence. The current study analyses Zimbabwean women writers’ literary contributions to discourses on gender-based violence and explores how female characters have embraced the concept of agency to recreate their identities and to introduce a new gender ethos into the contexts of lives that are often shaped by severe restrictions and oppression. Violence is a phenomenon that is always shaped by specific cultural, ideological and socio-economic forces. As the study shows, characters’ identities are constituted by the complex intersections of a number of markers of difference, including their gender, race and class. This study thus regards identity as intersectional and takes all these factors into consideration in its analysis of the representations of violence and resistance in the selected texts. The study also aims to determine whether these literary representations offer any solutions to the difficulties of characters affected by or living with violence. The works critiqued are Lillian Masitera’s The Trail (2000), Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope (2006), Virginia Phiri’s Highway Queen (2010) and Violet Masilo’s The African Tea Cosy (2010). / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

The endeavor of this thesis is to throw light on the portrayal of women by the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. Roth’s women are regarded as highly negative and thus the author has increasingly been judged a male chauvinist and misogynist. This opinion seems particularly questionable since hardly any studies on his fictitious women have ever been conducted. The present study aims at filling that void and thereby presenting Roth’s views in a more differentiated manner. A new approach to Roth is thus called for. The analysis draws from the socio-historic background in which Roth’s work is situated. In his journalism as in his fiction, Roth strived to demonstrate and deal with the challenges of the times he lived in. His work frequently revolves around the “damaged” post-war generation in the 1920s and 30s, the feeling of being literally and metaphorically homeless. His later works are mostly set in the past, although this should not be viewed as escapism but as an attempt to come to terms with present reality. The worlds he portrays are dominated by men who are neither whole nor strong. But although women are few and it is said they are depicted only in crude stereotypes, the study shows that Roth does address their problems and plights. By observing women within established types, modern and traditional, it is revealed that Roth indeed shows depth when characterizing women, and that his interest in them is to use them as examples to illustrate fundamental aspects of the human condition. Rather than portraying them subservient to man, Roth demonstrates their common humanity. His understanding for the condition of women in his times often becomes apparent only when the narrative perspective is isolated from the protagonists. Simultaneously his work presents a valuable literary contribution for Gender Studies. / Classics and Modern European Languages / (D. Litt. et Phil.) (German)

The central tenet of the study is that language and madness are bound together, language both including madness and perpetuating the exclusion of madness as 'other'. The first chapter considers the representation of madness in Atwood's novels The Edible Woman, Surfacing and Alias Grace from the perspective ofFoucauldian and Kristevan theories oflanguage and madness. Alias Grace becomes the focus in the second chapter. Here the syntax of madness is traced during Grace's stay in the mental asylum. Language, madness and sexuality are revealed as a palimpsest written on Grace's body. The final chapter looks at Grace's incarceration in the penitentiary and her dealings with the psychologist Dr. Simon Jordan where Grace's narrative tightly threads language and madness together. Underlying each chapter is a concern with how language and madness are in permanent interaction and opposition writing themselves onto society and onto Grace. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Each of these novelists, in her own way, presents a critique of the idealised woman of the nineteenth-century. My aim in this dissertation is to reveal the degree to which each is successful in her mission to 'explode the lie' of angelic womanhood, and, in so doing, free her long-incarcerated Victorian sisters. It took great courage and fortitude to utter at times a lone dissenting voice; and female writers of the present owe a great debt of gratitude to their pioneering Victorian counterparts, who cleared the way for them to take up the banner and continue the march towards female liberation from a stifling ideology. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This thesis reports on an analysis of the discursive construction of female and male physical identity in children’s literature and explicitly combines corpus linguistic methods with a critical discourse approach. Based on three novels from each of the Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter series, it shows clear gendering of body parts, not only in terms of the purely quantitative preferences for certain body parts to be associated with one or other gender, but in terms of discourse prosody, or the uses to which the body parts are put. Human body parts in these series are mostly used in the following four ways, all of which show differences in realisation in terms of gender: · to describe individuals, physically, in order to distinguish one from the other; · to convey emotion, unintentionally as well as consciously; · for physical interaction between people and · for interaction with the world more broadly: responses to danger and agency, i.e. the ability to act on the world and the nature of what is achieved. The use of body parts by characters to express emotion and act agentively on the world is revealed to be strongly gendered in the two series. I characterise the most prominent patterns in terms of the bodily products blood, sweat and tears, of which the last is strongly connected to female characters, who are generally associated with emotion. The other two, referring to active participation in fighting and injury, as well as agency, are almost exclusively reserved for males, with female characters rendered unable to act on the physical world as a result of overwhelming feelings. The females’ response to danger suggests stereotyped discourses of inequality which see women and girls as requiring protection and being physically incapable. Thus gender is still a particularly salient aspect in these widely-read examples of children’s literature, despite plots which appear to be fairly positive towards women. The strength of the inclusion of a corpus approach in this study lies in its capacity to reveal objective, and often fairly covert, trends in language use. These in turn enrich the critical analysis of discourses in these influential texts, which facilitates social change through linguistic analysis.

This dissertation examines the impact of modernity, in the form of modernization, rapid industrialization and the introduction of Western ideas about nationalism and female emancipation, on gender and gender relations in contemporary Malaysian film and literature. Drawing upon theories ranging from Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonialism, nationalism, existentialism to theories about fascism, I examine and critique the representations of gender from the predominantly middle-class writers and the works of the new wave Malay filmmakers. I make the case that these films and literary works reflect the outcome of the National Economic Policy (1971-1990) and, in my analyses, show that these modernizing imperatives, though received positively, are sometimes greeted with a cautionary ambivalence, depending on one's class, gender, ethnicity, and political and religious beliefs. Such ambivalence towards feminism, for example, appears in K.S. Maniam's portrayal of independent female characters, whom I call "fascist 'feminists'," or in the representations of hypermasculinity or male violence in current Malay cinema. Films and literature by some Malays reflect a desire to recover Malay custom, adat, while forging a unique, modern, postcolonial identity that distinguishes itself from the West, other former British colonies and other Muslim nations. However, this subversive postcolonial move must be treated with caution to ensure that it does not replicate prevalent negative stereotypes of women as sexualised beings. A key distinction in this dissertation is that the representations of the modern Malay woman vary according to the gender of the cultural producer: male writers and filmmakers portray the negative impact of modernity on women, whereas their female counterparts portray women at ease with modernity. / Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies / Graduate

This dissertation examines how transgender feelings and gender variation emerged as a vital motivator for scientific and aesthetic explorations of human personhood and social experiences of marginality in German-speaking culture in the early twentieth century. My research illustrates how concepts of gender variation served as a generative problem for modernist practitioners of sexual science and as a creative impulse and figural resource for modernist literary and artistic innovations. The feedback between these fields allowed for novel social categories to develop in a period where designations like “transgender” or “transsexual” were not yet in use as stable public identities or diagnoses, but nevertheless circulated in response to experiences of embodied difference and social alienation. By reading for “transgender feeling” as a heuristic that unites multiple historical categories of gender and sexual variation, I argue that transgender phenomena were instrumental for the development of German modernist movements at large. Building on affect studies, trans and queer studies, and German literary and cultural studies, my project intervenes in limited contemporary understandings of transgender history and identity as a minority political and diagnostic discourse. Instead, I argue for a more expansive, “democratized” notion of transgender feeling that encompasses diverse historical forms of gender variation, some of which have disappeared or become “obsolete,” and show how narratives of gender intermediacy and incongruence are essential to modernist aesthetic practices. Chapter One examines theories of sexual intermediacy in the sexological work of Magnus Hirschfeld and Otto Weininger, who both suggested that a transgender condition underlies “normal” human sexual development. I show that trans feelings cut across Hirschfeld’s sexological categories and, in particular, his deployment of the case genre, troubling stable taxonomies of sexual affect and allowing for promising forms of coauthorship and “trans genre writing” to emerge in sexology. Chapter Two takes up Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Das Stunden-Buch, as well as his early childhood experience, to argue that dysphoria and intermediacy are key to understanding the social alienation that Rilke expressed in his modernist work alongside personal attachments to femininity and a feminine poetic voice. Chapter Three on Else Lasker-Schüler illustrates how trans feelings, the masculine persona of Jussuf and appropriations of racial and ethnic difference significantly frame the novel Mein Herz and become enduring features of Lasker-Schüler’s literary and artistic production. I highlight how scholarly reception of Rilke and Lasker-Schüler’s work have intentionally disavowed these expressions as transgender and argue for a reassessment of trans feeling as a creative impulse in German modernism through their texts and images. My last chapter explores how modernist periodical media served as a vital tool for crafting trans intimate publics in the Weimar period and for negotiating the shared norms of gender and social participation for a novel class of gender-variant people under the category of transvestism. In my conclusion, I turn to the unfinished business of sexual and gender definition that continues to frame LGBTQ politics in Germany and abroad today, and I link contemporary questions of trans aesthetics to modernist dynamics of gender and sexual multiplicity.