Investigating Female Gender Identity and Subjectivity in the German Democratic Republic
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Helsingin yliopiston digitaalinen arkisto ‘Nachdenken, ihr nach’: Investigating Female Gender Identity and Subjectivity in the German Democratic Republic Heidi Scherz University of Helsinki Faculty of Social Sciences Political History Master’s Thesis May 2015 28,845 words Abstract Previous research on women in socialist East Germany has neglected to adequately or critically investigate the way in which female gender identity and gendered subjectivity was constructed in discourse. Furthermore, there has been a short- sighted neglect of socialist public discourse as source material for investigations not just of every day life in socialism but in the construction of individual subjectivities as well. The paper adopts a post-structuralist theoretical framework that draws on the traditions of second-wave gender history and operationalizes a modified version of Laclau and Mouffe’s model of discourse in order to investigate how gender identity and subjectivity was constructed in female-oriented public discourse in the German Democratic Republic. The analysis reveals nuances about the ways in which the various discourses that were in play modified and contested the definition of woman which heretofore had been glossed over by the heavy hand of preconception. In turn, the resultant, more nuanced picture of female gender identity uncovers important new avenues of investigation into the discursive construction of female identity and subjectivity in the GDR. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Kortti for his continued and patient academic guidance throughout the course of my project. Additional thanks go to my perpetual sounding board, Kate Stulberg, for her advice, support, and much needed clarity; to Excel-wizard and strict taskmaster Mariana Gimpelewicz for top tips and thinly veiled threats; to Selina Schmid for keeping me in sugar-laden provisions and hugs; and to Sandra Scherz, for flying me home when the going got tough and ensuring that I was tough enough to keep going. I could not have done this without you. Table of Contents 1. INTRODUCTION 8 2. PREVIOUS RESEARCH 11 2.1. HISTORY'S STRUGGLE TO LEXICALISE THE GDR 11 2.2. RESTORING WOMEN'S STORIES 14 2.3. SOCIALIST IDENTITIES, SOCIALIST ROLES 21 2.4. GENDER HISTORY AND THE GAP 23 3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 27 3.1. POST-STRUCTURALISM 28 3.2. IDENTITIES AND SUBJECTIVITIES 33 4. THE SOURCES 39 4.1. SOCIALIST MEDIA, CENSORSHIP AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY 39 4.2. SELECTING THE SOURCES 43 4.3. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MAGAZINES 46 4.4. MEET THE READERS 47 5. METHODS 52 5.1. METHODOLOGY IN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 53 5.2. DISCOURSE THEORY: UNITS OF ANALYSIS 54 5.3. IDENTITY AND THE SUBJECT IN DISCOURSE THEORY 59 5.4. METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 60 6. ANALYSIS 63 6.1. AT FIRST GLANCE: CONTENT AND STRUCTURE 64 6.2. CONTENT ANALYSIS: METHODS 65 7. CONCLUSION 72 APPENDIX I: READERSHIP STATISTICS 88 APPENDIX II: CODE TABLES 92 TABLE 1: FÜR DICH CATEGORY DESCRIPTIONS 93 TABLE 2: SIBYLLE CATEGORY DESCRIPTIONS 96 APPENDIX III: CONTENT ANALYSIS FIGURES 98 8. WORKS CITED 106 List of Figures Figure 1 - Für Dich Readership by Age adapted from Löffler ................................................................................................. 89 Figure 2 - Sibylle Readership by Age adapted from Löffler ..................................................................................................... 89 Figure 3 - Social Class of Sibylle Readers adapted from Löffler ............................................................................................ 90 Figure 4 - Social Class of Für Dich Readers adapted from Löffler ........................................................................................ 90 Figure 5 - Sibylle Readers' Interests adapted from Löffler ...................................................................................................... 91 Figure 6 - Für Dich Readers' Interests adapted from Löffler .................................................................................................. 91 Figure 7 - Für Dich Pages per Topic or Feature .............................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 8 - Located Material in Für Dich ........................................................................................................................................ 100 Figure 9 - Located Material in Informativ Section .................................................................................................................... 101 Figure 10 - Gendered Material in Für Dich ................................................................................................................................... 101 Figure 11 - Pages per Topic or Feature, Sibylle 1975 ................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 12 - Pages per Topic or feature (excl. Fashion, Ads), Sibylle 1975 ........... Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 13 – Located Material in Sibylle ......................................................................................................................................... 103 Figure 14 - Gendered Material in Sibylle ....................................................................................................................................... 103 Figure 15 - Percentage Contents by Combined Topics ............................................................................................................ 104 Figure 16 - Sibylle Contents by Combined Topic ........................................................................................................................ 105 Figure 17 - Für Dich Contents by Combined Topic .................................................................................................................... 105 List of Abbreviations Critical Discourse Analysis…………………………………. CDA Democratic Women’s League of Germany…………… DFD Federal Republic of Germany……………………………... FRG German Democratic Republic……………………………... GDR National Socialist German Worker’s Party…………... NSDAP Socialist Unity Party of Germany………………………… SED 1. Introduction Nachdenken, ihr nach – denken. Dem Versuch, man selbst zu sein. So steht es in ihren Tagebüchern, die uns geblieben sind, auf den losen Blättern der Manuskripte, die ich kenne. […] Die Farbe der Erinnerung trügt.’ – Christa Wolf, Nachdenken über Christa Wolf1 Scholarship on the condition of women in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has been prolific, the socialist woman a topic of heated interest even while the Wall still stood. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the reunification of Germany, East German women have continued to be the objects of much discussion, especially as it became clearer that women and their reproductive rights posed one of the largest obstacles for peaceful integration of the two German states (Fisher, 2005). Still, for all that has been written on the topic, there remains a remarkable bias in the literature. Historians, anthropologists, and sociologists alike have been keen to explain the anomalies of East German womanhood without a true attempt to critically analyse what that in fact meant for the subjects of their analysis themselves. The scholarship is marked by its reliance on an arrogant assumption that the meaning of woman in the GDR remained the same as it did everywhere else. It is the same arrogance that echoes through so much current discussion by Western analysts of women whose cultural and historical identities are unknown, misunderstood, and taken for granted. The identities of these women are then measured against the analyst’s own yardstick and found to be wanting. In undertaking this thesis project, my aim has been to address the imbalance of treatment in this subject. I am motivated by the conviction that an analysis which 1. ’The quest for her: in the thought of her. And of the attempt to be oneself. She speaks of this in her diaries, which we have, on the loose manuscript pages that have been found, and between the lines of those letters of hers that are known to me. […] Memory puts a deceptive colour on things.’ (English translation from Wolf, 1982: 3; Wolf, 2007: 9) refuses simplistic generalisations and tries, to the best of its abilities, to avoid presumptions and preconceptions, can uncover heretofore undiscovered nuances in a topic that has, in large part, been treated with a heavy hand. The project is an unconventional one, in that I enter into it with the expectation that I will be unable to answer my guiding question. Truly, though, any historian who claimed to be able to summarily answer the question, How was female gender identity constructed in the GDR?, should be regarded with suspicion, especially if she proposes to do so in the space of a Master’s thesis. This is not to say that the project will not return informative, innovative results. Rather, it is to set the understanding that any result that can be considered at least a partial answer to this question is of value. In the case of this project, a partial answer, the shedding of light on previously obscured nuances, is considered a positive result. The structure of the paper follows the progress of my research question from a broad unanswerable to a set of smaller, more tangible questions. Thus, I begin with an assessment of the previous research on the subject, identifying broad trends in historiography before discussing in detail the existing scholarship on East German