Christopher Treiblmayr
Irreversible Errungenschaften?
Christopher Treiblmayr:
Irreversible Accomplishments?
On the Gay Boom in 1990s German Cinema
English abstract
In this article, Christopher Treiblmayr investigates the increasing visibility of gay characters in the German cinematic landscape of the 1990s after decades of taboos and negative stereotypical representation of male homosexualities. Drawing on Raewyn Connell’s concept of "hegemonic masculinity", the author proposes that the visibility of gay characters went along with the disintegration of coherent male ideals. This shift is embedded in the broader process of pluralization of models of both manlihood and homosexuality at the end of the 20th century. Treiblmayr investigates this development by way of close reading using the examples of Der bewegte Mann (Sönke Wortmann, 1994) and No One Sleeps (Jochen Hick, 2000). On the one hand, scholars refer to Wortmann’s top-selling film as an indicator of heterosexuals’ increasing acceptance of homosexual identities in times of neoliberal thinking. On the other, Hick, by taking up HIV/AIDS as an issue, problematizes an omnipresent and highly political conflict within the gay community, but, in so doing, also follows commercial rather than non-profit interests.