Gender (trouble) in the Generation Golf: Popliteratur in 1990s Germany

Reading Popliteratur with "gender-glasses" provides a way of recognizing Popliteratur's representation of current events and the (gender/ed) situation in Germany. Such a decoding views cultural and national identity as it is articulated to gender and its performance.

Ultimately, Popliteratur depicts the failure of pre-existing notions of binary gender identity that rely on essential or ontological categories. This in turn triggers multiple crises, including the redefinition of gender roles (primarily for women) and the failure of individuals to comply perfectly with the old ones (generally depicted as a crisis of masculinity). These are partially caused by, but also clearly express a larger identity crisis. Through the narratives and engagement with German popular culture, Popliteratur novels indicate a specifically German identity crisis. New attempts at constructing identities beyond the gender binary are performed through social and class markers, especially by re-inscribing i.e. clothing the "natural" body with the right kind of outfit. Brand names, therefore, play a significant role within Popliteratur in the attempt to construct new forms of identity. New meaning for those old stereotypes derives from pastiche, or the sampling, shuffling and recombining in a remix of the material, so that each element is realigned through association with the other elements. In contemporary Germany, after the unification and the creation of the EU, new categories are being created to replace the loss of both stable and essential identities as well as the importance and meaning of performed gender and sexual roles. The frustration about the current state of identity, sexuality and performance finds its expression throughout texts of the genre in violence toward self (e.g. drug usage or suicide) and others on the one hand and a nostalgic yearning for childhood and youth on the other.

The first chapter of the dissertation therefore focuses on the role of gender within identity formation. The following chapters take up each a different facet of the issue gender and identity, as it relates to sexuality, violence and nostalgia.