13 - Body Matters: Race, Gender, and Perceptions of Physical Ability from Goethe to Weininger

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In Fables of Desire, Helga Geyer-Ryan shows how every racist discourse in a patriarchal society necessarily includes a discourse on the sexuality (or, rather, the nonsexuality) of that society's representative woman. To be accurate, she says, the race problem as such exists only as a sexual problem, as was illustrated in Goethe's 1779 version of Iphigenia in Tauris, which retained such cultural power in German literary tradition. Iphigenia can be read as a subtle discourse on social and racial control through the inscription of the two main images onto the reader's perception: First, the white woman is sexually threatened by the barbarian; and second, the barbarians are really yearning for all that is Greek.

The function and importance of the appeal of these images derive, Geyer-Ryan suggests, from their capacity to mold the subject into a specific patriarchal and ethnic identity. Because Germany in the eighteenth century was not yet a nation-state that could construct an identity in opposition to other ethnic groups, it employed a vague notion of European identity reaching back into the classical heritage of Greece to find the imaginary body of European culture. The appropriation ofthis heritage, including the ideal Greek male body as a subject position of cultural superiority, helped provide moral justification for embodying German racism, sexism, and imperialism during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. By the time of the Third Reich, German fascism had translated the preracialist topos of culture-versus-barbarism into pure racism.