Woman, Violence, Nation: Representations of Female Insurgency in Fiction and Public Discourse in the 1970s and 1980s

Citation:

Becker, Bettina T. 2000. "Woman, Violence, Nation: Representations of Female Insurgency in Fiction and Public Discourse in the 1970s and 1980s." Women in German Yearbook 16: 207-20.

Author: Bettina T. Becker

Abstract:

Germany in the 1970s was subject to a wave of terrorist activities in which women such as Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin played a significant role. The mass media and public discourse in general struggled with women's participation in these cases of extreme physical violence. In this article, I explore the articulations of the discourses of gender, nation, and violence in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Ulrike Meinhof's tele vision play Bambule, and Traude Buhrmann's Flage fiber Moabiter Mauern (Flights over Moabit's Walls), in order to illuminate representations of female insurgency. My argument centers around their different uses of deviance and the changing character of social criticism in the 1970s and 1980s.

Topics: Combatants, Female Combatants, Gender, Women, Gender Roles, Media, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Non-State Armed Groups, Nationalism, Terrorism, Sexuality, Violence

Year: 2000