Guest Lecture Katharina Gerund (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)

Photo credits: fau.de

28.03.2019
10:00 - 12:00
Büro Prof. Flach 0001-02-0128


"Happy Home Front Heroines in US TV Series"

In the post-9/11 era, military spouses have taken center stage in political discourses as well as cultural representations of the so-called New Wars. A plethora of cultural productions focuses on the experiences and perspectives of military spouses. These range from autobiographies to blogs and magazines, from self-help books and manuals to novels and poetry collections, and from Hollywood film to popular TV shows; and they reveal and critically negotiate the cultural ideal of the military spouse in the 21st century – an ideal that I want to call “happy home front heroine.” My talk will, first of all, introduce and discuss this concept that draws on Betty Friedan’s and Elizabeth Abele’s work and serves to outline the role of the military spouse in the cultural imaginary of the US. While throughout the 20th century, as Elisabeth Bronfen has argued, Hollywood has been the “site where American culture thinks about the implications in the traumatic history of war” (Specters of War, p. 2), it seems that the seriality of contemporary TV shows offers a preferred context for negotiations of the current wars. Therefore, in a second step, my talk will examine two popular TV shows – The Unit and Army Wives – with regard to their representation of military spouses. Their protagonists function as mediators between a civilian population and military culture, they are endowed with “affective agency” (Rebecca Wanzo) that is utilized for different purposes, and they are cast as suffering heroines who represent the nation at large. I will especially explore the embeddedness of these heroines in different (and sometimes conflicting) kinship structures, including their (nuclear) families, the military community, and the nation-state.

 

Dr. Katharina Gerund is an assistant professor for American Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University (FAU) Erlangen-Nuernberg. She has published in the fields of transatlantic cultural mobility, diaspora studies and gender studies, and American popular culture. Katharina is the author of Transatlantic Cultural Exchange: African American Women's Art and Activism in West Germany (2013) and the co-editor of Pirates, Drifters, Fugitives: Figures of Mobility in the US and Beyond (2012), Revealing Tacit Knowledge: Explication and Embodiment (2015), and Reeducation Revisited: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf "America's Germany" (2015). Her current book project is tentatively entitled “Happy Home Front Heroines? Military Spouses in the Cultural Imaginary of the US.” She is currently a member of two research networks: “Narrative Liminality and/in the Formation of American Modernities” and “Parallel and Alternative Societies in Contemporary Literature and Culture.” Together with Heike Paul and Fabian Schäfer, she heads an interdisciplinary research project on “Reeducation Revisited: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives on the Post-World War II Period in the US, Japan, and Germany,“ which is funded by the German Research Foundation. Katharina has presented her work at conferences in the US, the UK, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, and she regularly offers workshops at schools, teacher training seminars, and public lectures.

 

The event is free and open to the public.

This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies.

 

Department of American Studies Graz
Institut für Amerikanistik
Attemsgasse 25/II
A-8010 Graz
Tel. +43/316/380-2468
amerikanistik(at)uni-graz.at