Abstract:  This paper assesses the role that gender and feminism have played in German discourses about Turks at the crossroads between literature and politics.  Four methodological questions will be highlighted:  1) How do feminist and/or pseudo-feminist arguments impede rather than foster an incisive understanding of the relationship between gender and nation as it is currently configured vis-á-vis Turks and the German nation and Turks and German culture?  2) What possibilities exist for a feminist approach to gender and nation in postwar Germany that would yield trenchant insights into the kinds of questions obscured by more conventional feminist models (especially that of additive alterity)!  3) To what extent does the opening up of feminist scholarship in German Studies to issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality challenge us to revise our understanding of gender as a privileged category of analysis?  4) In what ways does this type of "Turkish-German" dilemma prompt us to hone our interests in both feminist and multicultural analysis to an even sharper edge?  Guided by these overarching questions, the paper compares three radically different texts that could be said to revolve around gender and nation, Germans and Turks.  Authors include Franz Schönhuber, founder of a right-wing extremist party with an anti-immigrationist platform, Alice Schwarzer, pioneering editor of Ozakin, a Turkish novelist whose translated works figured centrally in German debates about women and Turks in the 1980s.  The paper will conclude with some theoretical reflections on the linkage often posited between gender and ethnicity in representing crisis.  Ending with another question, the paper asks to what extent such linkage reliably promotes the articulation of complexity for German Studies scholarship committed to critical feminist analysis. 

Summary Statement:  Comparing the role of gender and nation in works by a right-wing German extremist, a pioneering feminist activist, and a Turkish novelist who spent several years of political exile in the Federal Republic, this paper pursues a series of methodological questions about the representation of crisis and the articulation of complexity.  In what ways do Turkish-German issues and discourses prompt us to hone our interests in both feminist and multicultural analysis to an even sharper edge?