Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T21:05:55.936Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Language-Bodies: Interpellation and Gender Transition in Antje Rávic Strubel’s Kältere Schichten der Luft and Judith Hermann’s “Sonja”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2021

Hester Baer
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Maryland
Alexandra Merley Hill
Affiliation:
Assistant Professorof German at the University of Portland
Get access

Summary

UNLIKE ANY OTHER MEDIUM, literature has the ability to employ the reader's imagination in the construction of bodies. When a narrator communicates information about a text's characters, the reader completes the act of constructing bodies by imagining their contours, postures, and gestures. A character's gender is thus dependent upon both the narrator's speech—his/her use of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives—and the reader's expectations regarding gender. If the narrator omits information about the character's gender, the reader finds clues in the text—social cues, behaviors, and actions—to fill in that information and assign one. Such moments activate literature's potential for “undoing” gender and bring to light the ways in which reading literature is an act of collaboration. Through this collaborative process between the reader and the narrator, the reader can become an active participant in the denaturalization of such basic categories as gender.

Two contemporary German authors exemplify literature's ability to employ the reader's imagination in this way. In Antje Rávic Strubel's Kältere Schichten der Luft (Colder Layers of Air, 2007), female protagonist and narrator Anja slowly transforms into a young man named Schmoll after a mysterious young woman (mis)recognizes her as him. Although Anja at first objects, the woman's insistence that Anja is Schmoll leads to Anja's physical and emotional transformation. Anja accepts Schmoll as a second identity within herself, experiencing a plurality of gender whenever Schmoll manifests himself in her body. Judith Hermann's short story “Sonja” (1998) similarly relies on a third party interlocutor to reveal information about the gender of the narrator. The reader may assume a female narrator until, halfway through the story, the protagonist's lover utters the pronoun “er” (he) and thereby forces the reader to reimagine the narrator as a man and her lesbian relationships as his heterosexual ones. Just as in Kältere Schichten der Luft, the gender transition in “Sonja” requires a third party interlocutor within the diegetic world to be initiated in the mind of the reader. In both texts, it is the moment in which heteronormativity is introduced into the lesbian relationship when queering happens—that is, the binary gender system breaks down.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×