The Minor ‘Crucial Differences’ deals with the social development and cultural-discursive legitimization of “differences” in modern societies embodied in structural constraints and discrimination based on race, class, religion, gender and sexuality. Students learn critically to analyse the intersectionality of these differences and their mediation through cultural texts and images, stereotypes and social practises, and at the same time familiarize themselves with the entangled fields of gender, queer, postcolonial and Orientalist studies.

The first course traces the historical dialectic of “enlightened” ideals like “equality”, “freedom” and “brotherhood”, and asks how these norms were interwoven with colonialism, slavery, anti-Semitism, the suppression of women and their emancipation. Through detailed case studies we analyse the social impact of cultural-philosophical discourses of difference, drawing on Foucault, Said, Butler, Adorno. The second course “Crucial Differences in the 21st Century” (coordinated by Louis van den Hengel since 2011) examines the working of contemporary configurations of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity and class. Tasks on “homonationalism” and the “headscarf debates” build on the historical part of the Minor. The third course explores how differences are negotiated through life stories.

Both the critical theoretical focus of the minor and its aim to reconstruct enduring historical discourses, figures and scripts of difference and “othering” in provincializing Europe corresponds exactly to the goals, theories/methods and themes of my research of the last 15 years. Publications like Heroes of Death. Studies in the Religion, Aesthetics and Politics of Modern Masculinity (2015) and Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses (2014) demonstrate the creative interconnections of my research and teaching. Also the current research network of Ulrike Brunotte (coordinator of the minor) ReNGOO “The Role of Gender in Orientalism, Antisemitism and Occidentalism” matches the minor’s aims to analyse the longue durée of tropes of ‘othering’ and to historicize current cultural conflicts.

Coordinator: Ulrike Brunotte

This course ties in with the research conducted in the Arts, Media and Culture research programme.