pre-call, 2 PhD-Positions (Humanities): Gender/masculinity in Antisemitic and Oriental discourses

2 PhD- positions at Maastricht University, Center for Gender and Diversity, Integration in the international research network: www. rengoo.net.

Four years position, 1500 Euro month. Both projects will be located within the Center of Gender and Diversity and are embedded within the focal point of FASOS “Cultural Memory and Diversity”. Students with a Master Degree in Cultural-Antisemitismus Studies, Gender/Queer- and Postcolonial Studies, and Literaturestudies may apply to this project. The candidate will also be connected to the international research network rengoo.net.

Application schedule: 15. 8. 2013: small Proposal (600) words: 1.) titel, research question, 2.) abstract (scientific importance, innovative, problem, what is your ‘material’, what discipline (sub-disciplines). Short CV with grades (if yes, please indicate if you followed a research master), academic prizes, publications and activities.

If you are chosen for a full proposal, the first deadline for the full proposal (2500 words) should be 20. 9. 2013.

Send your application to: u.brunotte@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Project I

The Role Gender and Sexuality in Orientalism, Antisemitism and Jewish Self-Orientalisation

Constructs of sexuality and gender represent central issues of religious and political difference in the Orientalist discourse of the 19th century. But during the 19th century, especially in Germany, the 'Jewish Question' was also connected to figures of an 'Inner Orient', defining Jews as the 'Asians of Europe', as the 'Southern Race', or as people with an “inner Blackness”. Projects, which propose to intervene in current debates about historical constructions of Jewish identity from the perspectives of colonialism and Orientalism, using literary and cultural narratives and figures as their corpus of analysis, are welcome to apply. Can we claim, as Kalmar and Penslar do, that Western Orientalism has always been not only about the Muslim, but also about the Jews? Are there similarities between the “Beautiful Jewess” and the “Oriental Woman”? What role did Christianity play, in concert with biblical scholarship, in the Orientalization of the Jews? What can be the research surplus from an analysis of Jewish Self-Orientalisation, in the Arts and in Orientalist scholarship? By concentrating on literary, scholarly and artistic transformations of colonial and especially Orientalistic images, the project should focus on imaginative works rather than only historical works. It should concentrate on the intertextual vocabulary of racism, colonial desire and oriental imagination, because works of literature and art open up an alternative history of entangled imagination, memory and history. As Rothberg and Silverman suggest, multidirectional memory can help to discover hybrid formations and can open our eyes to performative experiences, moments of resistance, imbalance and disruption.

Project II:
The Figure of the Hero and Unheroic Conduct: Re-inventing Masculinities

Masculinities, especially those which culturally function as ‘hegemonic’ masculinity were often connected to figures and narratives of heroism. Marginalized or socially excluded masculinities were often marked as ‘deviant’ because of their “unheroic conduct” (Daniel Boyarin). Reformulations of femininity however have attracted much more attention within genderstudies than the ongoing reformulations of masculinity. Yet boys and men – and what counts as normative or ‘ideal’ masculinity – are constantly subject to change as well. How is masculinity represented, what is the role of the ungoing crisis discourse of masculinity, what are the cultural narratives and dynamics that feed them? Do the Western countries really live, as some theorists state, in a “postheroic” era?

Essential to the cultural dynamics of gendered representation seems to be that new representations of masculinity often draw on older – even seemingly obsolete - repertoires, which are unearthed again and put to new uses. This is where cultural memory comes in. How can we, for example, explain the ongoing fascination for the model of the ‘hero’? And how “figures of the third” and “unheroic conduct” are culturally renewed? Drawing on the complementary work of Foucault and Mosse on the crucial role of modern sexuality and masculinity in European national-identity production, applying projects should referr to the role that antisemitic tropes of Jewishness and stereotypical representations of the Oriental have played in the production of modern sexual identities. According to Gilman the “male Jew as female” or “homosexual” became a central marker of difference in 19th century Antisemitism. Do we have a revival of such discourses today? Ours is the intersectional approach, which means that the construction of masculinity always has to be analysed in it interaction with other crucial differences, such as ethnicity, sexuality, age and class.