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

Normativity

Members:

Daniela Döring, Anke Langner, Wibke Straube, Katharina Weikl

Time Frame: April 2005 bis Januar 2007

Research Questions

The members of this working group look beyond the work they had done up to that point on their dissertations to confront a similar topic that relates to a few more abstract terms: norm, normality, and norming. Daniela Döring questions the application of measuring techniques. In “Average and ‘Normality’ Adolphe Quételet’s Concept of Average People” she examines, among other things, how knowledge of gender, together with help from statistical sources, is produced with mathematical language and technical formulations. The Quételetian Average Person incorporates, according to her thesis, a compilation of the principles of probability, of the aesthetic ideals and the statistical measurements of a military regiment, and therefore an explicitly masculine norm. 

Anke Langer works with “Norming and Normality in Identity Work of Mentally Handicapped Youth.” She conducted her research on the norming and normalizing practices that are essential in constructing identity using case reconstruction and observation in a special education school. She worked through the interaction between teachers and students to breakdown the processes of differentiation and identity building. This located her work in the interplay between normative norms — social rules — and normalistic norms. 

Katharina Weil examined norms in her microhistorial work — a chronology of the Jacob Endorfer peculiarities. In his self-representation as obsessed, Endorfer occupied a space outside of a scale of normal and deviant, which Katharina Weikl calls a “third room.” She notes that when economic concerns such as efficiency, work capability, and financial interests became powerful this room disappeared. With the founding of the Royal Bavarian Mental Hospital Giesing in 1803, Endorfer is given over to his “new place.” Here the binary separation between mentally insane and healthy is institutionally anchored and medically codified. 

Wibke Straube worked with practices of normalizing in relation to gender identities beyond a heterosexual matrix. She examined how sex is de- and re-normalized in contemporary feature films, in which the break in the depiction of coherent sexuality was given a special focus. In her work Wibke Straube specifically questioned whether films that were specially of the transgender genre enable a complication of gender and so are able to resist sexual naturalization.  

The academic perspectives on the topic were very heterogeneous: sociological, historical, pedagogical, and cultural theoretical. At the beginning, the working group consisted of readings and discussions of selected texts about norms (Link, Canguilhelm, Foucault). Out of that the idea to open questions about norms in the context of an interdisciplinary workshop developed. The goal of the working group and the workshop were to understand and full grasp the often seemingly diffuse  terms of norm and norming as well as normality and normalization as well as the various strategies and technologies of norming and normalization as well as their compatibility for analytical and methodological discussions. At this shared intersection very different research projects came together in dialogue, in order to consider the methodical approaches to and methodological aspects of constructions of gender and norm. 

Conferences
Workshop: Wissen über Geschlecht. Auf dem Spielfeld der Norm 
Zeit: 24.-26.11.2006 
Ort: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 

Publications
Döring, Daniela und Birgit Stammberger. 2007. "Bericht über den Workshop 'Wissen über Geschlecht. Auf dem Spielfeld der Norm'". ZtG Bulletin 34,  S.37-41.