The Promise of (Un)Happiness in Thüring von Ringoltingen’s Melusine

Forum: Feminism in German Studies

“…Embracing awkwardness as both a conceptual and a thematic axis, Carrie Smith‐Prei and Maria Stehle's Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism () mobilizes feminist and queer studies to explore the messy entanglements of theory and practice in contemporary German popular culture. Recent queer German scholarship revisits medieval and contemporary literature and music to trouble hegemonic readings of partnership and happiness in Christian and specifically Catholic traditions (see Kling []; Pfleger []). Such work productively expands beyond reductive understandings of queer as a label for sexuality to wider gestures that acknowledge incoherence and celebrate the proliferation of meaning.…”