Gender Studies

Historically conditioned gender configurations are pertinent to a number of our research projects. Cultural artefacts such as literary texts or other media enter into a complex relationship with the conventions of their time, including its conventions regarding constructions of gender. In the process, normative statements can be assessed self-reflexively and become modified; in some instances these modifications, by allowing for new subject positions, will then filter back into society beyond the artefact.

Our past and current research projects include:

Masculinities in British and Australian Literature of the Great War

Silvia Mergenthal, who has addressed questions of gender throughout her career, is currently completing a monograph entitled A Man Could Stand Up: Masculinities in British and Australian Literature of the Great War. In this contribution to masculinity studies, Mergenthal, building on the seminal work of R. W. Connell, will investigate how canonical as well as non-canonical fictional texts of the Great War and its aftermath negotiate hegemonic constructions of masculinity. From a synchronic perspective, the book will explore the interplay between fictional masculinities variously inflected by age, class, political affiliation, or sexual orientation; it will also link these fictional masculinities to those encoded in other, non-fictional discourses of the period. Diachronically, it will sketch developments in the pre-war, war and immediate post-war decades, but also read these developments against later, that is, late 20^th and early 21^st century, literary representations of the Great War.

Shame in Victorian Fiction

In her post-doc project “The Performativity of Victorian Shame: Materialist-Discursive Perspectives on the Shame Affect in the 19^th-Century Novel” (working title), Anja Hartl examines experiences and representations of shame in Victorian literature. Drawing on a wide range of theories, most notably affect theory and New Materialism, Hartl explores how shame is constructed socially and discursively and which functions it is attributed in selected novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde. Focusing in particular on how the texts represent, negotiate and instrumentalise shame, Hartl identifies eminent political and ethical concerns in the novels’ conceptualisations of shame that radically question the sexual norms, conventional gender roles and the political status quo of the time, while also pointing to the limits of affective emancipation. In this sense, shame experiences in 19^th-century fiction function as a testing ground for identity formation and emancipation – both individually and socially.

Gender and Genre in Contemporary Drama

Hysteria, trauma and melancholia have not only become powerful tropes in modern-day culture at large; they are also prominent in the theatre. How do contemporary plays employ these concepts? How does the staging of these ‘disorders’ affect the aesthetics of the plays? What exchange relations between theory and theatre can be traced? Christina Wald pursues such questions in her study Hysteria, Trauma, and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Drama, establishing the characteristics and concerns of ‘The Drama of Hysteria’, ‘Trauma Drama’, and ‘The Drama of Melancholia’ through in-depth readings of works by playwrights such as Anna Furse, Terry Johnson, Sarah Daniels, Phyllis Nagy, Claire Dowie, David Auburn, Marina Carr and Sarah Kane. Conceptualising hysteria, trauma and melancholia as ‘performative maladies’, Wald educes an exciting interaction of theatrical performance, psychiatric and psychoanalytic theory, and the theory of gender performativity.