Gender and the solvency of professionalism: Eastern German journalism before and after 1989 Dominic Boyer

East European Politics and Societies

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 152-179

[No Author Info available]

Author keywords

Gender; Germany (East); Journalism; Post socialist transitions; Professionalism

Indexed keywords

EID: 32044444852     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325405284251     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. See, however, Dominic Boyer, "On the Sedimentation and Accreditation of Social Knowledges of Difference: Mass Media, Journalism and the Reproduction of East/West Alterities in Unified Germany," Cultural Anthropology 15:4(2000): 459-91;
2. Andreas Glaeser, Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
3. Christine Leuenberger, "The End of Socialism and the Reinvention of the Self: A Study of the East German Psychotherapeutic Community in Transition," Theory and Society 31 (2002): 255-80;
4. and Amy Ninetto, "On Our Terms: Translating Culture in the New Russian Scientific Economy" (manuscript, 2002).
5. For example, Hermine G. DeSoto, '"In the Name of the Folk': Women and Nation in the New Germany," UCLA Women's Law Journal 5:1(1995): 83-101;
6. Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and Women's Movements in East Central Europe (London: Verso, 1993);
7. Margit Feischmidt, Eniko Magyari-Vincze, and Violetta Zentai, eds., Women and Men in East European Transition (Cluj-Napoca, Romania: Editura Fundatje pentru Studii Europene, 1997);
8. Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, eds., Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (New York: Routledge, 1993);
9. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000);
10. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, eds., Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000);
11. Eva Huseby-Darvas, " 'Feminism, the Murderer of Mothers': The Rise and Fall of Neo-nationalist Reconstruction of Gender in Hungary," in Brackette Williams, ed., Women Out of Place: The Gender of Agency and the Race of Nationality (New York: Routledge, 1996);
12. Joma Nazpary, Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan (London: Pluto, 2002);
13. and Marilyn Rueschemeyer, ed., Women in the Politics of Postcommunist Eastern Europe (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994).
14. Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender, 3.
15. Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender, Ibid., 5.
16. Karl Marx, Frühe Schriften, Band II (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 35.
17. Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender, 45.
18. Heike Trappe, Emanzipation oder Zwang? Frauen in der DDR zwischen Beruf, Familie und Sozialpolitik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), esp. 35-77.
19. The Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands' (SED's; Socialist Unity Party of Germany's) initial so-called Frauenpolitik was limited largely to questions of securing and equalizing employment opportunities for women in fields like the electrical and optical industries, construction, and skilled mechanics. Party leaders promised that equal access to industrial employment would stimulate social emancipation more generally. However, no large-scale institutional reforms were implemented to guarantee either actual work equality in the workplace or within families.
20. Sabine Schenk shows that the SED were successful in their objectives to the extent that they raised women's participation in the labor force from 45 percent in 1950 to 66 percent in 1970 during a period where, in the Federal Republic of Germany, women's workforce participation rate hovered almost steadily between 45 and 50 percent; see Sabine Schenk, "Reconstruction of Gender Stratification. About Men, Women, and Families in Changing Employment Structures - The Case of East Germany," in Gabriele Jähnert et al., eds., Gender in Transition in Eastern and Central Europe Proceedings (Berlin: Trafo Verlag, 2001), 217.
21. Yet extensive institutional reform did not begin until party leaders became increasingly concerned about the reproductive future of the GDR when, beginning in the mid-1960s, average childbirth rates began to drop steeply from about 2.5 children/woman in 1965 to closer to 1.5 children/woman in 1975; Trappe, Emanzipation, 66.
22. Indeed, between 1970 and 1975 alone, the availability of spaces in kindergartens and preschool child care increased from 60 to more than 80 percent and from 25 to almost 50 percent of potential demand respectively; Trappe, Emanzipation, 57.
23. Trappe, Emanzipation, Ibid., 64;
24. see also John Borneman, Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 95-98.
25. Comparatively, see Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender, 48-49.
26. Anne Hampele, "The Organized Women's Movement in the Collapse of the GDR: The Independent Women's Association (UFV)," in Funk and Mueller, Gender Politics, 181.
27. Homosexuality, among women as among men, for example, remained entirely taboo in GDR political culture not least because it appeared to challenge the state's biopolitical imagination of population growth and "progress." At the same time, however, the state emphasized a masculinist commitment to work as the basis for state policy, thus continuing to encourage women to return to professional work soon after children were born even though many women in the GDR complained that these multiple commitments increased rather than decreased pressure on their time and energy; see Christina Schenk, "Lesbians and Their Emancipation in the Former German Democratic Republic: Past and Future," in Funk and Mueller, Gender Politics, 73.
28. Hildegard Maria Nickel, "Women in the German Democratic Republic and in the New Federal States: Looking Backward and Forward (Five Theses)," in Funk and Mueller, Gender Politics.
29. See Dinah Dodds and Pam Allen-Thompson, eds., The Wall in My Backyard: East German Women in Transition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994);
30. Barbara Rocksloh-Papendieck, Verlust der kollektiven Bindung: Frauenalltag in der Wende (Pfaffenweiler, Germany: Centaurus-Verlaggesellschaft, 1995);
31. and Ingrid Sandole-Staroste, Women in Transition: Between Socialism and Capitalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).
32. Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 194-96.
33. Nickel, "Women in the GDR," 141-42.
34. See Dominic Boyer, "Censorship as a Vocation: The Rituals, Institutions and Cultural Logic of Media Control in the German Democratic Republic," Comparative Studies in Society and History 45:3(2003): 511-45;
35. Dominic Boyer, Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005);
36. and Gunter Holzweissig, Massenmedien in der DDR (Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Holzapfel, 1983).
37. Journalistisches Handbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Leipzig, Germany: VEB Verlag für Buch- und Bibliothekwesen, 1960), 20.
38. Hermann Budzislawski, Sozialistische Journalistik: Eine wissenschaftliche Einführung (Leipzig, Germany: VEB Bibliographisches Institut, 1966), 18.
39. See Boyer, "Censorship," 519-21.
40. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991);
41. and Mark Allen Peterson, "Getting to the Story: Unwriteable Discourse and Interpretive Practice in American Journalism," Anthropological Quarterly 74 (2001): 201-11.
42. For example, Die Presse - kollektiver Organisator der sozialistichen Umgestaltung (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1959), 101-2.
43. Hans Poerschke et al., Theoretischen Grundfragen des sozialistischen Journalismus (Leipzig, Germany: Karl-Marx-Universität Sektion Journalistik, 1983).
44. Gislinde Schwarz, "Im Dienste der Frauen? Kühnheit und Anschmiegsamkeit der Frauenzeitschrift FÜR DICH," in Edith Spielhagen, ed., So durften wir glauben zu kämpfen . . . Erfahrungen mit DDR-Medien (Berlin: VISTAS Verlag, 1993), 196.
45. Petra A. Hartmann-Laugs and A. John Goss, Unterhaltung und Politik im Abendprogramm des DDR-Fernsehens (Köln, Germany: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1982), 51.
46. Schwarz, "Im Dienste," 196;
47. also Irene Dölling, " 'But the Pictures Stay the Same?' The Image of Women in the Journal Für Dich before and after the 'Turning Point,' " in Funk and Mueller, Gender Politics;
48. and Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender, 53.
49. Schwarz, "Im Dienste," 193.
50. Sylvia Klötzer, "Öffentlichkeit in der DDR? Die soziale Wirklichkeit im 'Eulenspiegel,' " Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 46 (1993): 28-37.
51. Schwarz, "Im Dienste," 194.
52. Frank Böckelmann, Claudia Mast, and Beate Schneider, eds., Journalismus in den neuen Ländern: Ein Berufsstand zwischen Aufbruch und Abwicklung (Konstanz, Germany: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1994), 43.
53. Frank Böckelmann, Claudia Mast, and Beate Schneider, Journalismus in den neuen Ländern: Ein Berufsstand zwischen Aufbruch und Abwicklung, Ibid., 173.
54. Frank Böckelmann, Claudia Mast, and Beate Schneider, Journalismus in den neuen Ländern: Ein Berufsstand zwischen Aufbruch und Abwicklung, Ibid., 174.
55. In 1996 and 1997, I completed more than 120 interviews with former GDR journalists and their western German colleagues concerning their professional transition after 1989.
56. Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender, 41.
57. For a more general discussion of this phenomenon in knowledge, see Dominic Boyer, "Visiting Knowledge in Anthropology: An Introduction," Ethnos 70:2(2005): 141-48.
58. See Boyer, Spirit and System;
59. Maryellen Boyle, "Capturing Journalism: Press and Politics in East Germany, 1945-1991" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1992);
60. Peter J. Humphreys, Media and Media Policy in Germany (Providence, RI: Berg, 1994);
61. Hermann Meyn, Massenmedien in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin; Edition Colloquium, 1994);
62. John Sandford, "The German Media," in Derek Lewis and John R. P. McKenzie, eds., The New Germany: Social, Political, and Cultural Challenges of Unification (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1995);
63. and Edith Spielhagen, ed., So durften wir glauben zu kämpfen . . . Erfahrungen mit DDR-Medien (Berlin: VISTAS Verlag, 1993).
64. On post-1989 media transformations in Eastern Europe more generally, see Colin Sparks, Communism, Capitalism and the Media (London: Sage, 1998);
65. and Slavko Splichal, Media beyond Socialism: Theory and Practice in East-Central Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994).
66. Burkhart Lutz and Holle Grünert, "Beschäftigung und Arbeitsmarkt," in Hans Bertram and Raj Kollmorgen, eds., Die Transformation Ostdeutschlands: Berichte zum sozialen und politischen Wandel in den neuen Bundesländern (Opladen, Germany: Leske + Budrich, 2001), 139-41.
67. Schenk, "Re-construction," 214-15, 223.
68. Boyer, "On the Sedimentation," 470-73.
69. Boyer, "On the Sedimentation," Ibid., 463-64.
70. Dominic Boyer, "Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany," Public Culture (forthcoming).
71. Böckelmann et al., Journalismus, 41-47, 127.
72. See Dominic Boyer, "The Corporeality of Expertise," Ethnos 70:2(2005): 243-66.
73. Andrew Abbott, for example, raises the issue of gender (in a footnote!) only to discard its substantial relevance to a theory of professionalism: "Some might argue that the very notion of 'profession,' both as real-world label and as social-science concept, is gender- or class-based, and that consequently gender and/or class have been the central determinants of professional development since the Industrial Revolution. I disagree. That professions pursue status is obvious. That this may include class or gender alliance is unquestionable. That these alliances determine the major aspects of professional development is simply wrong. They reinforce, perhaps, but they do not cause." Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 352.
74. For Abbott, the central determinant of professionalism is a social relationship of jurisdiction organized into a system of professions, and he resists an argument of the inherent masculinity of professionalism and by extension of professional knowledges. In Magali Larson's Marxian analysis, professionalism's center is similarly defined through the extension of markets of standardized, codified expert knowledge, markets that depend essentially on socializing, reproductive practices of professionalization, and professionalism to guarantee that actors function as productive subjects within these rationalized and rationalistic economies of expertise; see Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 14, 40-47. Both theorists are able to accomplish the marginalization of gender through their theoretical emphasis on the sociology of expertise. In other words, once expert, formal knowledge is defined as the essence of professionalism, much as we have seen in the East German case, other dimensions of professional life, including other modes of knowing and knowledge involved in professional experience, are trivialized relative to the center.
75. See, for example, Janelle S. Taylor, "Of Sonograms and Baby Prams: Prenatal Diagnosis, Pregnancy and Consumption," Feminist Studies 26:2(2000): 391-418;
76. and Katherine Young, Presence in the Flesh: The Body in Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
77. Boyer, Spirit and System, 43-45.
78. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 289.
79. Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender.