Gabriele Kämper (born March 30, 1960) is a German literary scholarRegina Fritz et al. (Hrsg.): Nationen und ihre Selbstbilder, Autorinnen und Autoren, S. 365, s. Publikationen and head of the Equality Office of the Berlin Senate.
Life Kämper was born in Cape Town. She studied Latin American studies, German studies and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. In 1988, she received her Magister artium at the FU Berlin in the subjects Latin American studies and German literature of modern times with a thesis on the novel Paradiso by the Cuban author José Lezama Lima.Zitiert in: Gisela Beutler: „Sieh den Fluss der Sterne strömen". Hispanoamerikanische Lyrik der Gegenwart. Interpretationen, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1990, ISBN 3-534-03267-5, S. 265 In 2003, she received her doctorate from the Technische Universität Berlin with a dissertation on Gender in the Rhetoric of the New Intellectual Right.
At the Senate of the State of Berlin, Kämper was initially a women's policy press spokesperson from 1989 and, from 1991, a consultant for women's policy public relations work.Gabriele Kämper, Literaturwissenschaftlerin, Geschichte in Geschichten. Ein historisches Lesebuch, hrsg. Barbara Duden, Campus, Frankfurt a. M./New York 2003, S. 363 Since 2008, she has headed the Equality office. She is responsible for coordinating and supporting equality processes in all administrative offices of the State of Berlin.Geschäftsstelle Gleichstellung, berlin.de In these roles, she has produced several publications, including Materialien zum Frauenhandel (1999),Anlässlich der Internationalen Konferenz Europäische Strategien zur Prävention und Bekämpfung des Frauenhandels 25.–26. November 1998 in Berlin the conference volume Regenbogenfamilien – Wenn Eltern lesbisch, schwul, bi- oder transsexuell sind (2001), in which she argues that this form of family leadership can enrich society,Wiebke Krohn: Das Problem kirchlicher Amtshandlungen an gleichgeschlechtlichen Paaren, V&R unipress 2011, ISBN 978-3-89971-851-5, S. 193f. and the book Spreeperlen. Berlin – City of Women (2012).Kurzrezension in DIE ZEIT Nº 50/2012, online 6. Dezember 2012 Among other things, she has developed the gender equality policy framework program and the campaign Gleichstellung weiterdenken for the state of Berlin.Gleichstellung weiter denken
In her literary publications, Kämper has dealt with the topics of rhetoric as gender discourse, intellectual New Rights and their masterminds of the Conservative Revolution, above all Ernst Jünger, and the repositioning of the national in German literature after German Reunification.
In 1998, she published an essay in which she examined the obituaries of Ernst Jünger.Erstmals unter dem Titel Der „Kult der Kälte": Männlichkeit und Faszination im Werk Ernst Jüngers. Ein kritischer Nachruf auf die Nachrufe als Beitrag zur Ersten Internationalen Erlanger Graduiertenkonferenz „PostModerne Diskurse zwischen Sprache und Macht". Erlangen 20.–22. November 1998 (online auf gradnet) With one exception, these were written by men. Her analysis was based on the fact that male authors across different political camps and generations were fascinated by Jünger's work and his person. At the center of this fascination, Kämper identified a specific masculinity construct, which she described as the cult of coldness.Thomas Goetz: Poetik des Nachrufs. Zur Kultur der Nekrologie und zur Nachrufszene auf dem Theater, Böhlau, Wien 2008, ISBN 978-3-205-77734-2, S. 89–91f.
For the title of her dissertation, Kämper chose a quote from Jünger's 1922 essay Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, in which Jünger glorified war as a mythical natural event: Dem Phallus schimmernde Tempel errichten .... Her work was published as a book in 2005 under the title The Male Nation. In it, Kämper analyzed the anthology The Self-Confident Nation, published in 1994 by Heimo Schwilk and Ulrich Schacht, as a manifesto of an intellectual Right that had been forming in Germany since the Wende, a publication which, according to Barbara Sichtermann, pursued the intention of "helping Germany out of its penitential attitude – having started two world wars and being responsible for Auschwitz. "12] Kämper examined the authors' texts for images and metaphors beyond the actual statements, drawing on the analyses of the fantasies of soldierly men as elaborated by the cultural scientist Klaus Theweleit in his book Männerphantasien. The cultural sociologist Thomas Kleinspehn concluded in his review for Deutschlandfunk: "After reading it, it should be difficult to continue to cover the neo-conservative idyll with cuddles and to trivialize it."Rezension von Thomas Kleinspehn: Sehnsucht nach Männlichkeit. Gabriele Kämper über die intellektuelle Rechte, Deutschlandfunk, 13. Juni 2005More reviews: Gerd Wiegel in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (ZfG), Heft 6, 2006, . Teresa Orozco Martinez, in: Feministische Studien, Issue 2/November 2007, pp. 348–350 H.-Georg Lützenkirchen: Literaturwissenschaftliche Anstrengungen.Unterschiedliche Ergebnisse literaturwissenschaftlicher Analysen liefern ein Sammelband über Hermann Kesten und Gabriele Kaemmer's Analyse der "politischen Rhetorik der neuen intellektuellen Rechten", in: Literaturkritik Nr. 6, June 2005/Literaturwissenschaft und Literaturkritik, online at literaturkritik.de
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