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Women in German Best Article Prize Previous Winners
The competition for the Women in German Best Article Prize, 2009 received a record high number of strong and diverse submissions, which speaks to the quality of current feminist research in German Studies. The committee members, Barbara Mennel, Elizabeth Mittman, and Katrin Pahl, chose May Mergenthaler’s article “Die Frühromantik als Projekt vollendeter Mitteilung zwischen den Geschlechtern: Friedrich Schlegel und Dorothea Veit im Gespräch über Friedrich Richters Romane,” published in The German Quarterly 81.3 (Summer 2008), as the winning article for the 2009 prize, which carries a $ 500.00 check award. One of the categories for the award is that the work must present original new research that makes a significant contribution to the field of feminist German Studies. Committee members assessed Mergenthaler’s article as a beautiful and sophisticated reading – a re-enactment, really – of the conversation between Friedrich Schlegel, Dorothea Veit, and Jean Paul. Indeed, the conversation extends to the debate between feminist and non-feminist scholars of the 20th century about the value of Romantic ideas of irony and conversation. We found that Professor Mergenthaler leaves her own mark in this conversation by correcting the earlier feminist focus on Dorothea Veit via the perspective of Jean Paul. The article thus offers a differentiated feminist perspective that strengthens the voice of the literary. Committee members agreed that the essay in question advances feminist German Studies by offering a nuanced feminist literary analysis that moves beyond the gender-aligned feminist positions of the 1990s but acknowledges and builds on this earlier feminist discourse.
Jennifer Ruth Hosek and Elizabeth Mittman, 2008
This year, the WiG Best Article Prize committee recognized the exceptional quality of two essays, one by and Jennifer Ruth Hosek (Queen’s University, Kingston), and the other by Elizabeth Mittmann (Michigan State University) this year.
Jennifer Ruth Hosek’s essay “Buena Vista Deutschland: Nation and Gender in Wenders, Gaulke and Eggert” (German Politics and Society 25:1, Spring 2007) provides an excellent, very rich mapping of the displaced working through of reunification onto Cuba. The essay negotiates several difficult coordinates: the question of how cinematic representations of Cuba de facto relate to the unification process and how this representation in turn is gendered. This essay is equally well-written and covers equal ground in terms of the density of the argument, the different interconnected subtopics, and the different national and transnational contexts. In Hosek’s essay questions of power, in regard to the East-West, generations, and gender dimensions are central, as well as the question of high and purportedly low art.
Elizabeth Mittman’s article “Gender, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere in Postunification Germany: Experiments in Feminist Journalism” (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32:3, 2007) is a thoroughly-researched and original essay. It integrates feminist history, sociology, and cultural studies. Her analysis of several feminist magazines in the 1980s GDR and their development after unification is based on original, primary research that fills a gap in German feminist studies scholarship. The committee particularly appreciated the careful integration of an analysis of the artwork, interviews with the editors, and their biographical data. All of these aspects that are traditionally overlooked were analyzed in a sophisticated way. Her essay was also daring, questioning the privileging of Western feminism, particularly as advocated by Alice Schwarzer. Finally, we commend Liz Mittman for publishing her essay in Signs, expanding and complicating the question of “what is feminism,” as well as positioning German Studies in a dialogue with a larger theoretical community.
The winner of the 2006 Best Article Award, which was announced at the 2007 annual conference is Dr. Katrin Pahl, an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, for her article "Transformative Translations: Cyrillizing and Queering," which appeared in Transit 2:1 (2006). Dr. Pahl's article, a witty and sophisticated analysis of the video Copy Me: I want to Travel by Brigitte Kuster, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, struck the Prize committee as a well-argued, bold, and innovative piece of feminist scholarship. It raises important issues about gender and science, socialist memory, and fantasies of resistance in postsocialist Europe.
Tracy Matysik, 2004The 2004 Winner of the Women in German Best Article Prize was Tracie Matysik's "In the Name of the Law: The 'Female Homosexual' and the Criminal Code in Fin-de-Siecle Germany," which appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality in January 2004. Dr. Matysik is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, whose work is situated at the intersection of European intellectual history and the history of gender and sexuality. The article is part of a larger research project that she is currently finishing, entitled Secular Ethics, Secular Sex: A Cultural History of Ethics Between Nietzsche and Freud.
In her article, Dr. Matysik discusses the “controversy around an effort in Germany in 1909 to criminalize female-female sexual relations. The controversy depicts how legal efforts to identify the ‘female homosexual’ as a criminal category exposed the lack of public agreement regarding her physiological, moral, and social constitution.” Dr. Matysik analyzes the juridical, medical, and activist discourses bearing on the debate, and the sometimes odd alliances among advocates and detractors. Her essay shows how medical arguments and social activism ultimately undermined efforts to criminalize female homosexuality.
The committee unanimously found that Dr. Matysik’s essay is an original, well-argued piece of scholarship on a fascinating topic, and that her work makes a substantial contribution to feminist scholarship in several discrete disciplines.
The article is available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_the_history_of_sexuality/v013/13.1matysik.html. If this link doesn't open, you can access the article as a PDF file through Project Muse.