The Education of Desire
Unsettling Sexuality, Gender, and Racial Politics in Contemporary Medical Romance
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10498409 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Katja Herges (0000-0003-0253-2433, University of Wroclaw, Wroclaw, Poland, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 59 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 282-300 |
| Publication date | 2023-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Seminar A Journal of Germanic Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0037-1939 • E-ISSN: 1911-026X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/seminar.59.3.4 |
| OpenAlex | W4386824505 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
Medical romance features health care heroes and heroines in a central love story. This article analyzes two contemporary literary examples of the popular but neglected genre of German medical romance, Julya Rabinowich’s Herznovelle (2011) and Irena Brežná’s Schuppenhaut: Ein Liebesroman (2010). This article argues that medical romance performs agile cultural work that ambivalently locates discourses of desire, race, and gender within popular, literary, and medical cultures. Through a range of literary and autofictional strategies, both works reveal how medical romance can reflect and produce bourgeois sexuality and whiteness in contemporary culture. Foregrounding their narrators’ appropriation of colonial imagery, I show that Herznovelle and Schuppenhaut open up critical questions about approaches to decolonization in German studies and medical culture
Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Bourgeoisie · Colonialism · Foregrounding · German · Human sexuality · Literature · Political science · Politics · Queer · Race (biology · Romance · Sociology · European history and politics · Gender Studies · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
|---|