Female collectives

"Les femmes [...] ne disent pas nous", wrote Simone de Beauvoir in the introduction to Le Deuxiéme Sexe (1990 [1949], 18) - this is where women differ from all other oppressed groups in history. Based on this remark, the workshop on female collectives sets out in search of the particularities of a feminine set theory and enquires into the self- and other-descriptions, forms and functions, representations and interpretations of female collective formations in various discourses. What role do these plural figurations play in the definition of the 'feminine'? What fears and hopes are articulated through them? How do they adjust gender relations and what power techniques are at work in and on them? The workshop approaches questions such as these in case studies ranging from ancient crowds and maenads to witches and nuns, sisters and girlfriends, hysterics and suffragettes, secretaries and Tillergirls to digital collectives such as the #metoo movement. We would like to enquire into the historical dis/continuities of female crowds, focussing in particular on their aesthetic and media representation conditions.

Tove Soiland
On the difficulty of articulating a female collective: A
a Psychoanalytic Consideration (Keynote)
Since the beginning of so-called "third-wave feminism" in the 1990s, it has been a standard argument of feminist theory that the formation of a female collective is neither feasible nor desirable
not desirable because it would merely produce and reproduce exclusions; not feasible because such a collective would not take into account the difference between women. The political explosive force from which the second women's movement drew its strength by confidently referring to the collective "we women" thus seemed irrevocably delegitimised.
Based on the psychoanalytical understanding of gender, the lecture explores the question of whether we should actually regard this diversification of the female subject position, which tends to place every female collective under suspicion, as a theoretical achievement or rather as the reproduction of an old patriarchal situation, which Simone de Beauvoir summarised very aptly with her statement "Les femmes ne disent pas nous". Instead of uncritically affirming this pluralisation and thus also disarticulation of the subject of feminism, the lecture once again raises the question of why it is so difficult for women to maintain their individual difference within the framework of a collective, indeed, to develop it in the first place. In doing so, we inevitably come up against the difficult position that the mother has in our culture in phantasmatic terms. The symbolic non-existence of what she gives, and thus the phantasm of arbitrary availability over her and her body, is the focus of an analysis that assumes that what positions women in our culture is still this phantasm and its non-reflection.

Heide Volkening
Girls, girls, girls - or: politeness from woman to woman
In the cultural criticism of the Weimar Republic, young women were only thematised in the plural: as a phenomenon of an American-uniform "girl culture" (Fritz Giese) or as "girl complexes"
(Siegfried Kracauer), who are seen as part of a mass that has become an ornament. With terms such as mass, type and style, the perception of working girls is summarised in thought forms of serial repetition
Repetition. In contrast to this dominant (and still influential) diagnosis, however, literary and journalistic texts by various female authors of the time also modelled other forms of sociality. The lecture will present Ruth Landshoff-York's concept of a "politeness from woman to woman" as an example. It will examine the narrative processes that developed from this in her romances.

Alexander H. Schwan
Flower diagrammatics. Floral ornamentality of female collectives in revue film
The lecture revolves around the vegetal-geometric ornamentality of dance figurations with special attention to the floral figurations of floating female collectives in revue film. With reference to floriography and critical plant studies, Busby Berkeley's water ballet choreographies and those of later adepts from Justin Bieber and the Aqualillies to Miss Piggy are interpreted as dance representations of flower diagrams, as rosette-shaped movement ornaments. But are these flowers formed by a floating collective of women feminine? Hebrew pärach, Greek ánthos, Latin flos - in all three languages and those they influence, flowers are masculine, and in botany terms, flowers have both female and male sexual organs. The urgently needed questioning of the heteronormative equation of flowers with women (Jacques Derrida, Glass) must therefore be expanded with Paul B. Preciado's Contrasexual Manifesto to include a new interpretation of the water ballet flowers as anus (de)figurations. With reference to the ecosexuality movement, the final question is: To what extent can the comparison of flowers and sexual orifices propagated by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens in the context of documenta 14, which only reinforces Charles Darwin's analogy of roots and brains, be transferred to the flower diagrammatics of the revue film in a non-heteronormative way?

Silke Roesler-Keilholz
#MeToo. You too?
Social media and their platforms between liberation and accusation Scandals are closely linked to the media that uncover them. Without the flash of the hush-hush reporter, one or two secrets in old Hollywood would not have been uncovered. Back then, there was a shift of work between the photo being taken and the publication, at least one night before the 'Extrablatt' appeared. Nowadays, revelations can be disseminated simultaneously via the web. The flash is replaced by the hashtag. The scandal goes viral. This article looks at how the #MeToo scandal is embedded in social media and its platforms. What is the potential of the virtual space in generating a collective? What distinguishes a singular confession from a general accusation? How do individual fates and group dynamics relate to each other? These questions are explored in three steps:
1. The first part of my remarks looks at feminist actionism in the public sphere as the basis for the following media-cultural rewritings and female groupings.
2. In a second step, I would like to outline the beginnings of the #MeToo scandal and scrutinise these in relation to the media-techno-logical potentials of social media and their platforms.
3. The extent to which a discourse about the discourse (and thus a meta-level) is now emerging is part of the concluding thoughts on this article.

Marie Schmidt
Girlfriends and girlfriends of girlfriends in Sex and the City, Girls and The Bold Type
Three or four girlfriends, their deal with capitalism, the search for love and the ideal signifier, New York City: "You're never alone in New York, it's the perfect place to be single. The city is your date", says the main character in "Sex and the City" (HBO, 1998-2004). The series was paradigmatic for a plot that recurs in television and streaming, for example in "Girls" (HBO,
2012-2017) and "The Bold Type" (Freeform, 2017-2021). Standing alone and "never alone", its characters work with the repetitive structure of series, seasons and episodes: Within this framework, they can - and must - constantly redesign social and sexual bonds.
The history of "female singles in the big city" is similar to recent sociological emplotments. We see how the "negative choice" (Eva Illouz) swears love life and consumer capitalism to the same rules. We learn practices of "doing singularity" (Andreas Reckwitz), which make different ways of life (including oneself) comprehensible in the first place. Niklas Luhmann comments: "The ego of the ego is the result of self-selective processes; and for this very reason it is dependent on co-selection by others." (Love as passion).
These others are "girlfriends" in the series mentioned. The "validation of self-representation" does not take place in love relationships, as was the case with Luhmann, but between two or more women in changing combinations. Girlfriends and their girlfriends perform chains of co-selections for each other. How is this staged, and does something like society possibly emerge in all the indeterminacy of "never alone"? Or at least legible social figures and interpretable networks? And how should these be evaluated: as emancipative neo-communities, or as "policing networks" (Alison Winch) of a post-feminist culture in which women mutually monitor their capitalist performance and their body images?

Jenny Haase
"Ser nosotras". Negotiations of the experience of difference and collective female identities in the correspondence between Ernestina de Champourcin and Carmen Conde
Ernestina de Champourcin (1905-1999) and Carmen Conde (1907-1996) are among the most important authors and intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s in the context of the Spanish Generación del 27. Their correspondence is not only an important aesthetic and cultural-historical testimony, but also an essential mirror of the two women's perception of themselves and others, as well as a medium for their self-presentation in writing. The lecture discusses the gender- and class-specific negotiations of collective identity and changing female subject positions against the background of contemporary social norms, critical experiences of modernity and literary-historical reference models.

Karin Schulz
The effect of the feminine in Luigi Pirandello. Challenges of a singular and collective becoming conscious
Women occupy a marginal, subordinate position in Pirandello's romances, yet they play an essential counterpart through which the fate of the male protagonists is decisively determined. While most analyses read this dependence negatively and point to the restriction of female identity, my lecture focuses on the impact and effect of the feminine in Pirandello's narration and asks to what extent this opens up a very specific semantics of the female collective in the synopsis of the works. Particular attention is paid to the formal and semantic staging of the challenges and processes of singular and collective awareness. The result is a new perspective on the dialectic of gender in Pirandello, which reveals not so much the obstacle but the catalyst of female (self-)consciousness.

Hanna Sohns
Female crowds
The basis of my lecture is the observation of the conspicuous but hitherto unexamined accumulation of different female hosts since antiquity: in addition to the prominent hosts of nymphs, muses, sirens, gorgons, erinyes, eumenides or charites, there are countless other hosts and subgroups that permeate iconographic and textual traditions right up to the modern age and recur in endless repetitions, variations and deviations. Plural is therefore not only the respective flock in itself, but also the female flock as a figure in its various metamorphoses: there is no primal scene of its appearance, but rather an always only plural swarming out to other figures, which is always already invoked in each of their appearances. For - this is the central thesis of my habilitation project - the swarms quote and overlap each other incessantly from antiquity to modernity, thus destroying any possible identification and classification.
What is articulated in these figures that meander and intertwine through time and images? And why, one must ask, is there this particular affinity of the feminine to the plural in the imaginations and representations? From the very beginning, a science, a logos of the sexes is negotiated and designed with the female flock. In its metamorphoses, in its afterlife and historical transformation processes, the female flock thus participates in a discourse of subjugation that reveals processes of taming and the order of gender relations. And yet - as I would like to show with a view to her return in Proust's research - the female flock can also be read as a resistant figure who asserts herself against this logos and thus both inspires and threatens the literary and gender orders she creates.

Johanna-Charlotte Horst
'À la recherche du temps commun'. Remembering with Annie Ernaux
According to Annie Ernaux, life has changed for women in particular since the 1950s. In Les années, the history of this change is sketched from an 'impersonal' perspective. In their field of vision, personal history is always already impregnated by the history of others. What is remembered appears here as "une sorte de vaste sensation collective". In her search for the "temps commun", Ernaux explicitly utilises the social framing of memory (Maurice Halbwachs). She pursues a historiographical programme that sets a history of the everyday against the 'grands récits'. The remnants of ordinary life can be gleaned from old film posters, forgotten family photos or children's songs that are no longer sung and are condensed into commonplaces that are made available to the readership as a collective mnemonic.
In this sense, the author's personal life is not outlined as an exemplary part of a female history, but rather recreated from the infinite number of gestures, ways of speaking and habits of certain social milieus. The intention in Les années, Ernaux comments, is "d'inscrire dans l'Histoire l'existence d'une femme et, partant, celle des femmes, et des hommes." With reference to Simone de Beauvoir, she has repeatedly spoken out in favour of universalist feminism. Accordingly, the vanishing point of her practice of remembrance is not the retelling of a purely female collective history. Rather, the form of her text is intended to enable a remembrance "de façon collective", in which the specific historical constellation of female experiences becomes visible without excluding male points of view. In this context, Ernaux speaks of a kind of "transsubstantiation continuelle entre les individus - 'elle', 'nous' - et la société".

Vera Bachmann
Brotherhood - sisterhood? Formations of female similarity
Freedom - equality - fraternity: While the originally familial formation of brothers became the political guiding concept and ideal of a solidary community of the free and equal, there is comparatively little talk of a complementary concept of 'sisterhood', and, if one follows Derrida, not without reason: "Phratrocentrism" (Politics of Friendship, 371) is based on a "double exclusion of the feminine" (ibid, 388) from the concept of fraternal friendship, the exclusion of fraternity between man and woman and, in particular, that of a 'fraternal' relationship between women. Based on this diagnosis, we can consider what such a relationship would consist of. Is there an adequate concept of sisterhood? How does it relate to brotherhood? The lecture sets out in search of literary and filmic drafts of sisterly collectives and asks about the narrative and representation patterns associated with them. The exclusion of the female from the concept of brotherhood proves to be an inclusion: in spatial terms as well as an inclusion in rigid family structures and plot patterns that show an astonishing continuity.

Thursday, 27.5.

9.30
Greeting

Moderation: Johanna Charlotte Horst

10.00-11.00
Tove Soiland: On the difficulty of articulating a female collective: A Psychoanalytic Reflection (Keynote)

11.00-12.00
Heide Volkening: Girls, Girls, Girls - or: Politeness from woman to woman

12.00-13.00
Alexander H. Schwan: Blütendiagrammatik. Floral ornamentality of female collectives in revue film

Moderated by Vera Bachmann

14.00-15.00
Silke Roesler-Keilholz: #MeToo. You too? Social media and their platforms between liberation and accusation

15.00-16.00
Marie Schmidt: Girlfriends and girlfriends of girlfriends in "Sex and the City", "Girls" and "The Bold Type"

Friday, 28 May

Moderated by Hannah Steuerer

09.00-10.00
Jenny Haase: "Ser nosotras". Negotiations of the experience of difference and collective female identities in the correspondence of Ernestina de Champourcin and Carmen Conde

10.00-11.00
Karin Schulz: The effect of the feminine in Luigi Pirandello. Challenges of a singular and collective becoming conscious

Moderation Nadine Hartmann

11.00-12.00
Johanna-Charlotte Horst: "une sorte de vaste sensation collective". Remembering the everyday with Annie Ernaux

13.00-14.00
Hanna Sohns: Female flocks

14.00-15.00
Vera Bachmann: Brotherhood - Sisterhood? Formations of female similarity

15.00-16.00
concluding discussion and virtual aperitif