Queer Masculinity in Stephan Lacant’s Freier Fall GA RY SCHMIDT We stern Illinois Univ ersity Stephan Lacant’s Freier Fall (2013), released in the United States as Free Fall,- was billed as Germany’s answer to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), a cinematic adaptation of Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story. Certain sequences offer sufficient similarities with Lee’s film to suggest they be read as an homage to Lee or as allusions that enter into dialog with their North American counterpart. In both films, outdoor settings provide the scene where male-male sexuality comes to fruition, and both frame homosexual liaisons as the expression of a kind of raw, unfettered sexuality, which, although being «a force of nature» is a «non-reproductive pleasure» that can find expression neither within a sex-gender system in which the patriarchal law equates homosexuality with castration and the evacuation of masculine authority nor within the feminine-coded domestic sphere that is itself produced and reproduced by the patriarchy. 1 In the case of Brokeback Mountain it is the eponymous peak that provides the idyllic setting where Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), referred to sometimes as «gay cowboys» but more accurately described as sheep herders or shepherds at the time of their initial liaison, become lovers. In Freier Fall, the woods just outside an unnamed southern German city are the setting where police officers Marc Borgmann (Hanno Koffler) and Kay Engel (Max Riemelt) engage in subversive masculine bonding that eventually leads to sex. 2 «Nature» and the «natural» obtain concrete values only in specific contexts, for example when they are juxtaposed to ostensibly opposing terms in binarisms such as natural/ artificial or natural/ unnatural. In pairings such as these nature is equated with the authentic or the real and given a positive valence, whereas in other pairings nature becomes the negative term in opposition to civilization or culture. The opposition of unrestrained, untamed nature to the domesticating forces of culture or civilization can also take on gendered qualities, for example in Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life (2011), in which a «state of grace,» is associated with the nurturing maternal figure in contrast to both the more punitive father and the gratuitous cruelty of the narrator-son. The reciprocal contamination of the semiotics of gender and nature is no less evident in Brokeback Mountain and Freier Fall, for both Queer Masculinity 89 films grapple with the question of whether male sexuality in its apparently natural state is to be valued for its authenticity in opposition to the masquerades and shackles imposed by civil society, or negatively for the very threat it represents to the heteronormative order secured by this civilization. It is precisely this threatening element that comes to the foreground in Lacant’s film, whereas the setting for Ennis and Jack’s romance in Brokeback Mountain has been referred to by some critics as a homosexual idyll or gay Arcadia where the two lovers escape from social opprobrium to a kind of prelapsarian innocence threatened only by the intrusion of Joe Aguirre, interpreted by Henry Alley as a Satan figure: The very nature of the Arcadia developed in the story and film is defined somewhat by those who exist outside it. In one of the masterstrokes of Paradise Lost, we do not get a full description of Eden until we enter into Satan’s point of view. In similar fashion, every early on [in Brokeback Mountain] Joe Aguirre watches Jack and Ennis’ dalliance, […] later issuing the accusation, «you guys wasn’t getting paid to leave the dogs baby-sit the sheep while you stemmed the rose» (SS14). (Alley 7) Alley’s analysis identifies at least two cultural faultlines that are addressed explicitly in the representation of male homosexuality in Freier Fall: the conflict between sexual self-realization and duty, specifically those identified with the men’s role as protectors, as well as the notion of gay men as insiders or outsiders. While Alley claims that Proulx and Lee create an inside status for Ennis and Jack in an idyllic setting removed from society and its judgment, whereas the two men’s return to society means the reversal of this status, Freier Fall negotiates the boundaries between inside and outside in a very different fashion that also precludes any clear identification of homosexual men as simply victims of social prejudice. Rather than conforming to pastoral conventions or invoking a gay idyll, the backdrop for gay sex in Freier Fall evokes instead an anarchic nature that mirrors how the male libido bursts the constraints imposed upon it by «feminine» civilization. Marc, married to Bettina (Katharina Schüttler), and soon to become a father, finds in his homosexual liaison with Kay a sphere in which he can pursue his own pleasure, have sex whenever he feels the need, and at the same time break the rules of the law enforcement body he represents. In its focus on Marc’s double life, Freier Fall links its portrayal of male homosexuality in the German police force with broader cultural discourses on gender and sexual orientation, with a special lens directed at masculinity, specifically its relationship to both homophobia and «feminine» domesticity. Both Lee and Lacant offer characters whose homosexual acts and affinities do not align neatly with their self-presentation as cisgender males, i.e. an- 90 Gary Schmidt atomical males whose gender expression corresponds to the requirements of hegemonic masculinity in their respective cultural milieus: the post-frontier American West and a contemporary German police force. In other words, both films present non-heterosexual males who are visually indistinguishable from their heterosexual counterparts and who move within professional circles traditionally defined as masculine but who through their homosexual acts concretely endanger their position in these male-dominated spheres. Yet, in spite of many similarities in theme, setting, symbolism, and even storyline, important differences between the two films are to be noted. For example, whereas Lee’s film plays upon genre conventions of both the American Western and romantic melodrama (Cohan 237-39), Lacant eschews all such conventions, choosing an indie film aesthetic with sparse dialogue and minimal non-diegetic music or sound that would stimulate an emotional response from viewers. Further, Brokeback Mountain offers a temporal and cultural displacement of same-sex viewer identifications, inscribing a story of repressed sexuality and homophobia onto a past that is neither entirely recent nor completely forgotten but nevertheless one in which the icons of masculinity are those of a frontier that has long since ended and whose values most likely will not correspond to the sensibilities of many American moviegoers. Freier Fall, in contrast, presents viewers with a setting that will be familiar to most Germans - the contemporary «Kleinstadt» - and to a group of individuals visibly present in everyday life, police officers, whose function in society exceeds that of the merely symbolic or iconographic, and who are the subject of regular discussion and debate regarding, for example, excessive use of force, surveillance, and freedom of speech and assembly. In general, Brokeback Mountain is more closely aligned with a Hollywood aesthetic that has inspired blockbuster historical dramas that have sometimes been referred to as «German heritage film» (Cook et al 8), whereas Freier Fall adheres to stylistic elements more closely akin to that of the directors collectively labeled under the rubric of the «Berlin School,» which is described by Marco Abel as a «counter-cinema» (10). According to the authors of Berlin School Glossary, «Berlin School» cinema exhibits a dearth of communicative dialogue, minimalizes plot and character development, and focusses on a contemporary middle-class milieu (2). In contrast, the German historical blockbusters are «touristic returns to the past in the form of costume dramas» (Cook et al. 8) that offer little to no challenge to mainstream aesthetics and dominant ideologies (Abel 8). Given the imbrication of sexgender ideologies in narratives of national history and in aesthetic programs, in particular those related to the arrangement and organization of space and perception, any comparative analysis of the treatment of masculinity and Queer Masculinity 91 homosexuality in Brokeback Mountain and Freier Fall must take such programmatic and generic elements into account. A central question becomes not only which icons and codes of masculinity are invoked and/ or subverted but to what extent do the films resist imposing an interpretation on viewers within the culturally accepted and cinematically reinforced framework of meaning? To what degree do they make viewer responses possible that do not fall neatly into pre-existing categories of identity? The world of American cowboys and that of the German police force have a symbolic relationship to male bonding, male friendships, and the myth of masculine strength. An important distinction, however, is that while the American cowboy invokes the myth of rugged individualism and self-sufficiency, what Michael Kimmel analyzes as «Marketplace Manhood» undergirding the notion of the self-made man (122-23), 3 the German police force symbolically links masculinity with the rule of law and the maintenance of order. The cultural fault lines addressed by Freier Fall are thus significantly removed from the fantasies and anxieties surrounding masculine phallic wholeness central to Brokeback. While Brokeback encourages us to dream of a potential future (albeit utopian) domestic bliss for Jack and Ennis in which they might nevertheless retain their masculine self-images, Freier Fall raises questions regarding the very compatibility of male homosexuality with domesticity and a family structure that appears always already to be heterosexual. In Lacant’s film, the sexual self-sufficiency allowed for by male homosexuality appears as a threat to procreation and the family, and in the end there appears to be the possibility of a continued queer existence for Marc within the male-dominated police force, while his relationship to his wife and child remains in question. In this regard, the film harkens back to early twentieth-century discourses that link male homosexuality with statebuilding functions in distinction to heterosexuality as the cornerstone of domesticity and the family. 4 As Cohan notes, publicity related to Brokeback Mountain and the film’s reception tended to reinforce the idea of a largely female audience that had to coax heterosexual men to accompany them to the movie theaters, a conceptualization of the audience that aligned with the film’s billing as a romance, which by dint of its two lovers both being men could be «instructive to men» regarding the importance of emotion over sex (Cohan 237). Indeed, the melancholic loss that saturates in particular the end of Brokeback Mountain displaces sexuality almost entirely onto romantic love. The theme of male redemption, perhaps even through same-sex love, in Brokeback Mountain, is completely absent in Freier Fall, which eschews all sentimentalization of the relationship between the two male protagonists, in spite of a gesture to the 92 Gary Schmidt idea of loss at the end of the film. While Brokeback Mountain follows a tragic emplotment (Alley 11), leaving viewers with a sense of loss and «what might have been» if gay domesticity were possible and the two protagonists were able to overcome their own internalized homophobia, Freier Fall avoids closure altogether, refusing to draw clear boundaries regarding sexual identity and victimization. It does, however, squarely situate its exploration of male homosexuality within a framework of masculinity, and the portrayal of the liaison between the two officers raises questions regarding masculine vs. feminine roles, male vs. female sexuality, and the relationship between homophobia, hegemonic masculinity, and feminine domesticity. In particular, the two male lovers of Freier Fall occupy a unique position both concretely and figuratively: as men, they are insiders in the power structure that maintains law and order but as sexual nonconformists they undermine this very order and gesture towards a new form of masculinity that turns the verbal taunts and physical violence inflicted by homophobic heterosexual men back against these same men. Yet, if there is a lesson for heterosexual men implied in Freier Fall, it has little to do with the ability to feel or to sublimate raw sexuality into romantic love, which certain critics who interpreted Brokeback Mountain as a romantic melodrama or «chic flick» attributed to Lee’s film (Cohan 237). In contrast, the queer masculinity 5 embodied by Marc by the end of Freier Fall remains strictly within the parameter of spheres of activity and behaviors associated with traditional masculinity, while adding the element of gay sex and its charged implications for male dominance and invulnerability. This essay explores the transformation of themes, motifs, and plot elements from Brokeback Mountain in Freier Fall and the ramifications of these for the representation of male homosexuality and masculinity. Of central importance are the association of male-male sexuality with raw nature, the presentation of anal intercourse as the apparently quintessential gay sex act, and the tension between domesticity and lawlessness present in both cinematic works. In certain ways, both Lee’s and Lacant’s protagonists are homeless, sexual outlaws, but their real and imagined relationships to the patriarchal phallic order are very different. Lee’s «gay cowboys» are primarily the victims of this order, which rejects all forms of homosexuality as the evacuation of masculine authority and power; they are disempowered by their low socioeconomic status and live at the margin of the heterosexual family structure, while not really posing a threat to it diegetically or symbolically. Ennis and Jack’s masculinity consists largely in the two men’s outward adherence to the external trappings of the American West and their imagined relation- Queer Masculinity 93 ship to this ideal. In contrast, Lacant’s queer cops appear in no way to have relinquished their position in society. In the end, they successfully defend themselves against the vestiges of heterosexual patriarchy on the police force - a force that incidentally also contains at least one female officer, a fact that further destabilizes the one-to-one relationship between hegemonic masculinity and heterosexual male bodies. The defense waged by Lacant’s protagonists against the domestic sphere of wives and mothers is, however, not as successful. In this regard, Freier Fall seems to suggest that deeper chasms separate men and women, whether gay or straight, than those that divide gay and straight men. Lacant’s use of setting, dialogue, editing, and mis-en-scène aligns the symbolic space of male homosexuality firmly with non-domesticity, even lawlessness, as the title itself suggests with its reference to bodies subject only to the force of gravity and whose movement is thus unrestrained by any other factors. 6 Male homosexuality occupies a space in Lacant’s film that appears antithetical to the heterosexual family because it unleashes men from domestication as husbands and fathers and allows them to pursue unbridled pleasure. Yet the film is not unsympathetic to its two male protagonists and even allows them to perform an alternative, queer masculinity. In the idyllic fields on Brokeback Mountain, Ennis and Jack become freed from the constraints of heteronormative masculinity enough to «stem the rose,» but once they have returned to society they never free themselves from the need for external and internal conformity to their environment’s expectations of «real men.» Ennis and Jack are thus never able to integrate the freedom they experience on Brokeback Mountain with the expectations of heteronormative masculinity in their everyday lives, although Jack actively seeks to do so. We sense that such an internal act of liberation would require their conscious decision to leave the very environment in which they have been constructed as heteronormative masculine subjects, since Ennis envisions the only possible outcome of male-male domesticity (Jack suggests they settle down together on their own ranch) as death by lynching. The possibility of escape beyond the borders - that is to say, beyond the reach of the long arm of the law that enforces the sex-gender system in a post-frontier Wild West - flickers only briefly when Jack asks Ennis if he has ever been to Mexico, the destination of outlaws in traditional Hollywood Westerns, not to mention in more subversive treatments of the genre such as Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) and Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991). Jack’s admission to having «been to Mexico» brings upon him a threat from Ennis to inflict the very punishment on Jack that others might have enacted on the two of them had they chosen same-sex domesticity. In this manner, Ennis adamantly rejects a gay identity equivalent to self-branding as a sexual outlaw. 94 Gary Schmidt The sexual outlaw motif is taken up In Freier Fall in a setting far removed from mid-twentieth century rural Wyoming, but nevertheless one in which the often contradictory expectations that hegemonic masculinity places on individual men are examined and the possibilities of its subversion from within are explored. Lacant’s protagonists, who meet at an advanced training course for police officers, are situated squarely within the law, hence functioning as both insiders and outsiders, i.e., subversives. Kay and Marc eventually overcome initial inhibitions, first in the woods, and then in Kay’s high rise apartment, the key of which Kay offers to Marc so that he can «get away from things.» Kay seems, in fact, to be deliberately seducing Marc into a homosexual affair and more general rule-breaking at the same time. Jack’s longing for escape beyond the bounds of the law is paid homage to in a discussion between Kay and Marc when they share a cigarette on the balcony of Kay’s high rise apartment after having slept together in his bed. The camera positioning, with the two men in the foreground on the balcony, allows the viewer to see past Kay and Marc to the sun on the horizon, which in turn evokes an atmosphere that combines a feeling of transcendence above everyday concerns with a sense of longing for a more permanent escape. What Alley refers to as Jack’s desire for a Schillerian idyll, his need to «link the ideal with the actual and have the experience on a sustained basis» (14), is given an American «twist» in the pastoral landscape. In Freier Fall, the viewers never actually experience the idyll, there being no setting that corresponds in symbolic meaning or plot significance to Ang Lee’s mountaintop, but instead one catches glimpses of Kay’s longing for a self-reinvention in an entirely new setting. The possibility of escape, however, is preempted before it can even erupt into the kind of altercation portrayed in Brokeback between the two male lovers, for when Kay asks Marc if he ever considered just taking off for the unknown and starting over, a taciturn Marc quickly responds, «Nicht wirklich.» Moreover, notably absent in Freier Fall is anything equivalent to Jack’s suggestion of a gay domesticity - his vision of their settling down on their own ranch - nor does Kay look backward nostalgically or regretfully to a lost family of origin. Indeed, he appears as a freefloater without ties or roots, there being no mention of parents or relatives of any kind. Marc’s response to Kay is far less emphatic than that of Ennis to Jack, but the soon-to-be-father’s «nicht wirklich» foreshadows his refusal to relinquish the place and role that has been defined for him as a husband and father. His rejection of the label «schwul,» much like Ennis’s insistence that he is not «queer» is backed up later with his fists. Brokeback Mountain and Freier Fall frame homosexual bonds as both congruent and incongruent with hegemonic masculinity, to the extent that Queer Masculinity 95 hegemonic masculinity does or does not remain tethered to a heteronormativity that is associated with a feminine domestic sphere. In other words, both films sexualize male-male relationships that are not ipso facto feminized. Kay himself is representative of both the affirmative and subversive potential of gender-conformist male homosexuality: while he calls Marc a «Pussy,» taunting him to run faster, he uses the same gibe in order to push him to break the rules that as police officers they are sworn to enforce, for example by jumping into a swimming pool after hours fully clothed, or smoking marijuana. When asked by Marc how he ended up with the police force, Kay asks him if he has never heard of «Systemunterwanderung.» One need not take literally Kay’s claim or Marc’s astonished query whether Marc is perhaps an «Autonome» - a reference to members of loosely-organized anarchist groups that are «widely regarded as left-wing extremists and have been investigated as a terrorist and criminal organization» (Kopp 30) - to ascertain that Kay’s subversiveness lies precisely in the contradiction between his outward adherence to the expectations of heterosexual masculinity and his self-definition as gay, as well as the contradiction between his role as enforcer of societal rules and one who enjoys breaking them. No one on the police force suspects that Kay is gay until he is discovered in a gay bar during a raid, and he even plays it straight by appearing with a female date at a bowling alley where many of the officers hang out. The references to «Systemunterwanderung» and «Autonomen» suggest a possibility for male homosexuality and its representation that is not fully explored in Brokeback Mountain. In Lacant’s film, the suggestion of a utopian escape into outlaw status is alluded to in the couple’s visits to gay bars, where they take ecstasy, dance ecstatically all night long, and have sex in the bathroom, which one might read as nothing more than a stereotypical representation of gay subculture or more charitably as an evocation of mainstream stereotypes about gay men in a context in which the gay bar represents both the stereotype and the liberation from the constraints of society that weigh heavily on both men as police officers and on Marc in particular as young paterfamilias. In this context, homosexuality is the refusal inwardly to conform to the rules of the heteronormative sex-gender system by men who are otherwise invested in the maintenance of this system. Whereas Ennis and Jack never have the authority or status to act as actual enforcers of the sex-gender system on anyone other than themselves, the same cannot be said of Kay and Marc. Yet, although Kay manages to negotiate the contradictions between his role as police officer and his nonconformist identity by creating a private sphere to which he admits only the initiated, for Marc there is no such possibility, because the private sphere of 96 Gary Schmidt middle-class family life requires his absolute adherence to heteronormative masculinity. The focus of the film thus turns to Marc’s negotiation of the parallel lives between which he now finds himself switching back and forth as a kind of twenty-first century Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray, or Caligari (Kiss 51). While Ennis and Jack must remain in the closet for fear of death and as a couple cannot escape to Mexico due to Ennis’s rejection of sexual outlaw status as a viable life option, it appears that in post-gay-liberation Germany Marc can live in both worlds, as a husband/ father and a sexual outlaw, and even that he would have been happy continuing to do so if his mother had not witnessed him kissing Kay in a hospital corridor. Even after this, the film does not become a coming out story, and Marc never embraces a gay identity, ultimately leaving the viewers to answer the question for themselves posed by Marc’s wife, Bettina: «Was bist du denn? » Thus, for those viewers, whether gay, straight, or other, who wish to see the complexities of attraction and behavior clearly resolved in a narrative that culminates in a clear statement of identity, Freier Fall shares the «Berlin School» aesthetic that denies «the spectator what it is that they [sic] want or expect to see» (Cook et al. 8). In Freier Fall, homosexuality is not only tied to victimization and abjection in relationship to hegemonic masculinity, it also appears to be enabled, if not produced, by the practices and institutions of hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity. As a theoretical insight, this is anything but new, of course; one need only cite Eve Sedgwicks’s now famous hypothesis in her seminal work Between Men of «the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual - a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted» (1-2). Sedgwick deploys the term «homosocial desire» precisely in order to render visible the continuity between purportedly non-sexual relations (the homosocial) and those involving sexual desire. The precise referent of «our society» is open for question, but this much is clear: Sedgwick posits a distinction between modern Western arrangements of sexuality and that of the ancient Greeks, for whom homosexual relationships and the maintenance of patriarchy went hand in hand. The notion that relatively fixed paradigms of male homosexuality followed one another chronologically has long since been discarded, as one has come to understand various arrangements and expressions of sexuality as co-existing in time and space. Sedgwick’s emphasis on the necessary relationship between cultural arrangements of homosexuality and the power relationships between men and women is critical for our current analysis of Freier Fall and Brokeback Mountain, since both set their stories of male-male love in mas- Queer Masculinity 97 culine-coded spaces that at least in part represent escapes from the femininecoded spaces of everyday life. Lacant teases out some of the contradictions between «feminine» domesticity and «masculine» desire for escape from domestic restraints implicit in Lee’s film. In both, however, sexual relations between males come to represent a free space outside of the sphere of domesticity, outside social norms, roles, and definitions, a «Wild West» if you will, in which what the films themselves appear to define as specifically masculine passions can flow unrestrained, whether these are erotic, aggressive, or both. Furthermore, this «queer Wild West» appears to suffer explicitly from both the misunderstanding and disapproval of wives and mothers, as well as the male enforcers of hegemonic heteronormative masculinity, who reject any expression of homoerotic desire as «queer» or «schwul.» One example of the blurring of the homosocial and the homosexual in Freier Fall is seen in the athletic competitiveness that frames the entire narrative. The film begins with an establishing shot in which a group of police officers wearing shirts clearly marked as «Polizei» run around a track. Kay, not yet identified as gay, is clearly in the lead, and Marc attempts unsuccessfully to catch up with him, eventually stopping completely and bending over in apparent pain. The final shot of the film repeats the situation, this time with Marc pulling ahead of the rest of the men in the group, essentially occupying the position held at the beginning by Kay, with the viewers now knowing that even if Marc still does not embrace a gay identity he has at least embraced another man with affection and desire. The possibility for agonistic malemale relationships to flip over into erotic ones or to be revealed as masks for libidinal attractions is further underscored by two practice combat situations between the two men in which Marc displays excessive zeal, his aggression appearing as an obvious outlet for his increasing erotic attraction to Kay. The contrast between the police space in which homosocial bonding coexists with subversive homoeroticism, and the feminine-coded domestic sphere is made evident in a cut from a scene in the woods in which Kay blows smoke into Marc’s mouth and then steals a kiss from him to a dark bedroom scene in which Marc’s wife straddles him and states «We missed you,» as the camera pans down to reveal her pregnant state. This begins a sequence in which Marc’s parents use a camcorder to create a video for the baby, interviewing family members and literally interpellating the unborn child as the product of the heterosexual family structure. This home video introduces the baby into the heteronormative family, but it also reveals Marc’s awkwardness when being called on to speak to his unborn child, his need to resort to pat phrases and formulaic expressions. In this manner, we see that not merely the child, but Marc himself is being molded as a husband and father 98 Gary Schmidt in the heterosexual matrix and that the existence of this heterosexual family as an unquestioned reality is dependent on the still unborn child. This scene, in spite of its foregrounding of the construction of the familial imaginary, is not at all stylized: the apparent realism of the visible camcorder is mirrored in the realist aesthetic of the unseen movie camera. Such techniques call attention to the cultural production of Marc’s role as husband and father within the extended family: visual realism is revealed to be staged reality, and Marc’s production as father within the existing heterosexual familial paradigm is rendered even more explicit by the fact that he and Bettina are literally living in his parents’ house. Lacant uses repeated jump cuts from scenes featuring Kay and Marc to scenes with Marc and Bettina, suggesting commonalities between the homosexual and heterosexual relationships as well as differences. The jump cutting is more severe and hence more suggestive than that of Brokeback Mountain, but Lee’s film also pushes viewers to reflect on similarities and differences in the heteroand homosexual relations of the protagonists, for example when Ennis’s wife reminds him that his preferred sexual act will never produce a baby and the camera shows him turning her over to be penetrated anally as he did to Jack in the tent on a cold night in a scene that some viewers perceived as violent, even as a rape (Patterson 42). A comparison between the two films’ framing of such scenes is productive to the extent that one can read these framings as constructing differences between ostensibly male and female expressions of sexuality within the films’ broader treatment of masculinity and femininity. The equivalent scene in Freier Fall has Marc unsuccessfully - in contrast to Ennis - attempting to initiate and control sex with Bettina in a manner he is able to with Kay. When Marc oversleeps after a night of ecstasy-induced dancing in a gay club, Bettina begins painting the baby’s bedroom without him. In response to her anger at his failure to fulfill his obligations, Marc grabs her roughly from behind to initiate sex, a move reminiscent of how he first penetrated Kay against the car. Unlike Kay, Bettina vehemently rebuffs Marc, ultimately pushing him down and spilling the bucket of paint. If sex is the glue that bonds Marc and Kay together, it is for Bettina insufficient compensation for Marc’s failure to live up to paternal and spousal obligations. The focus in both films on anal penetration suggests an overdetermined link between this particular sexual act and the cultural meaning associated with male homosexuality. The camera leaves little to the imagination regarding who is doing what to whom, and the absence of foreplay or tenderness in the initial sex scenes between the two men in both films frames the act in terms of dominance and submission. Further, the framing of the scenes fore- Queer Masculinity 99 grounds the non-procreative nature of the sexual act that has just been portrayed. In Brokeback Mountain, the initial physical liaison between Ennis and Jack occurs in a tent on a cold night, after the two have shared a bottle of whiskey and conversation (Jones 20). While they are huddled close together to stay warm, Jack reaches over and places Ennis’s hand on his penis. The tent scene proceeds rapidly (in less than two minutes) from Jack’s initial move to a stunned reaction from Ennis, an attempt from Jack at a face-to-face intimacy, to Ennis’s forceful placement of Jack into the receptive position for anal intercourse. As he penetrates Jack, the camera pans back and forth from Ennis, whose face expresses a kind of tortured urgency, to Jack, who attests more to a gentle but pained submission; never do we see their two faces together in the frame. Freier Fall offers an equally quick trajectory towards anal penetration. The two men meet in the forest in pouring rain; Marc kisses Kay passionately on the lips before quickly turning him around to penetrate him as he leans against his car. Different than in Brokeback, the camera shows both Marc’s and Kay’s faces together in the frame: Marc’s expression is urgent, while Kay’s seems to oscillate between mild pain and blissful submission. Equally important to the editing and composition of the shots from which these scenes are composed is their respective framing. As Alley notes, Lee sets up psychological intimacy between Ennis and Jack prior to sex (12), whereas Lacant shows increasingly aggressive encounters between Marc and Kay. And while Jack’s concern for Ennis’s welfare, for example when he brings him a blanket and then invites him into the tent to stay warm, attests perhaps to his yearning for a same-sex domesticity openly voiced later in the film and his acceptance of a «feminine» role in such a partnership, no such element is present in the relationship between Marc and Kay prior to their first sexual encounter. A similarity between the two films lies in the fact that in both it is the «passive» participant who actually initiates sex, who acts as «seducer.» Perhaps the equivalent act to Jack’s placement of Ennis’s hand on his genitalia is Kay’s stealing of a quick kiss from Marc while blowing smoke into his mouth, which prompts the same stunned defensiveness the viewers see in Ennis. The shots immediately following these scenes of anal penetration are also significant in both films. In both, the character who was originally resistant to the act and is portrayed throughout as more rigidly masculine/ heterosexual leaves quickly and silently afterwards to return to duty only to discover he has been negligent, lacking in his role as caretaker: in Brokeback Mountain, Ennis discovers the mutilated carcass of a lamb, in Freier Fall, the negligence of duty in pursuit of pleasure is more explicitly linked to the abnegation of the parental role. Marc arrives late to a child-birthing class and must face accusa- 100 Gary Schmidt tions from his wife that his absence made her feel like «eine alleinerziehende Mutter.» Again, while Brokeback offers a kind of redemption and hope that the subject positions of man-desiring-man and father can indeed be reconciled, for example in the final scene in which Ennis’s love for his daughter is juxtaposed to his posthumous acceptance of domestic bliss with Jack in the symbol of the two shirts, Freier Fall offers no such optimism. While I hope in the preceding analysis to have demonstrated that Freier Fall participates in a transnational dialog on homosexuality and masculinity, it is also important to situate the film within a particular national media culture and cinematic tradition. Whereas many, perhaps even a majority of German viewers of Freier Fall will be familiar with Brokeback Mountain, many will also have seen one or more German films that address these issues. Freier Fall cannot be easily placed in a tradition of German films dealing with homosexuality. As should be evident based on the plot summary provided above, it shares little with «coming out» films, which, as Les Wright writes in his article «The Genre Cycle of German Gay Coming-Out Films, 1970-1994» contain a narrative progression [that] will lead the (soon-to-come-out) gay viewer to an authentic knowledge of what it means to be gay. The narrative will lead the viewer past the false stereotypes and thus negotiate the internalized (self-)hatred the viewer has to overcome as the first step in the process of coming out. So, step by step, the narrative accompanies its viewer/ participant, as the latter achieves her or his desired goals of self-discovery, self-acceptance, social engagement, and a socially meaningful life as a self-identified lesbian woman or gay man. 7 (314) In fact, Freier Fall plays upon the expectations (perhaps primarily of gay viewers) that the narrative will ultimately lead to Marc’s coming out, with Kay being the vehicle. Kay functions then both as the character who would trigger the coming out if Freier Fall were to be classified in this genre and as a vehicle to offer the traditional «coming out» interpretation to both Marc and the viewers, in his insistence that Marc admit that he is gay. Ultimately, there is no coming out enacted in the film, since protagonist Marc repeats to the end «Ich bin nicht schwul» and refuses to answer Bettina’s screamed query, «Was bist du denn? » Nevertheless, Freier Fall does share certain aspects of German coming out films, which in the tradition as described by Wright differ from their Hollywood counterparts in their emergence from the politicization of cinema by the Generation of 1968 and share a common lineage with the New German Cinema. While not being a coming out film in the strict sense of the word, Lacant’s treatment of homosexuality responds to the genre expectations by exploding them; its refusal of closure, however, and lack of Queer Masculinity 101 a celebratory aspect can in one sense also be seen as a return to the critical perspective of filmmakers like Rosa von Praunheim and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who directed their critiques not only at gay men’s oppressors but at gays themselves for their complicity in the system that oppresses them. As Wright reminds us, for Fassbinder and Praunheim, gays are as susceptible as straights to the «corruptive nature of capitalism and how economics shape human relationships» (326). For Lacant, the focus is less on economic exploitation and more on the social expectations of German, middle-class, provincial family life; his cinematic and narrative techniques lack the didacticism of Praunheim and the melodrama and Verfremdung favored by Fassbinder, but share Fassbinder’s dark mis en scène. One should further add that while gender-transgressive behavior is a major component of the representation of male homosexuality in the German cinematic tradition following Praunheim and Fassbinder, this element is completely absent in Freier Fall. The few brief shots of Kay and Marc in a gay bar do not offer the inevitable drag performances that would accompany such scenes in, for example, Heiner Carow’s Coming Out (1989) or Kutlug Ataman’s Lola und Bilidikid (1999). 8 In Lacant’s film at least, male homosexuality is, using the language of Eve Sedgwick, a «gender separatist» rather than a gender-transgressive phenomenon (Epistemology 10). While in Brokeback Mountain the gender separatist aspect of male sexuality in two straight-acting «cowboys» is tempered by the gender transgressive element of a domesticated and perhaps therefore «feminized» masculinity that, while never fully lived by the couple, is nevertheless the longed for, unattainable, and ultimately mourned object, Freier Fall makes no such gesture towards gay men as building a bridge between masculinity and femininity. Given the absence of drag, cross-dressing, or indeed any gender-nonconformist behavior other than homosexuality, it might also seem counter-intuitive to look for connections between Freier Fall and what scholars such as Alice Kuzniar have analyzed as the «Queer German cinema,» although the indefinability of protagonist Marc, either by others or by himself, and the split between his two lives suggest a kind of monstrous schizophrenia that Kuzniar has identified as part of this tradition (Kuzniar 30-31). If there is a «queer project» to be identified in Freier Fall, it seems to be restricted to a subversion of the category of «sexual orientation» rather than «gender» and in the implications of the film’s open-endedness regarding Marc’s sexual «identity» (if he even has one) and future development. Strangely enough, Freier Fall seems to enter into dialog with one of the most successful genres of what Eric Rentschler first dubbed the post-reunification «cinema of consensus»: the sex comedies of the 1990s, specifically 102 Gary Schmidt Sönke Wortmann’s Der bewegte Mann (1994), which was highly successful at the box office in Germany, but not in the United States (Rentschler 263). In fact, both films specifically address relationships between gay men and ostensibly straight men, raising questions of whether heterosexual men can be «turned» to homosexuality but also making parallels between the sexual appetites of straight and gay men and hence creating a possibility for identification between the two in opposition to women. On the surface the situation is similar - a gay man appears to wish to seduce a straight man; he, however, remains unsuccessful. Wright describes it as follows: Maybe … Maybe Not alleges to be the story of a straight man possibly coming out as a result of his encounter with gay culture. In fact, this assertion is specious, on the one hand nothing more than a gay fantasy, and on the other no more than a teaser to draw the consumer into the movie theater. The bewegte Mann of the original title is the intractably heterosexual Axel […]. (332) While Der bewegte Mann is dependent on maintaining clear boundaries between heterosexual and homosexual identities, Freier Fall allows an ostensibly heterosexual man to be «seduced» by a gay man while making evident that Marc has not been «recruited» to homosexuality but rather was responding to a potential for homoerotic attraction already within himself (although for Marc’s parents Kay is clearly to blame for breaking up the new family). And while the viewers of Der bewegte Mann were denied the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing straight sex symbol Til Schweiger in a love scene with another man, instead being treated to the farce that lands him in bed with his gay friend and the mere appearance of a homosexual tryst, the audience of Freier Fall is allowed to witness two up-and-coming, self-proclaimed straight, German male actors in a love scene. 9 Freier Fall challenges the boundaries between straight and gay not by claiming that straight men can be turned; rather, it reframes the question to ask to what degree attributions of identity such as those of gay and straight are applicable and what the relationship is between both identity regimes and that of hegemonic masculinity. While it shares some of the anxieties about male (hetero)sexuality evident in Der bewegte Mann and other films of the «German Comedy Wave,» the «crisis of heterosexuality» described by Randall Halle in the 1990s German comedies was consistently resolved through the structure of the «temporary-gay narrative,» in which a straight protagonist comes into contact with gay men, experiences a kind of pseudocrisis of sexual orientation and is restored to heterosexual wholeness in the end (12). Halle describes the generic elements as follows: The narrative necessity for contact with a gay man; the simultaneous ambiguity of the character’s sexual preference to the film’s other characters and its clarity Queer Masculinity 103 to the film’s audience; the construction of the straight man as object of desire for both women and gay men; the insistence on the biological or fixed explanation for sexual preference; the temporary-gay character’s sensitization to the conditions of women and gay men; heterosexual desire thwarted by the perceived ambiguity; a coming out as straight followed by a heterosexual coupling. (12) Whereas in this genre, Marc would have filled the role of the «temporarygay character,» he cannot do so in Freier Fall, for while he indeed functions as object of desire for women and gay men and becomes sexually ambiguous to his wife Bettina, he is not restored to unambiguous heterosexuality at the end, nor is he domesticated in a way that makes his male sexuality more palatable to a female partner. In this manner, Lacant’s film plays not merely upon tensions related to the discussion of homosexuality and masculinity in Germany, but also to programmatic and aesthetic discussions regarding the relative role of mainstream and independent cinema. Germany’s contemporary cinematic landscape can be characterized as a fractured terrain with, on one side, the proponents of successful international blockbusters that, paradoxically, have been criticized for pursuing a normalizing project of national identity even as they focus primarily on Germany’s totalitarian past (Rentschler’s «cinema of consensus»), and on the other side, the «counter-cinema» (Marco Abel) identified primarily with what has been designated as «The Berlin School.» Scholars have noted that the homogenization of cinematic form associated with the post-reunification cinema of consensus very often also entails a restoration of traditional sex-gender hierarchies, which is to say that the project of normalization carried out in these films is often post-feminist, if not anti-feminist, heteronormative, and even masculinist (Sell 2ff.). One can identify cinematic features of Freier Fall that distance it both from the dominant German cinema (i.e., of consensus and normalization) and from the Hollywood models it draws from and that also enabled the success of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. Hence, the «Germanization» of themes and topoi found in Lee’s film consists not only in contextualizing the issue of clandestine male homosexuality in a contemporary German allmale setting, but also in utilizing cinematic techniques that hearken more to an independent, counter-cultural German cinematic tradition. Unlike the treatments of male homosexuality in the cinema of consensus (largely comedies) and in Lee’s acclaimed film, which maintain clear identity boundaries (and hence protect the sanctity of male heterosexuality), Lacant’s treatment leaves more questions unanswered and refuses to subjugate male-male desire to identity politics, which for Kuzniar is indeed a central difference between Germany’s queer cinematic tradition and Hollywood coming out films (18- 104 Gary Schmidt 19). The question posed so urgently by Bettina to Marc - «Was bist du? » - continues to resonate in the viewers, suggesting that we might ask this of all heterosexual males, or indeed of hegemonic masculinity itself. Lacant’s refusal to label Marcus and to create a closed narrative of identity-formation resonates with Marco Abel’s understanding of the cinematic project of the Berlin School, which he defines in part through its emphasis on de-familiarization and «primacy of the object» (Abel 17). Films such as Maren Ade’s Alle Anderen (2009) offer a critique of masculinity and a much more open-ended exploration of gender/ sexuality than mainstream blockbusters like Good Bye Lenin! (2003) and The Lives of Others (2006), or even, as Muriel Cormican notes, certain films of the acclaimed director Fatih Akin, celebrated by critics for his contributions to the discourse of transnationalism. 10 Abel’s description of Berlin School films seems appropriate to the treatment of masculinity and homosexuality in Freier Fall: «Instead of catering toward the familiar, these films present their audiences with new, non-preexisting images of Germany. But this imaging of novelty proceeds by intensifying their look at reality rather than by avoiding it» (Abel 19). The sparse dialog, long takes, and jump cuts of Freier Fall go hand-in-hand with the refusal to name, the refusal to provide comfortable answers to the question of how an apparently heterosexual police officer and young husband and father can suddenly become engaged in a homosexual relationship that he continues parallel to his domestic heterosexual life. Abel’s description of the Berlin School as turning away from history to the present rather than fleeing from the present into history as in the mainstream blockbusters is also highly relevant for a comparison between Freier Fall and Brokeback Mountain, for the latter film’s tragic ending promotes viewer identification with loss rather than reflection on the need for change in the present. Finally, Brokeback’s assumption of same-sex domesticity as the desirable, yet unattainable object predetermines both the teleology of desire and the failure to reach the telos. While Brokeback viewers might easily leave the cinema mourning with Ennis the loss of «happily ever after» that might have been, viewers of Freier Fall are more likely to leave wondering precisely what exactly was, what might have been, and what might yet be. If one allows a reading of Marc as Lacant’s manifestation of Ennis, it is consistent for Marc to experience the same loss of his love object and to bear a similar ethical responsibility for this loss. Both Kay’s disappearance and Jack’s death follow their respective partner’s refusal to imagine anything other than an affair in secrecy behind the façade of heterosexual masculinity. Marc, however, while not embracing a gay identity, nevertheless appears to Queer Masculinity 105 make a deliberate decision to iterate a masculinity that is not strictly heterosexual, one that eschews homophobia, and one that also is willing to experience and receive pain rather than merely inflict it. This queer masculinity, as it were, comes to the foreground in the police locker room when Marc refuses any longer to participate in the gay-bashing engaged in by his colleague Limpinski, who earlier in the film attacked Kay in the cafeteria after accusing his recently outed colleague of groping him. Marc himself had been implicated in the homophobic masculinity of which Limpinski is the most extreme example, since Marc’s earlier disavowal of his own queerness expressed itself more than once in physical attacks on Kay. In the locker room, Marc admits to Limpinski that he had a sexual relationship with Kay; then, in response to being called a «Schwuchtel» by Limpinski, he kisses him directly on the lips. When Limpinski physically attacks Marc, rather than responding in kind, Marc willingly receives the blows and goads his colleague to strike again, calling him a «Pussy» just as Kay had done to Marc. Only the intervention of another colleague stops Limpinski from mercilessly beating Marc. Thus, while not umabiguously embracing a gay identity, Marc has taken on Kay’s subject position by using Kay’s very words and actions - the stolen kiss and the taunt of «Pussy.» This fact is reinforced in the final scene of the film, which returns full circle to the group of jogging police offiers, this time with Marc pulling ahead rather than Kay. These two scenes unite two central elements of Michael Kimmel’s critique of homophobia and manhood, which he describes as «the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to us and the world that we do not measure up, that we are not real men» (131). Marc’s earlier aggressive acts against Kay attested to precisely this fear. Marc now turns the situation around. As an insider who knows the homophobic male’s fear of being «outed» as «not a real man,» he breaks the silence with which he and even Kay earlier accepted Limpinski’s sexist and homophobic locker room jokes, which for Kimmel go hand and hand with «the fear of being seen as a sissy [that] dominates the cultural definitions of manhood» (131). Yet to what extent can one read Marc’s reversal of positions as simply taking on the active role, of forcing Limpinski into the passive role that is the source of homophobic, straight men’s fear of evacuation of masculine power and authority - what Leo Bersani pointedly called «the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman» (8) - rather than exploding the framework of the active/ passive, dominant/ submissive binarism? While Marc’s move into Kay’s subject position performs a rapprochement between a formerly homophobic masculinity and a straight-acting homosexuality, the viewers are left with still no clear explanation or label for Marc’s new sex-gender identity; from a theoretical perspective it remains 106 Gary Schmidt queer, unknowable and uncategorizable, and viewers may well identify with Bettina’s incomprehension of her husband’s sexual desires and practices. This incomprehension is most acutely expressed in a shower scene, in which Bettina enters the shower and grabs Marc from behind and asks him, «Willst du es von hinten? » Further, her assertion, «Ich kann nicht richtig eifersüchtig sein,» suggests that her husband’s homosexual liaison must always remain a mystery to her, for it involves practices that she cannot engage in as a woman. In such moments, while Freier Fall explodes the boundaries between gay and straight male identity, it reinforces a male/ female binarism particularly in regard to sexuality. Significantly, while Marc’s father expresses a vague and perhaps disingenuous tolerance for gay men - «Wir haben nichts gegen Schwule …», his mother is unforgiving and states clearly that she sees her son’s homosexual acts as a deviance from familial norms: «Wir haben dich nicht so erzogen,» she laments. Returning to the construction of masculinity in Freier Fall and Brokeback Mountain, both films carve out a distinctly masculine space for homosexual relations, yet these spaces are inflected by their self-positioning in response to specific national cinematic traditions and movements, as well as to homophobic discourses informed by specific national dialogues on masculinity, femininity, procreation, and the family. Whereas Lee’s film focusses more on the abject relationship between male homosexuality and patriarchal masculinity and encourages viewers to embrace an affect of tragic loss, Lacant’s film places obstacles to viewer identification with the two male lovers, specifically through the attention given to the concerns of heterosexual women. Ultimately, it is Bettina’s position that is irreconcilable with Marc’s queerness, whereas the sexist homophobes of the police force appear to lose in the end. And finally, melancholic loss is shifted from the «sad, lonely gay man» that Halle identifies as being central to the history of queer representation in German cinema (18) to the ambiguously sexual Marc. Kay, who has clearly embraced his homosexuality, has disappeared from the narrative, whereas both Marc and Bettina remain as a broken heterosexual couple. Notes 1 Brokeback’s tagline, «Love is a force of nature,» has been interpreted along these lines, for example in Wojtaszek’s Deleuzian reading (130). On the relationship between homosexuality, non-procreativity, and the death drive, see Lee Edelman’s No Future. Luke Mancuso builds upon Edelman to discuss the semiotics of anal intercourse in his analysis of the scene of «coitus a tergo» between Ennis and his wife (99). Freier Fall inserts itself into this discourse by foregrounding a visual contrast between procreative heterosexual intercourse and anal homosexual intercourse. Queer Masculinity 107 2 Freier Fall was filmed in Ludwigsburg, a small city on the commuter train line to Stuttgart. 3 That this is a myth is central, for the cowboy has very little power in the capitalist economy. 4 The central text in this discussion was Hans Blüher’s Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft (1919-20). See Geuter, Widdig, and Hewitt on the relationship between male-bonding, homosexuality, the state, and ostensible masculine and feminine spheres in the writings of Blüher and others. 5 Since Freier Fall, particularly in the portrayal of protagonist Marc, resists the conventions of gay coming out narratives while at the same time undermining the firm alignment between strict heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity, queer seems to me to be a more appropriate term than gay. 6 The metaphor of free fall suggests an analogy to Ennis’s proclamation, «There ain’t no reins on this one! » 7 Since the publication of Wright’s article there have been a number of films that more closely approximate the Hollywood coming out genre, for example, Marco Kreutzpainter’s Sommersturm (2004), a feel-good drama about a Bavarian teenager’s coming of age and coming out after encountering a group of openly gay youth from Berlin at summer camp. Ironically, Kreutzpainter’s most recent film subverts the coming out genre in a very unsubversive way. In the comedy Coming In (2014), Kreuzpainter invokes almost every stereotype imaginable of gay and straight men to tell the story of an ostensibly gay hair designer’s discovery of women’s romantic appeal. 8 Wright notes the centrality of the drag ball in Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum Kloh (1980) as well. 9 Max Riemelt appeared in Napola (2004) and Die Welle (2008) and Hanno Koffler in Der rote Baron (2008) and the television movie Nacht vor Augen (2008). 10 See article in this volume. Works Cited Abel, Marco. The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. Ade, Maren, dir. Alle Anderen. Komplizen Film, 2009. Alley, Henry. «Arcadia and the Passionate Shepherds of Brokeback Mountain.» Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film. Ed. Jim Stacy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. 5-18. Ataman, Kutlug, dir. Lola und Bilidikid. Boje Buck Produktion, 1999. Bersani, Leo. «Is the Rectum a Grave? » Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Blüher, Hans. Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft. 2 vols. Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1919-20. Carow, Heiner, dir. Coming Out. DEFA, 1989. Cohan, Steven. «‹The Gay Cowboy Movie›: Queer Masculinity on Brokeback Mountain.» Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas. Ed. Christine Gledhill. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 2012. 233-42. Cook, Roger, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, and Brad Prager, eds. Berlin School Glossary. Bristol/ Chicago: Intellect, 2013. 108 Gary Schmidt Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. Geuter, Ulfried. Homosexualität in der deutschen Jugendbewegung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. 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John Sandford. New York: Routledge, 1999. 30. Kreutzpaintner, Marco, dir. Coming In. Summerstorm Entertainment, 2014. -. Sommersturm. Claussen & Wöbke Filmproduktion, 2004. Kuzniar, Alice. The Queer German Cinema. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. Lacant, Stephan, dir. Freier Fall. Kurhaus Production, 2013. Lee, Ang, dir. Brokeback Mountain. Focus Features/ River Road Entertainment, 2005. Malick, Terrence, dir. The Tree of Life. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011. Mancuso, Luke. «Brokeback Mountain and the History of the Future of the Normal.» Coming Out to the Mainstream: New Queer Cinema in the 21st Century. Ed. Joanne C. Juett. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. 91-112. Patterson, Eric. On Brokeback Mountain. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. Rentschler, Eric. «From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus.» Cinema and Nation. Ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie. New York: Routledge, 2000. 260-77. Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. -. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Sell, Richard. «Male Subjectivity and Twenty-First Century German Cinema: Gender, National Identity, and the Problem of Normalization.» Diss. U of South Carolina, 2012. Widdig, Bernd. Männerbünde und Massen: Zur Krise männlicher Identität in der Literatur der Moderne. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlang, 1992. Wortmann, Sönke, dir. Der bewegte Mann. Neue Constantin Film, 1994. Wright, Les. «The Genre Cycle of German Gay Coming-Out Films, 1970-1994.» Queering the Canon: Defying Sights in German Literature and Culture. Ed. Christoph Lorey and John L. Plews. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998. 311-39.