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.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Henschel, Denise

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mukhida, Leila

• 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

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/b6cbdacd-f910-4a2d-8f25-34af12a8d2b4/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.117322

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/382555