CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Hoft, Swantje |
|---|---|
| Title | Between Past Perfect and Future Perfect East German Feminist Utopias in Self-Published Texts in the Time of the German Unification |
| Summary | In this thesis, East German feminist publications are analyzed with respect to their imaginations of feminist utopias, which included visions of a socio-ecological transformation of the GDR into a radically democratic socialism, ideas about an intersectional reformulation of Marxist ideas (Behrend & Maleck-Lewy, 1991, p. 9), as well as the necessity to demasculinize of existing utopias. In the aftermath of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the reform government opened the press, which led to an explosion of independent, self-published magazines (Tröger, 2021, p. 985). East German feminists used this opportunity and founded a realm of feminist magazines, and books, which will analyzed be in this thesis as in relation to their function as subaltern counterpublics (Fraser 1990). The East German woman’s movement was one of the most important ones in the Soviet Bloc (Martens, 2001, p. 1), they participated in the GDR opposition, creating their own organizations, organized the first occupation of State Security headquarters, and had an important role in the so-called Round Tables of the GDR opposition. On the analytical level, I will operate with the concept of disidentification by the cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz, as a process of identity formation that negotiates belonging through “working on and against” Western influences (1999, p. 11). I will show how these feminist utopias where a form of hope that functioned as critique of the post reunification neoliberal politics in united Germany, since East German feminists wanted to create alternative utopias for the future and safeguard this memory for upcoming generations. But their female utopias have been stored on the graveyard of lost futures after the demise of state socialism. This loss of futures created ambivalent emotions among East German feminists, which oscillated between feelings of hope and hopelessness, and a sort of ‘East German feminist melancholia’. With this thesis, I aspire to contribute to the research on GDR feminism and show that feminist ideas and knowledge are not western by default, but eastern and western thought was mutually constitutive of one another, even during the Cold War. |
| Supervisor | Hadley Z. Renkin |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/hoft_swantje.pdf |
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