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 Art, is to explore the analytical potential and operationalization of the social science concept of intersectionality for gender research in literary studies. At the same time, it also serves to explore the possible contribution of specifically literary intersectionality analyses to interdisciplinary gender research.
The study is based on two theoretical premises. The first is that the production context of literature is reflected in literary texts regardless of authorial intention. The production context includes societal and cultural structures, but also, and above all, the subjective experiences of authors who, as individual subjects, represent specific interfaces of societal discourses and practices: Literary texts are thus expressive spaces of both social structures and individual experiences. And second, 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 in principle unpredictable.
This means quite concretely 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, this implies that a study of the interdependence of gender and other dimensions of inequality in narrative texts must combine aspects of literature and social science.