This research project explores the slippages and boundaries between the concepts homosociality, homoeroticism, and homosexuality in the context of gendered identities in the literary sphere. The impetus for the project is Rosa von Praunheim’s 2018 film, “Männerfreundschaften”, an engagement with queer motifs and relationships in the Goethezeit. Perhaps unexpectedly, the film interrupts its reflection on male-male relationships to briefly reflect on the life-long partnership of Sybille Mertens and Adele Schopenhauer, thereby pointing towards a queer puzzle: is there a homo-logical cleavage in our theoretical understanding that separates “warm brothers” from their similarly inclined sisters? What similarities, differences, boundaries, and slippages come into focus when we look at male-male and female-female bondings side by side? Are there specific sites that allow us to differentiate social, erotic, and sexual boundaries from a gendered perspective? How do we theorise the complex relationships between desire, eros, power, and representation in Männerfreundschaften and Frauenfreundschaften?
In light of current movements both to label all manner of difference and to resist its categorisation, we look to literary and cultural representations of same-sex intimacies and inclinations that defy clear definition, thus pushing back against commodification. By looking to periods preceding the mid-19th century solidification of terms purporting to catalogue, define and contain sexual difference (such as “homosexuality”), we aim to tease out affective, ethical, and aesthetic potentialities that are curtailed through the labelling that has characterised Western culture since the mid-19th century.
The figure of thought of inclination is utilised in political theory as a critique of rectitude and uprightness (Cavarero 2016). This figure animates our project, as we interrogate all manner of same-sex relationships, their reception and aesthetic representations as variations on the concept of Neigung.
Prof. Imke Meyer
University of Illinois Chicago (USA) | German Studies
E-mail: imke.meyer@college-uaruhr.de
Imke Meyer is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research is focused on 19th-21st century German-language literature, film and thought. She has particular expertise in 19th-century realism, Viennese Modernism, Kafka, and post-WWII literature and film. Her research frequently engages narrative theory, gender and queer theory, critical theory, and visual culture.
Imke Meyer has published two monographs: „Jenseits der Spiegel kein Land: Ich-Fiktionen in Texten von Franz Kafka und Ingeborg Bachmann“ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001) and „Männlichkeit und Melodram: Arthur Schnitzlers erzählende Schriften“ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010) as well as numerous articles on a diverse range of authors and filmmakers, including Ludwig Tieck, Franz Grillparzer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Elfriede Jelinek, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Haneke, Barbara Albert, and Arthur Schnitzler.
Imke Meyer is the recipient of a DAAD grant for research in contemporary literature. She has held a visiting professorship at the University of Pennsylvania and was the Helen Herrmann Chair at Bryn Mawr College before moving to the University of Illinois, Chicago. She has served as president both for the Austrian Studies Association and for the Pacific Modern and Ancient Literature Association. She is the founding and current editor of the book series “New Directions in German Studies”, published by Bloomsbury Press.
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Prof. Sigrid Nieberle
TU Dortmund University | Modern and Contemporary German Literature, Gender and Diversity
E-mail: sigrid.nieberle@tu-dortmund.de
Prof. Heidi Schlipphacke
University of Illinois Chicago (USA) | German Studies
Heidi Schlipphacke is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she also holds an affiliate appointment in Classics and Mediterranean Studies. She has published widely on German, European, and American literature, film and thought, with particular attention to aesthetic form and its ability to uniquely reflect on social and political structures that are often camouflaged in the real world. Thematically, her scholarship has focused on gender and sexuality, on kinship, on queer aesthetics, on affect, on the aesthetics and ethics of the nation-state, on intermediality, and on temporality.
Heidi Schlipphacke has published the monographs “Nostalgia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film” (Bucknell UP, 2010) and “The Aesthetics of Kinship: Form and Family in the Long Eighteenth Century” (Bucknell UP, 2024) as well as a co-edited volume on the global cultural resonance of Elisabeth of Austria. She has edited and co-edited journal issues on topics including “Habsburg Nostalgia” (Journal of Austrian Studies, 2014); “Lessing, The European Enlightenment, and the First Sexual Revolution” (Lessing Yearbook, 2017); and “Queer German Studies: A Forum” (The German Quarterly, 2024), and has published numerous articles on related topics.
She is the recipient of grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Fulbright Foundation, and the UIC Institute for the Humanities. She will serve as president of the Goethe Society of North America beginning in 2025.
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Prof. Sigrid Nieberle
TU Dortmund University | Modern and Contemporary German Literature, Gender and Diversity
E-mail: sigrid.nieberle@tu-dortmund.de
Prof. Sigrid Nieberle
TU Dortmund University | Modern and Contemporary German Literature, Gender and Diversity
E-mail: sigrid.nieberle@tu-dortmund.de
Sigrid Nieberle is Professor of Modern and Contemporary German Literature with a focus on gender and diversity at TU Dortmund University. She completed her doctorate at LMU München with an interdisciplinary thesis on “FrauenMusikLiteratur” and habilitated at the University of Greifswald on literary biopics. In 2009, she was appointed Professor of Modern German Literature at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg; in 2014, she accepted the appointment to TU Dortmund University.
Sigrid Nieberle is a founding member and has been Managing Director of the Institute for Diversity Studies since 2020. Her research focuses on gender and diversity studies and the intermediality of literature, especially in music and film. She was a visiting professor at the University of Oxford (DAAD Professorial Exchange Program) in 2008, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence (Max Kade Foundation) in 2013, and at the University of Illinois Chicago (dto) in 2019.
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