In/Securities: Queer Life Narratives of Early Modern Times

In/Securities: Queer Life Narratives of Early Modern Times – Some Guiding Thoughts

Daniela Fuhrmann and Gaby Pailer

Between spring 2021 and spring 2023, the Natural History Museum in Berne hosted an exhibition entitled “Queer – Diversity is our Nature”, which sent

visitors on a journey of discovery into the ‘queer realm’, a world that show[ed] the colourful abundance in nature and society that can be found in the topic of gender and sexuality. An expedition in which the visitors also explore[d]‌ their own identity.¹

The colourful and interactive exhibition invited viewers to break with traditional concepts of placing humans and animals in hierarchical order depending on their capacity for speech, and of dividing female and male exemplars of the human species into two distinct ‘sexes’. Exhibits like the one in Berne cause irritation because they challenge binary modes of thinking that create a shell of security which inevitably breaks down if we stop perceiving people as speaking and acting in certain ways because they are – in our perception – male or female.

The present volume looks into “Queer Life Narratives of Early Modern Times” by focusing on the one hand on literary depictions from the Baroque and early Enlightenment eras, and on the other on 21st century novels that reconnect with life narratives from the early modern period. In literary scholarship, the history of the term ‘queer’ does not need to be re-written; there is an abundance of publications ready at hand in the fields of Queer Studies and Queer Theory.² However, to refute the fashionable ubiquity of ‘queer’ discourses,³ the co-editors find it useful to briefly outline in which of its possible meanings ‘queer’ will play a role in the present volume.

In general, the contributions gathered here are guided by a broader understanding of ‘queer’ and ‘queerness’ that has increasingly emerged ever since the beginning of Queer Studies in the 1990s. Nevertheless, we want to be mindful of the origins of the term ‘queer’, which was politically motivated to address processes of exclusion and persecution, as well as discourses of deviation for individuals conceiving of their personal identity beyond socially established norms of sexuality, structures and orientations of desire, and gender assignments;⁴ and also to challenge heteronormative traditions, values and views in critical research.⁵ The initial goal, with its forceful as well as emphatic reference to the social construction of norms and resulting discriminations, has led over time to address in more general ways the question of “how norms are produced, policed, and potentially destabilized”.⁶

In this way, it became possible to apply ‘queerness’ to figures and behaviors in other socio-cultural spheres outside of the realm of sexuality, namely wherever something eludes the dominant regulatory efforts and normalization procedures, or – in phenomenological terms – wherever it stands in opposition to them.⁷ These developments within Queer Studies and Queer Theory, which are especially linked to considerations of Queer Phenomenology and Queer Assemblages,⁸ prove particularly productive for the contexts of this volume for several reasons: Firstly, the narrow terminology for pre-modern objects would be problematic, because with its identity-political thrust, it would bypass the historical realities of pre-modern literature. Admittedly, the term ‘queer’ strikes us as anachronistic as soon as it is applied to pre-modernity. In its broader sense, however, and especially when applied to literary characters and their concepts of the self, it is possible to work with cultural processes of presenting oneself in writing, behavior, dressing etc. and perceiving others within those processes.⁹ ‘Queer’ then is more taken as an epistemic category, and less as a theoretical-political perspective.¹⁰

As an epistemic category, a ‘queer’ focus allows the investigation of the relations and tensions between posited norms and deviations from them as established in a literary text, and this not only for the realm of sexuality. In these terms, Puar proposes

a queer assemblage that resists queerness-as-sexual-identity (or anti-identity) – in other words, intersectional and identitarian paradigms – in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements, [which also] deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and non-queer subjects, and, instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations.¹¹

Since ‘queer’ stands for any ‘breaking of fixed attributions’,¹² in literary studies this also means breaking with fixed interpretations, and instead seeking out new readings, especially of well-established mainstream culture that “can be rendered queer through against-the-grain (re)readings of texts and histories, by foregrounding silenced voices”.¹³ This is precisely what the present volume strives to achieve with contributions that focus on queer narratives of early modern lives to bring previously lesser or even unheard voices into the scholarly discourse.

The volume works with a very broad understanding of the adjective ‘queer’ and addresses a plethora of possible phenomena in the various characters’ lives, which have in common that they are presented as different from existing societal norms and surroundings. On an extra-diegetic level, the effects of alienation and irritation make the literary characters an interesting focus for ‘queer’ investigation, while on the intra-diegetic level, these effects often constitute a response to these norms and circumstances which shape the characters’ chosen ‘queer’ ways of life.

In the early modern period, and in German-speaking Europe particularly, the Thirty Years’ War and its aftermath – which constitute the thematic core of our volume – present dominant factors troubling subjects, making them vulnerable and unhinging their existence. Typical for literary renderings of life experiences of this time is the liminal space in which the narrators, as well as the characters, are moving about in a persistant state of ‘in/security’. Especially the form of the picaresque novel relates these experiences of moving between ‘secure’ and ‘insecure’ exterior situations and interior conceptualizations of the self. The writing process becomes a strategy to reassure one’s own way of life, trying to secure the contours it may have lost during periods when the overall organization of sociocultural, political or religious life is troubled by warfare and upheaval.¹⁴ In that sense, the autofictional accounts that picaresque novels present tend to work with aspects of self-fashioning that can also be read as attempts to capitalize on language in times of deep distress.

The work towards this volume was initiated by a symposium, which both co-editors organized at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in August 2019. Since then, we have invited further contributions on the topic of “In/Securities: Queer Life Narratives of Early Modern Times”. The nine contributions selected for final publication in this issue of the Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik address the interplay of ‘in/securities’ and focus in particular on the significance of queer aspects, as well as on their unsettling or stabilizing functions in the lives of the protagonists – both the lived and the literarily-constructed ones. Although it actually contradicts the idea of queerness, for ease of orientation the articles are nevertheless arranged more or less chronologically: The volume starts with four articles dedicated to Grimmelshausen’s Simplician novels (Daniela Fuhrmann, Sarah Möller, Ervin Malakaj, and Laurie Ann Henderson). It continues with two articles that deal with 17th century material: one that focuses on Johanna Eleonora Petersen’s autobiography and its framing by historical and modern editorial and narrative processes (Patricia Milewski); and another that looks at the staging of Lohenstein’s tragedy Agrippina within the context of the “Breslauer Schultheater” (Benjamin Davis). The volume concludes with three articles discussing contemporary retellings of early modern lives, Angela Steidele’s Rosenstengel and Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (Brigid Garvey, Steve Commichau, and Gaby Pailer).

With respect to the queer aspects of the literary lives narrated, which mostly result from or cause various in/securities, a far more diverse web of interconnections emerges that is by no means as linear as the chronological arrangement might suggest. Some of its ties will be briefly sketched below, many more are to be discovered while engaging with the individual contributions. What all the articles have in common is that they reject any fixity in their respective material. By systematically focusing on moments of irritation, or queer instances, each of the subjects of investigation challenges established norms, stratas, ideologies, and their underlying domains of knowledge; at stake are one-dimensional fixations of meaning in the sense that “[q]‌ueer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant”.¹⁵ Thus, the procedures of standardization and normalization themselves come into focus, and the foundations of their legitimacy are, if not called into question, at least critically scrutinized. This way, the literary life narratives treated are once again involved in the interdependency of in/security: The texts do not only exhibit figures whose existence becomes unstable one way or another, this also necessitates that techniques of self-assertion and safeguarding be devised. The literary products themselves seem to pursue the goal of unhinging established orders of knowledge and society, and therefore they decisively irritate social orientation markers to show their weaknesses – whether by pointing out a lack of flexibility inappropriate to human life, or by exposing abusive power structures that lead to unacceptable discriminations.

As for the notion of rejecting fixations, this is often conveyed within the narratives by negotiating the main figures’ identities as unstable. This can be seen in episodes undermining or blurring binary gender orders (Möller, Davis, Commichau), and by others crossing established ideological boundaries between animal/bestia and human (Fuhrmann, Commichau, Garvey). The consequences are mostly not just irritations displayed by, for example, a positive and productive amazement, but rather episodes of demonization or monsterization evoked by the representatives of the norm (Fuhrmann, Möller, Commichau), who perceive their order and belief threatened by the queer entity. In reaction to this, they mark the unsettling and queer ‘other’ as the actual threat to legitimize its social exclusion or even its eradication. The observed identity negotiations are often mediated by body language and markers such as hair, for example, or attire attached to the body, as well as descriptive names (Möller, Henderson, Commichau), which emphasizes that identity formation occurs largely within semiotic systems as well as via the interplay of procedures of perception of self and others (Möller, Commichau). Queer bodies make it abundantly clear that identity is not a ‘natural’ given, not an ontological but rather a socially – and rhetorically-constructed – category that is and should always be mutable – just as the social world changes around each individual at every moment of their existence (Malakaj).

Most of the articles highlight the literary characters’ bodily features and how they serve to destabilize gender orders and to make them visible and accessible for discussion, often in relation to other identity markers such as social status or religious affiliation (Möller, Milewski, Davis, Commichau). At times one and the same body sign may indicate different social affiliations. It is precisely at such moments that the intersectional constitution of identity becomes apparent, which underscores the simultaneous multiple social connections of an individual and, consequently, also the impossibility of its unambiguous identitary fixation.

Moreover, queer bodies can serve as a commentary on contemporary events and offer an outlook on an alternative future (Fuhrmann, Commichau, Davis), so that queer conceptions of the body and of time productively overlap. By rejecting the here and now with its social structures and practices as inadequate, queer identity not only marks the need for change, but furthermore imagines, precisely in its queer features, in which direction this change should go. In this way, displayed queer identities simultaneously become carriers of a queer futurity (Davis).

‘Queerness’, however, is not only expressed through certain signs on the figures’ bodies, it can also apply to their communicative and performative patterns, when characters express themselves and contribute to their life narratives mainly by means of performative balancing acts as viewed by others (Pailer). They go off the beaten track, often not choosing the direct, the ‘straight’ path, or they are directed down odd paths by queer objects that seem to have a life of their own and in some ways take over human agency (Malakaj). But it is precisely these aberrations which allow both new narrative techniques and perspectives, as well as completely new concepts to be accessed. Thus, the alternative proxemics, can also promote alternative or at least additional knowledge (Fuhrmann, Malakaj, Pailer).

The level of narrative discourse is revealed to not follow the ‘straight’ line, as has been traditionally claimed for a number of literary genres involved. The articles unravel how the texts treated explore a variety of literary forms such as autofictional, autobiographical, picaresque, and historical storytelling as well as staging of queer experience. Along with the narrative formation of lives in writing, the idea of fixity is undermined, for instance by systematically showcasing the lives through fractured perspectives or polyphony (Milewski, Commichau, Garvey, Pailer). And finally, a layering of different temporal levels that comment on each other blur boundaries, and interrelate anachronistic events, opening up and enriching potential interpretations of the world between the 17th and 21st centuries (Commichau, Davis, Pailer).

The articles gathered in this volume strive for an enriching multiplicity as opposed to a unidimensional fixation. They invite the reader to question traditionally set ideologies, norms, and boundaries of the self. By the same token they encourage the unlearning of hasty discrimination and attendant condemnation of what may appear to be different or even deviant. Many of the articles refer to the 17th century and especially the world of the Thirty Years’ War and its aftermath. At the same time, they open up discussions of our contemporary world with its internecine wars – conflicts more often than not still triggered by binary modes of thinking and inhumane practices that deprive individuals of the most elementary right to become themselves.