Eine Frau zu sehen by Annemarie Schwarzenbach

First, I seek to demonstrate the usefulness of Weber’s thought-and German Studies more generally-for contemporary queer theory in thinking about sexual politics and the relationship between text, speech, and identity. The article brings Max Weber and 1970s American gay liberation literature together to reconceptualize camp sensibility as a queer art of reenchantment and a discursive practice of worldmaking. I am currently working on a new article aimed for publication in a leading queer studies journal.

In doing so, they generate original modernist worlds and sensibilities adjacent to, yet distinct from, what we’ve come to understand as canonical modernism. I show how these authors’ female and queer characters in particular simultaneously are shaped by and exert control over the entwined narrative articulations of time and sex. Through close readings of the prose-novels, novellas, diaries, essays, letters-of Robert Musil, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Klaus Mann, Siegfried Kracauer, and Marieluise Fleißer, I analyze how the rhythms of erotic desires mold time and how time inflects sexuality. In my current book project, The Times of Their Lives: Queer and Female Modernism, 1910–34, I investigate the relationships between time and sexuality and how they interact on and with the page in modernist literature.

As you’ll see below, I actively publish in both fields in pursuit of a cross-disciplinary conversation. Second, by engaging extensively with major debates and scholars in queer studies and theory, I bring the neglected German context to queer and feminist debates around topics such as normativity, desire, subjectivity, and relationality.

First, I contribute to a new turn in German Studies away from applying an abstractly queer theoretical lens to canonical authors and texts and toward studying overlooked queer authors and texts themselves, thereby recasting our understanding German literary history. Working at the intersections of German Studies, literary studies, and queer studies, my research has two main aims.

Eine Frau zu sehen by Annemarie Schwarzenbach