Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Gender as a Category of Knowledge

Media

Members:

Konstanze Hanitzsch, Hannah Fitsch, Simon Strick, Sabrina Kühn, Maja Figge, Wibke Straube, Daniela Wentz

Time Frame: Juni 2006 - Juli 2008

Research Questions

Initially founded as a reading group, the working group offered the seminar MediaGender-GenderMedia for students in the research training program (as a part of module 5). Currently the working group continues as a reading group and serves especially as a space for the individual doctoral students to examine their dissertations in light of relevant questions related to the entanglement of media and gender. With the emergence of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, gender and media theories have become strange bedfellows. Feminist and gender theories often use a media term that is based on gender dichotomies (femininity as masquerade, masculine gaze, etc.). In contrast media theories often imply an unreflected gender logic. With a focus on epistemological approaches the working group considered the question of how gender and media theories can be productive for each other, or how they can be critically confronted: How does the (gendered)body present a medium, which gender positions imply medial apparatuses, what are the blind spots in both theories? The working group worked towards a critical development of gender and media theories, their reciprocal conditions and dependency. In particular methods of discourse and content analysis, visual and gaze theory as well as questions of intersectionality of sexuality, identity and race were discussed on the basis of poststructuralist gender theory.