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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2012
Identity politics, understood as the analysis of the ways in which social roles are inscribed on the body, affects and behaviour, and in which collective experiences of oppression also produce resistant practices, informed German feminisms and performances during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, major feminist playwrights have shifted into literary production, or abandoned gender as their central critical concern in view of other urgent issues that arose after reunification, including historical revisionism, economic restructuring, rising racism and xenophobia, and globalization fears. Younger white artists playfully unbundled gender and sex and supported the postfeminist consensus that feminist identity politics had become obsolete. The work of Bridge Markland, which can be found on YouTube, emblematizes a burgeoning transgender and drag culture that was transnationalized through film, video, photography exhibitions and workshops. In this critical vacuum, immigrant and minority women were saddled with intensifying, ever more essentialist discourses of gender and ethnic difference, and continued to grapple with them through deconstructive and historicizing, as well as essentializing, deployments of identity.
1 Among others, see Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009)Google Scholar; ha, Kien Nghi, Hype um Hybridität: Kultureller Differenzkonsum und postmoderne Verwertungstechniken im Spätkapitalismus (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005)Google Scholar; Imre, Aniko, Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
2 Chow, Rey, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.
3 Imre, p. 122.
4 Mandel, Ruth, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Sieg, Katrin, ‘Black Virgins: Sexuality and the Democratic Body in Europe’, New German Critique, 109 (Winter 2010), pp. 147–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Sieg, Katrin, ‘Class of 1989: Who Made Good and Who Dropped out of German History? Postmigrant Documentary Theater in Berlin’, in Silberman, Marc, ed., The German Wall: Fallout in Europe (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 165–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
