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Table of contents

No. 13 - Volume 9 (2021)
Between Autonomy and Vulnerability
Edited by Julia König et al.


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Julia König / Dagmar Lieske / Sebastian Bischoff: Historische Fremd- und Selbstentwürfe weiblicher Adoleszenter zwischen Autonomie und Verletzlichkeit.
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For a long time, little attention was paid to the sexuality of girls in the social sciences and the humanities; the focus issue prefaced by the following remarks is to be devoted in particular to the tension between vulnerability and self-determination in relation to the sexuality of girls. Accordingly, the three authors of the following contributions deal with self-determination and violence, sanctioning and free spaces. Three case studies are used to examine how girls’ sexuality was perceived, channeled, suppressed or instrumentalized in different historical contexts in Germany and Austria in the 20th cen-tury, but also empowered and expressed and lived by girls and young women them-selves.

Analysis

Daniela Aharon: The Trouble with Love. Sexual Crises and the Young Jewish Woman in Lilly Fenichel’s Diaries and Novellas 1915-18.
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This article examines sexual crises of the young Jewish woman during the fin-de-siècle period as discussed in Lilly Fenichel’s (i.e. married Alice Aschner, 1894-1925) unpublished diaries and novellas written between 1915 and 1918. Her writings draw on Freudian psychoanalysis and Zionist tropes, pointing to the triple sexual burden of the young Jewish woman as adolescent, Jew, and woman. With a focus on social im-plications, Lilly Fenichel addresses sexual trauma and agency, as well as female desire and problems of disembodied sexuality, issues that also fueled heated feminist debates about the New Woman at that time. In her novellas, Lilly Fenichel creates young female Jewish characters who are ultimately driven to suicide by love trouble.

Anna Schiff: „Verliebt, verlobt“. Mädchenspezifische Diskurse um voreheliche Liebesziehungen im Nationalsozialismus am Beispiel der Zeitschrift Die junge Dame.
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The following article explores discourses about the sexuality of heterosexual white middle-class girls and young women during National Socialism using media products targeted at this audience as its primary sources. It demonstrates the normalization of certain premarital sexual acts (kissing, intercourse) for white middle-class girls within this type of media. Readers were promised individual love and happiness on certain conditions: Choosing the right partner, that is racially and eugenically eligible men, and having sex out of love (and not out of lust) within the constraints of a serious mo-nogamous relationship. This set them apart from lower class girls and young women who were generally stigmatized as being promiscuous. These magazines therefore promoted the National Socialist ideologies and contributed to their acceptance.

Sonja Matter: Adoleszente Mädchen, das sexuelle Schutzalter und die „sexuelle Liberalisierung“ in Österreich der 1960er und 1970er Jahre.
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In the course of the Austrian criminal law reform of the 1950s to 1970s, the provisions on the sexual age of consent were also renegotiated. In these debates, the stage of development of the sexual body of girls and boys seemed to be the first point of reference for determining it. The majority of legal experts and parliamentarians were of the opinion that the criminal law should protect prepubescent children from adult sexual acts. In the case of adolescent, underage girls, however, the case was much less clear. Here, the legislature clarified that male sexual desire for a girl's body is legitimate if it can be read as a female body. Austria was also one of the first European countries to introduce an age tolerance clause into its age of consent regulations. The article shows that sexual liberalization was problematic in the context of a continuing gender hierar-chical order, especially for adolescent girls: Their sexual rights were inadequately se-cured.

Open Section

Philipp Kröger: Germanisierung als Abwehr des Flüssigen. Über das Verhältnis von Männlichkeiten, Körpern, Nation und Territorium in völkischer und nationalsozialistischer Ideologie.
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From the German Empire to National Socialism, the „Slavic flood” served as a metaphor for a perceived demographic threat in Germany’s eastern borderlands. This article argues that the flood metaphor highlights a close connection between masculinities, bodies, nation, and territory in völkisch and National Socialist ideology. Statistical records of ethnicity had liquefied the German eastern border since the turn of the century. Subsequent calls for its solidification by means of population policies focused primarily on the female body. By connecting birth rates and territorial boundaries völk-isch and National Socialist biopolitics operated not only in the dyad of the individual and the social body, but in a triad including space. It is therefore no coincidence that the flood metaphor used for territorial boundaries resembles the body perceptions identified by Klaus Theweleit in his study of (fascist) masculinities. The articles shows how boundaries of bodies, gender, and territory were closely intertwined.