Spoken and Unspoken

Abstract

The study The Fight Over Female Individuality. On the Transformation of Modern Manners of Subjectivity in German around 1900 (Der Kampf um weibliche Individualität. Zur Transformation moderner Subjektivierungsweisen in Deutschland um 1900) addresses the problem of how “symbolic-cultural processes of meaning and classification” can be adequately described (6). Andrea Bührmann draws on “Foucault’s reflections on the analysis of discourse and power formations” as her theoretical basis. She reconstructs or rather develops this in the form of a “social theoretically founded dispositive analysis” which is completed by the structural category of gender (20f). Using examples, she tries to prove that the historical (trans)formation processes can be theoretically conceived and historically depicted in a concrete manner using the struggle of “women for a ‘feminine individuality’” (11).