Summer semester 2023 Normality - Images, Discourses, Practices

‘Norms’ in the sense of efforts to find the right measure, to establish rules for appropriate behaviour and to define social, cultural, geographical and aesthetic boundaries between one's own and the other or the foreign are an integral part of cultural history. These rules find expression in the most diverse media and arts, for example as visualisations, but also in literature, in various discourses or in popular and everyday practices. It is true for all areas that the actors involved let themselves be guided by standards, confirm them, but also creatively or subversively thwart them. Thinking of social order as the implementation of norms and normality initially makes the category of the normal appear as a paradigm of modernity. However, the associated contexts of domination and oppression (e.g. pogroms, repression, stigmatisation) turn out to be long-established cultural patterns for the defence and disciplining of the non-normal.

The multidisciplinary lecture series "Normality - Images, Discourses, Practices" would like to take up the discussion on the meaning of normality and on the functioning of normalisation processes and ask about concrete processes of the genesis and shaping of regulations, patterns and schemes producing normality. A decidedly cultural-scientific, media-theoretical and cultural-aesthetic perspective will be pursued. The entire spectrum of human ideas of order and standardisation techniques will be addressed, from the specifics of historical disciplinary and stabilisation measures to current examples of a postmodern power of normalisation.

The opening lecture provides an overview of the historical genesis of normalisation processes and outlines the common theoretical framework in which the other lectures in the lecture series will examine 'normality' in more detail using exemplary artefacts, images, discourses, media and practices in both diachronic and synchronic perspectives.

For intersectionality studies oriented towards the present, it is self-evident to assume that inequality and discrimination are social phenomena to be overcome and combated. But was this also true for societies in the European Middle Ages? Was the social inequality that prevailed at that time perceived as unjust, or as normal because it was supposedly 'natural'? How did the people concerned react to discourses and practices that we would call discriminatory today? Selected examples of negatively constructed Jewish alterity will be used to explore this question.

What are we obliged to do - and what goes beyond that? What role does "the normal" play in the justification of norms? Or in other words: how normative is normality? These questions are philosophically particularly interesting in places where we transgress, perhaps must transgress, the boundaries of the normal, where norms are violated in order to set new ones, where we move from the ordinary to the extraordinary. At the latest, James O. Urmson's essay "Saints and Heros" (1958) philosophically revived the debate on the question of the systematic place of outstanding actions. The author argues that all moral philosophies that assume a trichotomous division of actions into "commanded", "forbidden" and "permitted" cannot adequately describe the actions of saints and heroes; for this, another category is needed, namely that of supererogation. Based on the questions raised in Urmson's text about the systematic place of moral exceptionality in ethics, I will look at normality from the perspective of exceptionality in my lecture and, using recent research contributions on the sense and nonsense of (moral) heroism, examine how normality and normativity relate to each other here.

France is considered the country of human rights; with the motto "liberty, equality, fraternity", the republic underlines its self-claim to equal rights. However, the realities often look different, not least for the French integration model, which relies on assimilation. Migrants and even post-migrants repeatedly come up against the limits of the uniforming-norming system that relies heavily on social reproduction. A fact that ultimately makes postmigration appear as a-normative and a-normal. The fact that this is especially true for (post-)migrant women is illustrated by exemplary literary texts by (post-)migrant women authors from France.

There is probably no other topic that is currently (and has been for some years) so heated in public discourse as linguistic gendering. Sometimes there is even talk of a social camp formation and division into gender supporters and gender deniers. Starting from the question of how linguistic norms can be defined linguistically, the lecture will discuss the current norms on linguistic gendering: What does the official orthography say, what recommendations does the Duden give and how are the language guidelines, e.g. at universities, designed? Based on this, linguistic gendering is placed in the context of general developments in language change. The questions of how the massive socio-symbolic charge of gendering came about and how the German language will possibly develop further with regard to gendering will be the focus of this lecture.

In German didactics, there has been a lively discussion about the standardisation of subject-specific educational goals and the associated secondary consequences with regard to the setting of learning goals for German lessons since the far-reaching "PISA shock". On the one hand, standardisation is seen as a danger of trivialising and reducing teaching to the merely standardisable; on the other hand, it is emphasised that the turn to empiricism and monitoring has only made glaring deficiencies and inequalities visible and made new intervention concepts possible.

Using examples and results from empirical classroom research, this lecture will take a look at the tension between normality (as a quantitative-statistical concept) and normativity (as a phenomenon of setting) and show that we have to struggle with irresolvable paradoxes in this regard when it comes to teaching language competences.

With the 'Corona crisis', the advertising industry in 2020 also found itself in a crisis situation: 'Is it allowed to advertise in these times as if nothing had happened?', 'How can we continue to advertise in these times at all?' More or less implicitly, a problem with normality is articulated here, certainly in the sense in which it was theoretically founded by Jürgen Link in normalistic thinking.

The lecture deals with TV commercials that ran from the end of March to the end of August 2020 and address the Corona situation. By means of exemplary observations, it offers some observations on how, on the one hand, the Corona situation has affected the challenges that advertising has to face as a text type, and how, on the other hand, this itself changes again in the course of 2020, describable precisely as (re)normalisation.

Gender fluidity is not a phenomenon of modernity. For example, the famous hermaphrodites were already known in antiquity. Against this background, the lecture will address the reception of these older traditions in Christian art of the early modern period. Finally, it will be discussed whether these older phenomena can also be described with the contemporary concept of queerness, or where the differences are to be found.

A mistake is considered a deviation from what is right. To speak of a mistake, it is therefore necessary to define "right" and "wrong". Not only in the technical sphere are norms set that must be adhered to, but also in the social sphere. From a historical perspective, the lecture asks about gender-specific attributions of mistakes and the associated setting of norms: How are images of "right" and "wrong" femininity/masculinity formed through the attribution of mistakes?
The lecture will cover a broad cultural-historical arc, ranging from primal narratives about Adam and Eve to a focus on technical errors and gender attributions to glitch feminism. The lecture is thus based on a broad concept of mistakes. Themes include sins and moral misconduct, mistakes in technical processes and concepts of mistakes as resistance to the mainstream.

Both Rosa von Praunheim's "Not the Homosexual is Perverted, but the Situation in which He Lives" (FRG 1971) and, over 20 years later, Sönke Wortmann's "Der bewegte Mann" (FRG 1994) present a homosexual subculture and thus provide a mainstream audience with insights into the life plans of gay men that were marginalised or at least little known at the time of the films' production. The lecture aims to show how in both films a gay life is constructed as an "other" that is categorised and evaluated from the perspective of an "own" through audiovisual mediation throughout the plot. In this context, special attention will be paid to the hyperbolic staging of gay lifeworlds and their characters in the lecture: Both films travesty and parody (time-specific) gay specifics and construct a gay self-image in the case of von Praunheim and a gay image of others in the case of Wortmann. In the chronological sequence of these two images, the lecture considers whether and, if so, how gay lifestyles are evaluated by the films as normal or still evaluated as "different" in the majority culture.

In the late medieval Frederick of Swabia, the title character meets the dwarf queen Jerome, who wants Frederick for a husband and keeps him temporarily in captivity: The result is the daughter Ziproner, who follows the fugitive Frederick in later years and gains admission into his human family. The unusual figure of the female dwarf poses a riddle in an eccentric family constellation, for on the one hand Ziproner fits surprisingly smoothly into the courtly dynastic order, although on the other she is set apart from the noble community by markers of distance and strangeness. The novel arranges the overlapping of gender and species differentiations with the intrinsic spatiality of the dwarf world in a field of tension of ambivalent power and minor relationships. At its centre is the dwarf queen Jerome, who transgresses courtly norms and enforces love against the dominant gender order. Her extraordinary power turns into powerlessness in her relationship with the human man and breaks with an assumed bodily norm that makes the smallness of the noble-beautiful dwarf woman a problem. On the basis of the narrative and visual representation in the illustrated Heidelberg manuscript (cpg 345, circa 1470), the lecture examines which cultural and narrative processes of adaptation, equalisation and norming enable the integration of dwarf women into the aristocratic human world and where these processes reach their limits.

Modern agriculture is very successful in that food security is guaranteed in a calculable way and agriculture harmonises with industrialisation. However, the field of agriculture is at the same time marked by numerous polarising challenges ranging from price pressure and animal welfare to soil, water and climate protection. Both the successes and the problems are closely linked to the regime of industrialised agriculture. This is accompanied by a dilemma: the normality of industrialised agriculture, which is almost invisible to the public and provides food security at historically low food prices, is incompatible with increasing demands for soil protection, water conservation, climate adaptation and the remuneration of qualified personnel - but these demands can be ignored less and less. What is needed is a transformation of the normality of agriculture, which necessarily implies a change in its social location.

The lecture traces the development towards the normality of industrialised agriculture from a socio-theoretical perspective, discusses the increasingly visible costs of this normality and points out challenges and development requirements.

Art is the subject of images. Images are viewed, designed, reflected upon, communicated. The discourse on which images are the subject of discussion in reception, production and reflection in education, changes with varying dynamics. Essential conceptions of images or perspectives on the world of images persist. A critical reflection on the canon of images in curricula, media and textbooks for art education seems necessary in view of new social, art-theoretical and art-pedagogical discourses.

The lecture poses questions about normative ideas of images on the basis of the historical and current canon of images in art education and develops ideas for overcoming prevailing conceptions.

Whether as a "dying race" (vanishing Indian), "noble" or "bloodthirsty savage", the literary, cinematic and artistic representations of mainstream American (and international!) society(ies) have frozen Native Americans in a static past for four hundred years. Against this backdrop of cultural imagination and appropriation from outside, it seems an oxymoron, an abnormality, to imagine indigenous peoples as part of future worlds. Indigenous futurisms, which go against this long-established Western norm, have emerged in the last decade as a broader artistic movement expressing Indigenous perspectives of the past, present and future in the context of science fiction and related subgenres in visual art, literature, film, comics, online games and other media forms. These perspectives often reflect indigenous forms of knowledge, traditional narratives, historical or contemporary political narratives and cultural realities. Indigenous futurisms are part of what Gerald Vizenor has called Native Survivance, a combination of ethnic survival and (often subversive) resistance. They challenge the centuries-long appropriation of indigenous cultures by the dominant society(ies) and at the same time diversify the frame of reference of the science fiction genre. As such, they contribute to processes of decolonisation. This paper examines the visual art of indigenous painter Ryan Singer (Navajo) at the intersection of pop art, activism and indigenous futurism. By focusing on Singer's artistic engagement with the fictional characters and settings of the Star Wars franchise, Singer's works are read as questioning the prevailing norm, as pop art acts of cultural and political decolonisation. This is evident, for example, when Singer (re)appropriates Princess Leia as Hopi Princess Leia (2009) because her hairstyle in Star Wars was originally adopted from the Hopi women's tradition, when Star Wars characters engage with Navajo gaming traditions, or when the artist uses an iconic Star Wars character in (De)Colonized Ewok (2019) to critique the forced assimilation of Native American children in boarding schools during the 19th and 20th centuries.

As a highly modern form of early technological mass entertainment, the circus is a paradigmatic study of what constitutes entertainment. Contrary to the persistent caveat that entertainment is only a temporary escape from everyday life, the circus offers a highly complex model that helps to reflect the social and cultural context by deliberately transgressing the assumptions that establish normality in that context. Contrary to the conventional reading, however, entertainment does not simply consist in breaking norms and conventions, but in the fact that the act of transgression, as a ritualised one, is in turn subjected to fixed norms.

In medieval ethics, the medieval doctrine of natural law plays a central role. Its core idea is the justification of moral norms by means of the concept of a natural right that is to be understood in a non-positivist way, i.e. that is naturally obvious to every human being. But what does nature mean here at all and to what extent can it become normative in practical terms? The medieval thinkers adopt a concept that has its roots in Stoic philosophy and Roman law, but work out more strongly than these traditions that natural law is to be understood as the law of reason, because knowledge of natural rights is communicated to man through his reason. In the background a double concept of nature can be found, insofar as man is not only an animal creature, i.e. endowed with natural drives and instincts, but primarily a nature of reason - with normative implications.

Emojis have become an indispensable and at the same time constantly contested attribute of everyday digital communication. The annually adopted additions to the pictorial vocabulary, in which both international media corporations and private users participate, reflect different ideas about social and cultural 'norms' and 'normality'. The lecture will focus specifically on gender identities and their normalisation in emoji discourses, including the ongoing debates on gender icons and their global reception.

‘Norms’ in the sense of efforts to find the right measure, to establish rules for appropriate behaviour and to define social, cultural, geographical and aesthetic boundaries between one's own and the other or the foreign are an integral part of cultural history. These rules find expression in the most diverse media and arts, for example as visualisations, but also in literature, in various discourses or in popular and everyday practices. It is true for all areas that the actors involved let themselves be guided by standards, confirm them, but also creatively or subversively thwart them. Thinking of social order as the implementation of norms and normality initially makes the category of the normal appear as a paradigm of modernity. However, the associated contexts of domination and oppression (e.g. pogroms, repression, stigmatisation) turn out to be long-established cultural patterns for the defence and disciplining of the non-normal.

The multidisciplinary lecture series "Normality - Images, Discourses, Practices" would like to take up the discussion on the meaning of normality and on the functioning of normalisation processes and ask about concrete processes of the genesis and shaping of regulations, patterns and schemes producing normality. A decidedly cultural-scientific, media-theoretical and cultural-aesthetic perspective will be pursued. The entire spectrum of human ideas of order and standardisation techniques will be addressed, from the specifics of historical disciplinary and stabilisation measures to current examples of a postmodern power of normalisation.

The final lecture deepens the overview of the historical genesis of normalisation processes as well as the theoretical approaches taught and summarises the exemplary artefacts, images, discourses, media and practices presented from the perspective of different disciplines on the framework topic 'normality' in a synopsis.