Dr. Folkert Degenring

The aim of the pilot study on the category of gender and intersectional narrative text analysis, funded by the Hessian Ministry of Science and the Arts, is to explore the analytical potential and operationalization of the social science concept of intersectionality for literary gender studies. At the same time, it also serves to explore the possible contribution of specific literary intersectionality analyses to interdisciplinary gender studies.
The study is based on two theoretical premises. Firstly, that the production context of literature is reflected in literary texts independently of the author's intention. The context of production includes social and cultural structures, but above all the subjective experiences of authors who, as individual subjects, represent specific interfaces of social discourses and practices: Literary texts are thus spaces of expression of both social structures and individual experiences. And secondly, that the concrete structural context and the relative significance of these dimensions of inequality, which intersectional analyses trace, are variable depending on the context and cannot be predicted in principle.
In concrete terms, this means that literary texts reveal structures and dimensions of social inequality and may even openly comment on them, but also that, as artistic-symbolic representations of social reality, they obey their own rules. From a methodological point of view, it follows that an assessment of the interdependence of gender and other dimensions of inequality in narrative texts must combine literary and social science aspects.