Crises of Metronormativity in Queer German Culture, 1970-1990
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Date
2025-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Queer life prefers the city. Or, at least, a wealth of queer cultural artifacts have convinced us of such. The urban, with its promised subcultures, anonymity, and acceptance, has become the straight-and-narrow setting for the queer book and film, reserving queer narratives for the confines of the city. One must, then, wonder what imaginaries exist outside of these spatial constraints—or, perhaps better yet, how queer media might resist such boundaries.
This project intervenes in "metronormative" discourse of the German city as the sole locus of progress—of hope, of utopia—by uncovering tensions and fissures within the metronormative vision of the urban. While German literary and filmic representations from the 1970s and 1980s affirm the notion of the urban as a crucial site for same-sex love and desire, such renderings of the city also elaborate the vanity, entrapment, and alienation that were central threats to queer life in those same urban spaces. The resultant contradiction within queer urban experience invites a renegotiation of the “appropriate” spatial boundaries for queer life during Germany’s second gay liberation movement.
Considering both gay and lesbian perspectives, the following analysis of queer spatiality works its way through two well-known films from the 1970s—Rosa von Praunheim’s Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt (1971), along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975)—in addition to Marlene Stenten's lesser-known Puppe Else: Eine Lesben-Novelle (1977). This thesis then examines the AdA-Teeblätter-Commics (1980) and Mikrogeschichten (1991) of German artist and writer Eberhard Bechtle. Across New German Cinema, lesbian literature, and gay poetry and zines, various crises of metronormativity become manifest, for the metronormative myth fails in the German context to account for the lived realities of queer people as they have been documented in the archive.
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Keywords
queer German studies, metronormativity, Rosa von Praunheim, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, lesbian literature