Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies
Subject group
Law, Economics and Social Sciences
Subject classification
History
Start
2012
Status
Ongoing
Keywords
Artusliteratur; Europäische Integration; Internationale Beziehungen; Prosa der Romantik und Aufklärung; Zeitalter der Aufklärung
Short description
Im Zuge des vorangeschrittenen Prozesses der politischen Integration haben sich in Europa in vielen wirtschaftlichen, politischen, aber auch sozialen Bereichen neue Formen grenzübergreifenden Denkens und Handelns herausgebildet. Die Arbeit analysiert basierend auf dieser Annahme die gegenseitige Einflussnahme zwischen der Europäischen Gemeinschaft bzw. deren Organen und nationalen Akteuren wie Regierungen und Sozialpartner so wie deren auf Europaebene agierende Repräsentanten. Am Beispiel der Situation der Frau auf dem Arbeitsmarkt im Zeitraum von 1969 bis 1986 und den ausgewählten Problemfeldern Lohngleichheit, (Anti-)Diskriminierung und Frauenarbeitslosigkeit wird folgenden Fragen nachgegangen: Welche Vorgaben und Diskurse sind im Untersuchungszeitraum in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft und den Nationalstaaten zu identifizieren? Welche Möglichkeiten und Interessen haben die Akteure? Welche Wechselbeziehungen bestehen zwischen den Akteuren mit welcher Wirkung? Welche (weiteren) Einflussfaktoren auf die Problematisierung und Maßnahmen der Situation der erwerbstätigen Frau sind zu erkennen? So wird zum einen für Frankreich und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland die Aneignung supranationaler Diskurse und Maßnahmen auf nationaler Ebene nachgezeichnet und erklärt. Zum anderen soll untersucht werden, welchen Einfluss nationale Politik und Akteure auf den Prozess haben.
In her inaugural address for the opening of the new season at Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, Carolin Emke explains: “Identities are a means of transport but not a home. Identities are something to travel but nothing to live in.” (1)
Postmigration is a controversial term that has found its way into German written press with the arrival of Shermin Langhoff and Jens Hilje as the new directors of the Maxim Gorki Theatre. It is the artists who decline a ‘postmigrant identity’ and propose an alternate concept. As creative actors they design new narratives that reflect German society. Postmigration can be understood as a filter or lens. This perspective is based on certain experiences between different cultures and languages. Hereby the process of moving between a sense of self and a sense of others is especially relevant. Postmigrant representations deconstruct prominent stereotypes and defy the supposed image of “the” Latina or Turkish Immigrant.
But to understand postmigrant self-representations merely as a counter-identification or counterculture is also a simplification. Stereotypes and the sense of others are also being appropriated and processed through self-representations.
José Esteban Muñoz explains “disidentifications” as strategies of marginalized subjects between identification and counter-identification within a hegemonic culture. He describes: "the postcolonial hybrid is a subject whose identity practices are structured around an ambivalent relationship to the sign of empire and the sign of the 'narrative', a subject who occupies a space between the west and the rest.“ (2) Muñoz analyses performance as everyday practice and assumes that certain strategies are being made explicit in Performance Art. This correlation between everyday practice and artistic performance seems to be fundamental for postmigrant representations between cultural spaces.
Stuart Hall describes identities as the product of different interlocking histories and cultures, which at the same time belong to different homelands and can never be homogenous. “Cultural identity (…) is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. (…) Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.” (3) Postmigrant cultural representations bring this play on stage. His- and Herstories about migration are being told and the question is raised: What comes after? Thereby cultural and verbal translations accompany the second and third generations. I assume that in cultural in-between spaces, cultural identities are being negotiated. But how? Which artistic practices and aesthetics play a role? What are the similarities and differences concerning the diversity of culture, race and language? And which utopian moments can be found in Postmigrant Performance Art?
(1) Emcke, Carolin: Rede zur Eröffnung der Spielzeit 13/14, Programmheft Gorki Theater Berlin, S. 3.
(2) Muñoz, José Esteban: Disidentifications, Minneapolis 1999, University of Minnesota Press, S. 78.
(3) Hall, Stuart: Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In: Patrick, Williams and Chrisman (Hg.): Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: a Reader. London 1994, Harvester Wheatsheaf, S. 225.
Graduate Programme "Between Spaces. Movements, Actors and Representations of Globalisation"
Field/Area of work
Department of Sociology
Subject group
Law, Economics and Social Sciences
Subject classification
Sociology
Funding
Stipendiat des IGK "Entre Espacios"
End
2019
Status
Completed
Short description
Paid domestic work has been historically discriminated against, both in law and in practice. It was only within the past ten years that this occupational field started to gain political attention and recognition worldwide. In this respect, many Latin American countries adopted new laws in order to guarantee more rights for domestic workers, and several organizations of the sector have emerged and gotten stronger since then.
The research focuses on organizational experiences of paid domestic workers in Uruguay and Paraguay, particularly on the networks that they build with different types of organizations, within and across national borders. Specifically, I am interested in analyzing how the entanglements of different axes and dimensions of inequality that cut across this occupational field shape these networks and their outcomes.
The study focuses on organizational experiences in Uruguay and Paraguay, two close but significantly different cases regarding the participation of local actors (trade union confederations, feminist NGOs, migrant organizations, the State, and counterparts) and transnational actors (ILO, UN Women) in the struggle for more rights for the sector.
