Binswanger, Christa, Post Doc

By Katherine Harrison on 21 May | 0 comments

GEXcel project: “Sexual scripts” as a transdisciplinary tool for analysis

The fictional settings of literature form a specific, multidimensional context to interpreting articulations of love, desire, pleasure and sexuality. Literature as my central field of analysis gains its specificity by the kind of imagination it offers: In comparison to visually operating forms of art, writing as a process located “in the mind”, leaves open many possibilities of ambiguity, using specific textual strategies. These strategies are going to be investigated as possible forms of variation and subversion to sexual prescripts. Developing a deeper transdisciplinary understanding of sexual scripts and applying these insights to literary theory is seen as a possibility of democratising perceptions of sexuality today. Scripting as a process offers the comprehension of sex/sexuality and gender as being always “under construction” – although powerful prescripts are always to be taken into account. In my follow-up project I will reflect on the possibilities of applying the concept of sexual script to teaching literature to pupils in secondary schools.

Biographical notes:

Dr. phil. Christa Binswanger is a senior researcher at the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Basel. She is currently working on her postdoctoral project “Sexual Scripts: Constructing Desire in Modern German Narrative Literature”. Since 2005 she is teaching gender studies as a senior lecturer at the University of Berne, Fribourg and Basel. Her degrees in German and Russian Literature led to her research interests, focussing on the dimensions of gender, sex and sexuality in literature and narratives; poetics; the canon of gender studies; gender studies in literature; the canon in the study of literature and didactics of teaching literature.