New Forms of Kinship in Contemporary Literature and Film from the German-Speaking World
This thesis is concerned with the ways in which contemporary German-language literature and film partake in the representation, interrogation, and constitution of kinship as a contested field of social relations in the twenty-first century. In considering kinship, with the philosopher Judith Butler, as the constitutive sphere of the social – and as the site of emergence of the concept of human ‘culture’ itself – I present kinship as the regulating principle of being-in and knowing-of the world. I argue that the socio-historical, material, and discursive transformations of the twenty-first century have had profound implications on hitherto normative conceptualizations of kinship in relation to human and nonhuman others and that they have altered our understanding of who is – and can be – humans’ ‘kin’. The traditional paradigm of kinship-as-family is therefore predicated on binary norms of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. The normative constitution further provokes a discursive marginalization and/or foreclosure of other forms of kinship. By attending to the representation, interrogation, and constitution of ‘forms of kinship’ in and through literature and film, then, I seek to unlock literature and film’s potential to help to imagine or instantiate alternative forms of being-in and knowing-of the world. In doing so, I bring together works by a series of contemporary authors and directors from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. By looking, from the vantage point of queer theory, at the spheres of the family (chapter 1), the non/human (chapter 2), and queer and trans ecologies (chapter 3), I consider the ways in which literary and cinematic aesthetics instantiate non-normative forms of being-in and knowing-of the world. To describe this phenomenon, and to bring into sharper relief my notion of ‘forms of kinship’, I have coined the term ästhetisches Eigenwissen, or aesthetic knowledge in its differential specificity – a concept which alludes to the intrinsically transformative potential, or political function, of aesthetic artefacts in the world.
Ästhetisches Eigenwissen, Christian Dittloff, Contemporary German Film, Contemporary German Literature, Faraz Shariat, Film Studies, Kim de l'Horizon, Kinship, Marie Gamillscheg, Olga Grjasnowa, Olivia Wenzel, Queer Studies, Uisenma Borchu, Yael Inokai
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