Christa Binswanger

In Cultural Studies, the affective turn is a response to the so-called crisis of representation. Insisting on a crucial difference, some theorists separate representation as it is addressed in psychoanalytic accounts of the subject, from pre-individual bodily capacities, as they are developed in affect theory. In our article, we are revisiting Freud's model of the mystic writing pad and present a metaphor enhancing an inclusive approach to both: the palimpsest. Following Ahmed and Butler, we understand subjectivity as a constant process of affective surfacing, in which intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions constitute each other. The metaphor of the palimpsest offers a way to theorize subjectivity as structured by power relations yet open to potentiality, paying attention to the intrapsychic as affective force within encounters between subjects. "Queering the palimpsest" disrupts the dichotomization of ontology versus epistemology, the dichotomous ways of gendering the subject and the "either-or-option" of affect theory and psychoanalysis.

In this article the authors1 approach material and symbolic violence through transdisciplinary readings of theoretical debates, fiction and empirical narratives. They make use of the concept of turning points which disrupt dichotomous and static categorizations of victim and survivor, and their association with passivity and agency respectively. In situations of violence, turning points represent temporality instead of timelessness, dialogism instead of monologism, multilayering rather than any fixed identity. The authors draw on the theorists Bakhtin and Certeau, whose work Highlights the significance of meaning-making between self and other. They analyse empirical and fictional narratives to understand the creation of dialogic spaces, a space that both subordinates and subverts. Pointing to the procedural nature of turning points within the everyday, the authors argue that women, despite the pain and trauma, are neither just a victim nor just a survivor in a violent relationship.

This article explores shifts in feminist and postfeminist discourse on sexuality using two influential novels about women's sexual agency and empowerment as case in point. The first novel, Häutungen [Shedding], appeared in the mid-1970s at the peak of the New German Women's Movement and went on to become one of the most important feminist fictional texts. The second novel, Feuchtgebiete [Wetlands] was published in 2008 in the wake of what has been called postfeminism. Both books are discovery narratives about young women coming of age and both have been heralded by the media as having ruptured sexual taboos and old ways of talking about women's bodies and sexuality. In different ways, both have also been influential in feminist and postfeminist debates about the possibilities for empowering women as sexual subjects. Both texts show how fiction can draw upon and help shape a transgressive sexual politics, making it instrumental in women's sexual empowerment. In this article, we examine the resonances and the differences between these two texts, paying particular attention to the kind of narratives that are produced and how in each case a sexual subject is constructed in and through the text. Specific exclusions in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality are explored, as well as the sexual political strategies that each text generates with an eye toward the possibilities each creates for women's sexual (dis)empowerment and critique of normalized sexuality.

In this article we explore transdisciplinary understandings on scripts as transformative interventions. Script, as a term, refers, on the one hand, to cognitive routinised behavioural patterns; on the other hand, it is a multi layered process of enacting, interpreting and re-writing interaction within a specific context. The metaphor of the palimpsest, embodying and provoking interdisciplinary encounters, links the various layers of practiced and narrated scripts. The interrelation of the scripts of the palimpsest is marked by inextricability, as they use the same space and create an illusionary intimacy. We develop our ideas about script as intervention, reflecting on scripts of violence and sexual experience. We make use of the psychoanalytic term "cryptic incorporation". Cryptic incorporation entails the idea of an experience psychically "swallowed whole" by the subject, and therefore not accessible to conscious reflection once incorporated. Or methodological readings are both empirical and fictional. The empirical example is based on an interview with one respondent, who has experienced intimate violence during the course of her life. The autobiographical text of Shedding, written in 1975 by the Swiss author Verena Stefan, is an example of fiction. Both texts engage in the inextricability of vulnerability and intimacy. Analysing these narratives, we pay special attention to "turning points". As turning points represent decisive changes within evolving live stories, they are read as palimpsestuous scripts of a transformative process. Thus, we focus on the human ability to change scripts, to re-write biographical events. We look for a productive entanglement of our scientific writing, understanding the writing process itself as a palimpsestuous layer of script as intervention.

Critical Sexualities, Affect, Queer and Gender Studies each address the shifting meanings of contemporary sexuality. In Critical Sexology, Sigusch articulates a loss of significance with regard to sexuality. According to Sigusch, sexuality’s decreasing importance is tied to the ways formerly pathologized sexual identities and practices achieve increasing social legitimation: sexuality has been democratized. This should not be understood, however, to result in the disappearance of fundamental human anxieties. Tensions and unresolved problems with regard to contemporary sexuality still remain. In the field of affect studies, Angerer (2015) has stated that, due to technological and political changes in the 21st century, affect has replaced the Foucauldian sexuality-dispositif, thus displacing psychoanalytical interpretations of desire. Interested in overlaps as well as differences between affect/emotion/feeling and desire, theorists like Cvetkovich, Ahmed or Hemmings see potential in overcoming the dichotomization of affect and emotion. Gender and Queer Studies have opened debates on the de-gendering of sexuality and desire in order to think sexuality beyond binary opposition. In the 2011 volume “After Sex?”, Halley and Parker relate the idea of “post-sexuality” to Queer Theory. These debates, as various as they are, have at least one characteristic in common: they set the agenda for a critique of how dichotomies have shaped notions of sexuality and gender. In an initial step, my contribution addresses the broader significance of these critical discourses: do they, as Sigusch (2005 and 2013) suggests in his notion of a third sexual revolution, indicate a major shift in understandings of sexuality? Next, I consider how sexual script theory, first introduced by Gagnon and Simon in the 1970s and elaborated by Jackson and Scott in 2010, might contribute to such critical discourses. I employ the palimpsest as metaphor to link the three levels of sexual script theory: the intra-psychic, the interpersonal and the cultural. Doing so enables a conceptualization of sexuality beyond dichotomization and allows to address affect and desire as entangled with gender.