Ü/PS (Cult): Genres of Intimacy: Bridging the Private and the Public Selves
I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
Rousseau
The notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ have always been clearly delineated as a binary throughout the Western imagination. This binary is still a crucial reality in modern societies because it fundamentally influences notions of intimacy, privacy, the personal, and the political. Therefore, it is directly linked to societal power structures, discourses, and (collective) subject positions. US American literary critic Michael Warner highlights that the public/private dichotomy is not “just a distinction but a hierarchy” (359) where the notions of the ‘public’ and the ‘public sphere’ are prioritized and conceptualized in a higher position than concepts of the ‘private’. This hierarchization reciprocally creates and is supported by discourses on gender, sexuality, race, and their intersections. A prime example would be the separation and gender coding of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘public’ spheres in the 19th century when the average household was considered to be a ‘female space’, which defined women as the ‘homemaker’. Simultaneously the public sphere was understood as a male space and men were supposed to ‘go out there’ and be the breadwinner in conventional and heteronormative family structures. In this Übung/Proseminar, we will deal with diverse literary and cultural material that belongs to ‘genres of intimacy’ where the notions of public and private are sometimes reinforced, and sometimes subverted, inverted, and even reconciled. Throughout the course, we will analyze ‘confessional’ genres in the form of poetry. We will also look at life narratives in different
formats such as comic books. We will focus on stand-up shows and their representations of an intimate self as well as self-help media formats such as daytime talk shows. Last but not least, we will focus on representations of Blackness and their tensions in popular music, specifically hip-hop.
Works Cited
Warner, Michael. “Public/Private.” Critical Terms for the Study of Gender, edited by Catherine R. Stimpson and Gilbert. Herdt, Chicago UP, 2014, pp. 358-391.