Abstract:  Unlike in the U.S.,  Queer Studies" in Germany is still a very marginalized field within academia in general and women's studies in particular. There is no  lesbian and gay men's caucus" in any academic association, no journal specifically devoted to queer and/or lesbian and gay studies, and,above all, there is no academic institution for queer and/or lesbian and gay studies. Given this distribution of  symbolic capital" (PierreBourdieu),  "Queer Studien" has had little impact on the definition of Genderand Women's Studies in Germany. Why then  Feminist Studies and its QueerDiscontents"?

In 1990 Judith Butler's book, Gender Trouble appeared in German translation under the title Gender and its Discontents. The book launched an almost decade-long, heated debate among German academic feminists about the  future of gender, which, in part, was also a conflict about the "legitimate inhabitants" of the territory of Women's Studies. Much of this debate was coded as a conflict between different feminist generations. This "trope of  generation," however, served as a strategy of displacement.  "Queer issues" figured as a kind of absent/present threat haunting the coherence of Gender Studies as a legitimate field of knowledge, but they were hardly made an explicit subject of discussion. In my paper I will look at both levels of this discourse:

1) What is at stake in claiming a territory of knowledge? Who gets to say what? What defines an  intelligible" object of study and who gets to defineit? 
2) Even if  "Queer Studien" has had no impact on the definition of Gender Studies on the conscious level, how did the spectre of  queer" structure Women's Studies on the unconscious level? And above all, what does all this mean for the future of German academic feminism(s)? 

Paper:Click on the title below to view this paper.

"Disputed Territory: Feminist Studies in Germany and its Queer Discontents" 

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