German #MeToo: Rape Cultures and Resistance, 1770-2020: 10 (Women and Gender in German Studies) - Hardcover

Book 7 of 11: Women and Gender in German Studies
 
9781640141353: German #MeToo: Rape Cultures and Resistance, 1770-2020: 10 (Women and Gender in German Studies)

Synopsis

This volume of new essays represents a collective, academic, and activist effort to interpret German literature and culture in the context of the international #MeToo movement, illustrating and interrogating the ways that "rape cultures" persist. Responding to the worldwide impact of the #MeToo movement, this volume investigates not only the ubiquity of sexual abuse and sexual violence but also the transhistorical and transnational failure to hold perpetrators accountable. From a range of disciplines, the collected essays engage current cultural and political discourses about systemic sexism, feminist theory and practice, and gender-based discrimination from an academic and activist perspective. The focus on national cultures of German-speaking Europe from the mid-eighteenth century to the present captures the persistence of normalized and institutionalized sexism, reframed through the lens of a contemporary political and social movement. German #MeToo argues that sexual violence is not a universal human constant. Rather, it is nurtured and sustained by the social, political, cultural, legal, and economic fabric of specific societies. The authors sustain and vary their exploration of #MeToo-related issues through considerations of rape, prostitution, sexual murder, the politics of consent, and victim-blaming as enacted in literary works by canonical and marginalized authors, the visual arts, the graphic novel, film, television, and theater. The analysis of rape myths - of discourses and practices in German history and culture that subtend and indemnify sexual violence - is a central subject of this edited volume. Throughout, German #MeToo challenges narratives of sex-based discrimination while emphasizing the strategies of resistance and the importance of telling one's own story.

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About the Authors

ELISABETH KRIMMER is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis.

PATRICIA ANNE SIMPSON is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Lisa Wille, is research associate at the Department of Modern German Literature at the Technical University of Darmstadt.

Melissa Sheedy is a Lecturer in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Deborah Janson is an associate professor of German at West Virginia University

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