Queerfeminist Proletarian Dreams

This lecture examines the theoretical implications that have arisen in film studies perspectives on early cinema audiences around 1910 from the fact that the archives contain almost exclusively male sources. From these sources, primarily bourgeois voices and Victorian media models have fed into theoretical development; their ontologisation has, moreover, enabled a patriarchal hierarchy of audiences that remains valid to this day, in which women, queer people, the unemployed and ethnic minorities, amongst others, have been devalued on the basis of attributed stereotypes. The lecture is intended not only as a critique of an inherently precarious archival practice and its male-dominated selection, but also as a critique of feminist film studies positions from the 1990s, in which the focus on female cinematic publics was likewise perpetuated through bourgeois, and moreover female, stereotypes and hermetic conceptions of media.

Inspired by Sabine Hake’s book The Proletarian Dream (2017), the lecture instead sets out to trace queer and queering proletarian publics in film journalism that can demonstrate that neither female submissiveness nor proletarian naivety dominated people’s everyday lives with film. It draws on concepts of proletarian public spheres from the history of women and gender in the 1980s, as well as on theories of aesthetic experience by the aesthetic theorists Vernon Lee (1856–1935) and Lu Märten (1879–1970).

The talk will be held in German.