FEMINISM AND GERMAN STUDIES IN THE UNITED STATES

FEMINISM AND GERMAN STUDIES IN THE UNITED STATES

Sara Lennox



An examination of the influence of feminist theory and scholarship on German Studies is no
easy task. Perhaps more than any other methodology that has entered Inlands- and
Auslandsgermanistik from without, feminist German Studies around the world reveals in each
case the strong imprint of the particular circumstances that shaped the women’s movement and
its academic feminist manifestations in the country out of which it emerged. (Indeed, the case of
feminist German Studies exemplifies in nuce why the different conditions of various countries
make it necessary to write histories of the quite different trajectories pursued by Germanistik im
Ausland—as splendidly illustrated in the recent volume German Studies in the United States: A
Historical Handbook, edited by Peter Uwe Hohendahl.) In this essay, I’d like briefly to trace
the course of U.S. academic feminism and then look at the ways in which it entered German
Studies. Then I’d like to turn to some yet-unsolved problems that feminist scholars of German
cultural studies confront and make some proposals for the directions that feminist cultural
analysis might wish to move in the future.
To understand U.S. feminism in the twenty-first century, as well as differences between
American, German, and Australian feminism from the outset of the women’s movement until
today, it’s necessary to return to the moment of feminism’s emergence. In the United States, the
women’s movement that began in 1967-68 understood itself to be in alliance with other sixties
movements, critical of the sexism of the student anti-war movement and the Civil Rights
movement but otherwise generally in accord with their aims. At its outset, the U.S. women’s

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movement was thus a socially-critical oppositional movement that was not focused on women’s
issues alone. Early U.S. feminists maintained that women were fundamentally like men, and
their earliest political activities were directed against the sexist treatment of women and
discrimination against them in arenas in which men dominated. These early emphases of U.S.
feminism made little impact on West Germany, where feminism did not emerge until half a
decade later. By the mid-seventies, however, the U.S. women’s movement had undergone a
huge ideological transformation that also left its imprint on Germany: now feminists emphasized
women’s difference from, possibly even superiority to, men. “Radical” or “cultural” feminists
argued that women’s specificity—that of all women, which was taken to be the same
everywhere--had been repressed within male-dominated history and culture. Feminists scholars
now set about to uncover what had been obscured, hidden from history, in the past and to
elaborate women’s difference in the present. The texts of French theorists Hélène Cixous, Luce
Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva were used to support radical feminists’ contention that female
otherness, variously understood as derived from the otherness of the female psyche, anatomy, or
desire, must now be allowed to speak.
What saved American feminists from what seems now an entirely untenable position were
the vigorous protests of U.S. feminists of color in a series of contentious conferences and in
influential anthologies during the period from 1979 to 1982/3. U. S. feminists of color argued,
first, that what (white, middle-class) U.S. feminists had taken to be representative of all women
in fact described only their own white, middle-class selves, and, secondly, that white, middle-
class women could not credibly argue that all the crimes of civilization were men’s fault alone,
in which women played no part and for which they bore no responsibility. In Donna Haraway’s
words: “White women . . . discovered (that is, were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the

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non-innocence of the category ‘woman’” (157). U.S. feminist scholars’ far-reaching
reconceptualization of their field in the eighties can be understood as their effort to repudiate
their essentializing views of “woman” and elaborate a methodology that would allow them to
reconceive the female subject as “shifting and multiply organized across variable axes of
difference” (de Lauretis “Eccentric” 116), i.e., to understand and describe how actual women
differed across time and culture. If a certain appropriation of poststructuralism had allowed
American (and German) feminists of the seventies and early eighties to view the stark binary
opposition between men and women as the single difference founding a singular, monolithic
“phallocentric” system that had excluded women from discourse and power, American feminists
now turned instead to critiques of universalizing paradigms, singular histories, and unitary
identities elaborated by poststructuralist men. That appropriation of French theory was often
inflected or modulated by an attentiveness to historical specificity enabled by German Critical
Theory, British neo-Marxism and Cultural Studies, and/or postcolonial theory. The origins of
the new approach, which produced a transformation of American feminist scholarship without
parallel in Germany, are thus multinational and a consequence of multiple theoretical
displacements: as de Lauretis has put it, “feminist theory came into its own, or became possible
as such . . . in a postcolonial mode” (“Eccentric” 131).
This is the moment at which gender studies emerged in the American academy. In the
United States, at least, gender studies was not understood in opposition to feminist or women’s
studies, but rather as a signal that the categories “woman” or “femininity” were now to be
conceived differently. Though the term “gender,” used to designate the social organization of
sexual difference as distinct from the biological raw material of “sex,” had already entered the
American feminist vocabulary by the mid-seventies, attention to ethnic specificity in scholarship

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of the eighties and nineties made it possible for feminists entirely to repudiate what Linda
Nicholson has called “biological foundationalism,” to recognize “that we cannot look to the body
to ground cross-cultural claims about the male-female distinction” (83), and to investigate the
production of the sexed body across time and culture. From the mid-eighties onward, American
feminists increasingly treated masculinity and femininity as unstable and constantly changing
products of historically and culturally specific social practices, always inflected by all of any
culture’s other symbolic categories and other modes of cultural, political, and economic
organization, varying racially, ethnically, by class and religion and for many other reasons. As
feminist scholars sought new paradigms for their new understanding of gender, they turned
increasingly to Foucauldian theory to formulate their understanding that, in de Lauretis’s words,
“gender is not a property of bodies or something originally existent in human beings, but ‘the set
of effects produced in bodies, behaviors and social relations,’ in Foucault’s words, by the
deployment of ‘a complex political technology’” (de Lauretis Technologies 3 citing Foucault
127). Recognizing that they themselves were also the products of the social categories and
conditions that constructed them, American feminists also conceded their own implication in
structures of power and gave up their claim to speak for all women. U.S. feminists now
acknowledged that the term “women” at best described a hybrid grouping linked only by tenuous
and provisional coalitions. They argued instead for new conceptions of feminist political
practice that would free the category ”woman” from any stable referent and allow it to be
reconfigured anew in each instance, while they simultaneously advanced a conception of
feminist “positionality” to describe the specific location from which specific location from which
particular women can act and speak. Contemporary U.S. feminists often describe their method
as an “integrative analysis,” within which all social categories are equally weighted (i.e. gender

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is merely one category among others) and constitutive rather than additive, so that any particular
gendered phenomenon can be understood only if all the factors operating to produce it are taken
into account. By the nineties, the new queer movement that emerged in the wake of the AIDS
crisis together with Judith Butler’s enormously influential theoretical texts succeeded entirely in
detaching gender from biology altogether (even sometimes postulating that biological sex itself
was a discursive construction), raising ever more difficult questions about whom feminist
activists should regard as allies. The somewhat paradoxical consequence in the U.S. was a
feminist movement fallen on hard times in a period of general political quiescence at the same
time that gender became an ever more self-evident category of analysis in many American
academic settings.
Feminism’s astonishingly successful entry into the U.S. academy, as well as academic
feminism’s impact on U.S. German Studies, can also only be understood via a consideration of
U.S. national specificities. First, some significant differences between American higher
education and that of Germany and Australia made it possible for feminism more easily to gain a
foothold there in the United States. The U.S. has many more colleges and universities than other
industrialized countries. Though all are certainly not equal in quality or status, the respective
prestige of those institutions is plotted as a continuum than as the rupture conceived to exist, say,
between the German university and the German Gymnasium, and faculty members with a
doctorate at any institution of U.S. higher education hold the same ranks, Assistant, Associate, or
Full Professor. Thus from the outset feminist scholars in the United States have had more
opportunities to attain a professorial position than in other countries, and if they acquire the
necessary credentials (usually via publications), they can also move from an institution of lower
to one of higher prestige. In addition, federal “affirmative action” policies instituted in the early

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seventies meant that colleges and universities faced the choice of hiring more women and
minorities or potentially losing their federal funding, and many of the first feminists entered the
academy as affirmative action hires. Finally, many colleges and university are privately funded
and compete with each other to attract the most talented students, while the funding of
departments in both public and private institutions is also often linked to the size of their
enrollment figures. Hence, administrators at all levels are constrained to offer courses of study
that students want, and over the past thirty years students have increasingly demanded courses
focused on gender and other feminist issues. The market is thus also responsible for feminists’
initial entry and ongoing presence within the academy
Secondly, as a consequence of the presence and influence of refugees from Hitler’s
Germany (and the Economic Miracle) within U.S. German Departments, American Germanistik
itself may be a more liberal field in the United States than in Germany or Australia (though those
refugees often enough oriented themselves primarily towards Germany and did not involve
themselves in American intellectual life). German exiles educated my own generation, the
graduate students of the sixties, who as a consequence frequently found (as at my own graduate
institution, in the sixties and seventies often termed “das rote Wisconsin”) that they could
reconcile their left-leaning political commitments with a career in German literary studies.
Moreover, as U.S. higher education confronted its first financial crisis in the early seventies,
German Departments discovered that, to maintain high enough student enrollments to justify
adequate funding, they were forced to hire U.S.-trained Ph.D.’s rather than young scholars from
Germany or elsewhere, since it was essential that their instructors possessed the skills to attract
and retain American undergraduates. Though the number of available academic positions
certainly contracted from the seventies onward, it was not at all impossible for a quite politicized

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generation of young Germanists (whose female, and sometimes male, members became our
field’s first feminists) to be hired into permanent positions in U.S. German Departments.
Finally and probably most crucially, the organization Women in German, founded in 1974 at
a Washington University conference on the literature of the German Democratic Republic (and
subsequently based for some years at “das rote Wisconsin”), has been an enormously important
force within the field of U.S. German Studies. Of course the young and not quite so young U.S.
women who comprised U.S. German Studies’ first feminists had constructed their own
professional identities vis-à-vis the German literature and culture that they studied. However,
from the outset, the structures WIG put into place to support Germanistinnen in the academy
were very pragmatic and very American, quite different from the relatively free-floating, mostly
intellectual, and highly European-identified Marxist Germanists to whom the new feminists also
felt affinities. From its outset, WIG has attempted to devise “hand-on” strategies to bridge the
many divides that rend the academy. In contrast to other areas of feminist scholarship, senior
feminists within German Studies are not only WIG members, but enthusiastic participants in its
meetings. Senior women take very seriously their task of educating and nurturing the Nachwuchs
and at yearly WIG conferences have arranged numerous WIG panels addressing pedagogical
techniques; interview skills; syllabus, c.v., and teaching and tenure dossier preparation; journal
and book publishing; grant applications; and many other topics. Together with its challenges to
academic hierarchy, WIG also acknowledges the connectedness of the personal and the
professional. Each conference begins with a panel focused on the intersection of personal and
professional issues, and in general the conference provides older and younger feminist
Germanists with a brief respite from the “balancing act” of juggling numerous incompatible
obligations and comforts and sustains WIG members in departments hostile to feminism (whose

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numbers, happily, have declined over the years). In this regard WIG also carries on the
peculiarly American feminist politics of the early U.S. women’s movement by holding two
mutually contradictory positions at the same time, both agitating as liberals for feminists’
integration into the academy as it presently exists and simultaneously advocating for far-reaching
qualitative changes in all of society that would enable the transformation of both women and
men. As Jeanette Clausen observed as long ago as 1984, WIG members conceive WIG to be a
concrete utopia, a site where they can begin to realize their visions and reflect upon goals that
extend beyond the immediately pressing problems of their daily lives. WIG’s principled and
ongoing commitment to a kind of solidarity that early U.S. feminists might have termed
“sisterhood” begins to explain how and why feminist German Studies has often played a highly
salutary role within U.S. German Departments and our discipline in general.
But, though WIG has helped U.S. feminist Germanists over the years to preserve the best
aspects of the early U.S. women’s movement, in their theoretical approaches to German
literature WIG members have very much changed with the times, mainly following the lead of
feminists in other areas of the U.S. academy. First focusing on the analysis of sexism in literary
texts inaugurated by Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1971), feminist Germanists also swiftly
seized upon another familiar standby of feminist scholarship, “Images of Women in the Works
of . . .” Because WIG was not founded until 1974, such early variants of feminist analysis
coexisted with approaches more in vogue in the mid-seventies, and WIG’s first conferences also
undertook the resurrection of “lost” women authors and the reinterpretation of those better
known. By the late seventies WIG members too insisted on the fundamental difference of
women from men and saw their task as the retrieval and elaboration of an autonomous female
culture that patriarchal domination had hitherto repressed. However, the U.S. feminist attention

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to differences among women provoked a strong reaction in WIG members, too. Within feminist
German Studies, this new understanding of the importance of differences among women
crystallized around two events. First, at the WIG conference in 1979 it became apparent that a
great many WIG members were Jewish, thus had a very complex relationship to the German
culture they taught and could not be conceived to be simply women tout court. Somewhat later,
Claudia Koonz’s book Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (1987)
argued that, while German women were indeed subordinated to men under National Socialism,
their support for Nazism was nonetheless crucial to its success. Indeed, Koonz argued, German
women were not only not the Nazis’ innocent victims, but often enough enthusiastic supporters
of National Socialism themselves. By the mid-eighties, a significant disparity could be identified
between the positions of feminist Germanistinnen in Germany and American feminist
Germanists: while the Germans continued to explore the relevance of French feminist theory for
women and representation, many Americans found the theory depoliticizing in its inability to
conceptualize women’s differences from each other and its refusal to look at specific women in
specific circumstances. It is striking that “Weiblichkeit” remained the central term of German
feminist investigation long after “femininity” had been replaced by “gender” in U.S. analyses.
By the nineties, as the discipline of history negotiated its “linguistic turn” and Foucault’s
influence became more prominent throughout the U.S. academy, history and theory (and,
perhaps more slowly, German and American feminists) reconverged in the investigations of
historically-specific manifestations of gender and sexuality, now understood as always also
discursive productions. WIG members now drew upon a range of methodologies elaborated
outside of Germanistik to investigate the ways in which gender manifests itself, and, as an
insistence on the discursive construction of all human experience gradually dismantled the

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distinction between literary texts and other cultural productions, also turned their attention to a
wide range of cultural phenomena beyond the mainstream or even the feminist literary canon.
Now was the influence of these methodological transformations upon U.S. German
Departments limited to the terrain of gender studies alone. On the contrary: it seems likely that
U.S.-trained feminist Germanists bear major responsibility for importing into U.S. German
Studies the range of methods and emphases first elaborated in feminist and other areas of Anglo-
American literary and cultural studies. In that respect, the “Americanization” and “feminization”
of our field, variously lamented or hailed in the eighties and nineties (Cf. Nollendorfs) as an
older generation of German-trained Germanists was replaced by younger, U.S.-trained, and
frequently female scholars, was responsible for a transformation of the discipline that
increasingly distinguished it from German Germanistik. In the eighties and nineties, many
American German Departments were rent by bitter conflicts over the future contours of the field,
but by the late nineties the German Studies approach had won the day, as the German Studies
Association’s “Guidelines for Curricula in German Studies at Universities and Colleges in North
America,” formulated in 1998, indicate: “This variety of German Studies represented a shift
from the philological focus of German Germanistik to a broader concentration on culture studies,
often with the help of methods derived from Anglo-American literary studies (cultural studies,
new historicism, film studies, feminism, ethnic and minority studies, gay and lesbian studies,
queer theory, postcolonial theory). Originating as an oppositional movement led by younger
Germanists attempting to challenge older approaches, this version of German Studies has
achieved widespread acceptance in the field” (www.g-s-a.org). The German Studies
Association itself, an interdisciplinary organization that brings together scholars from all fields
that focus on “things German,” has also played a role in expanding German cultural studies

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