Cecilia Rentmeister

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Cecilia "Cillie" bailiff (* 1948 in Berlin ) is a German art historian and gender and gender researcher . In addition to examining the various realities in which men and women live, she has also dealt with matriarchy , among other things .

Life

Rentmeister attended the humanistic Goethe-Gymnasium in Berlin-Wilmersdorf and, after graduating from high school in 1968, studied art, archeology and American studies at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Cologne . She received her doctorate in 1980 from the University of Bremen . Rentmeister lives in Berlin and Brandenburg and has been teaching since 1994 at the University of Applied Sciences Erfurt in the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, cross-cultural gender studies and interactive media.

In 2010 she received the teaching award from the University of Applied Sciences Erfurt for her seminar “Political and institutional conditions of social work” and her lecture “Gender - Gender Relations: Differences, Equality, Equal Rights”.

Rentmeister was already active in the new women's movement from the early 1970s . From 1974 she wrote articles on feminist art history and cultural studies, which also received international attention. From 1977 she taught at art colleges, colleges of education and universities in Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. Among other things, she was one of the initiators of the interdisciplinary women's summer universities at the Technical University of Berlin , in which around 30,000 women took part from 1976 to 1986, and from which important impulses for women's and gender studies in all scientific disciplines came. Cäcilia Rentmeister was the keyboardist for the Flying Lesbians , the first female rock band on the continent; she reflected the meaning of “women's music” in her texts on rituals and women's festivals. In the 1970s and 1980s, she also published art and culture-critical writings on “ feminist aesthetics”, thereby sparking controversy.

In the 1980s Rentmeister published as a science writer for the radio, among other things on patriarchal motives of population growth and critical of the New Age . She has been working with her partner, the director and author Cristina Perincioli , since 1973 : in 1975 they wrote the screenplay for "Anna and Edith" - the first feature film about a lesbian relationship on German television ( ZDF ).

From 1985 Rentmeister and Perincioli turned to the subject of “computers and creativity”. They developed models for artistic and educational work with multimedia and published and taught with the express aim of getting women interested in these new digital technologies in what was then still a computer-skeptical environment, including in 1989 at the 1st MultiMediale of the ZKM .

From the 1990s, Rentmeister worked as an editor and in the practical transfer of websites on “sensitive” social and gender topics that were created by Perincioli.

As a private pilot , Rentmeister is committed to promoting girls and women in aviation , in the female pilot networks Ninety Nines and the Association of German female pilots, through lectures, in TV and print media, in international exchange and with campaigns for Girls' Day ; Melanie Katzenberger writes: “The pioneers of the air belong in school books, demands Cecilia Rentmeister. Girls have to be given the feeling: If she can do it, I can do it too ... ”.

This important role of role models - from the entire MINT sector - and that they should be introduced to girls at the earliest possible age of “five to twelve” is demonstrated by Rentmeister in her essay from 2018 “This is your captain speaking. The Gender Factor in Aviation ”, in the volume accompanying the exhibition“ Violence and Gender ”in the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden . On the basis of international studies, Rentmeister is analyzing the reasons why the proportion of female pilots worldwide has stagnated at an average of only six percent for decades, and how it could be increased. As further central factors, she discusses conscious and unconscious prejudices and stereotypes against “women and technology”, common among men and women. It shows positive examples of how self-confidence in technical skills can be increased and explains why the participation of women in aviation is generally a win-win situation - for women themselves as well as for business and society.

Two specific approaches to Rentmeister's matriarchal theories

Cäcilia Rentmeister initially dealt with matriarchy archaeologically . She was critical of ideology and reception and was looking for a “realistic” approach. In 1976, when asked "Why are so many allegories female?", She consulted among other things evolutionist-Marxist ( Thomson ) and historical ( Bachofen , von Ranke-Graves , Bornemann ) matriarchal theories; In 1980 she asked: “How is politics made with questions of matriarchy?” And criticized the blanket negation of matriarchy, including by contemporary feminists . In the article “Squaring the Circle. The seizure of power by men over building forms ”, published in the first female architects special in“ bauwelt ”in 1979, she tries to identify matriarchal traces in building forms and spatial language. Margrit Kennedy writes: “Nevertheless, even an objective observer would probably have noticed the relatively high proportion of free and curved shapes both in the UIFA exhibition in Paris and in the exhibition 'Women shape their city'…. Anyone who has read Erik Erikson's psychological and Cillie Rentmeister's mythological investigations into spatial preferences and gender-specific differences ... is perhaps less astonished ... "

These and other early archaeological texts by Rentmeister have been translated into several languages. They are received in the lively international and interdisciplinary gender discourse of the 1970s and 1980s, for example by the Italian architectural theorist Paola Coppola Pignatelli and the writer Christa Wolf .

In 1988 she analyzed the “matriarchy debate” of the last two centuries in Germany, especially in terms of its significance for the first 15 years of the “new” women's movement : In this, between 1973 and 1988, she differentiated between three phases and ironized - now even before the backdrop of her matriarchal trips of the early eighties - a certain " esoteric matriarchal enthusiasm" and "attempts at resuscitation of matriarchal rituals " in Germany.

The question of the real existence of contemporary, modern matriarchies led her from 1980 to preoccupation with current cultural anthropological findings and to research trips to matrilineal, matrilocal societies, including Minangkabau in West Sumatra and Nayar in Kerala , South India. Here she found - despite crises caused by social change - confirming and self-confident statements from indigenous peoples about the special qualities and even advantages of their matriarchal institutions and lifestyles for both sexes.

How these advantages correlate statistically with a comparatively high level in the index of human development and reproductive health, Rentmeister describes in 2007 under the title Development is female. Using the example of the Minangkabau and the Nayar, it shows that empowerment , education and property of women are too significant contribute to lower birth rates and that - in comparison to neighboring patriarchal population groups - there is significantly less domestic violence and socially lower poverty and better health.

Definition of matriarchal societies according to Rentmeister

Rentmeister explicitly did not define the term “matriarchy” as a “reverse formula for patriarchy” as early as 1980: “I use it here in the literal and analogous translation of mother-beginning, - not mother-rule; I also use it because it is slogan and has become an alternative to today's patriarchy ... and because matriarchy means at least as many different forms of society as the collective term patriarchy for today. "

In 1985 she emphasized, now with reference to ethnological findings: "For a socio-cultural structure that could simply be described as> the matriarchy <there is no even rudimentary uniform definition".

According to Rentmeister, “… there were and are certainly as many forms of matriarchy as there are now - and at the same time! - There are forms of patriarchy . ”Therefore it can only be a question of“ defining a basic pattern with great openness to variations. ”

It therefore lists a number of ideal-typical features that can or could occur both individually and together, including:

  • Matrilinearity : Family name, house, land and movable property are inherited in the female line - with the result of divorces and divorce consequences with little conflict, and that there are no “illegitimate” descendants
  • Matrilocality : Descendants live “at the place of the mother clan”, in the country, in the houses of the mother clan
  • Avunculate : elevated status of the uncle / sister-brother related in the female line
  • Women in important cultic and symbolic-religious roles: ancestor worship , tracing the group, the people, the ethnic group back to a female ancestor or creator, animistic ideas and practices
  • Visiting marriage in which men and women stay in the houses of their respective matrilineage and only "visit" each other
  • Men as a representative “voice” who announce gender-democratic decisions in public - a role that led to the overestimation of the real power position of men, as for example with the often matrilineal Indians of North America / Native Americans
  • Property in the hands of women (clans) promotes overall social prosperity and makes a significant contribution to the avoidance of violence
  • Exercise of "reproductive rights" by women, especially birth control , with the consequence of lower population growth than the surrounding patriarchal ethnic groups

Fonts

  • Frauenwelten - Herrenwelten , Opladen 1985
  • Computer and creativity , co-author with Cristina Perincioli , Cologne 1990
  • Gender in teaching and didactics. Gender in Education and Didactics (Co-Ed.), Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt / M., New York, Oxford, Vienna 2003

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 2010 teaching award to Prof. Dr. Cecilia Rentmeister .
  2. ↑ A selection of translated publications, in twelve languages ​​- print, music and websites and A selection of translated publications in English - print, music and websites , accessed on May 27, 2013
  3. ↑ Inge v. Bönninghausen to Rentmeister u. a. Lecturers at the summer universities, in: Ariadne 37-38, Kassel 2000, p. 130, section "Personal thought stories"
  4. ↑ Cecilia Rentmeister: Rituals as a social drama - On the meaning of rituals in human life, in: Scheiblich, Wolfgang (Ed.): Images - Symbols - Rituale, Freiburg 1999, pp. 69–99
  5. ^ Cillie Rentmeister: Women's festivals as an initiation ritual , in: Heinrich Böll Foundation, Feminist Institute (ed.) How far did the tomato fly? A reflection gala for women in 1968, Berlin 1999
  6. ↑ http://www.cillie-rentmeister.de/themen/neue-frauenbewegung/ Several of the writings in full text
  7. ↑ http://www.queer.de/detail.php?article_id=10985/ , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el61hBowbLU/ and http://www.ziegler-film.com/produktionen /tv/produktion/anna-und-edith.html
  8. ↑ Joint book Perincioli, Rentmeister: "Computer and Creativity: A Compendium for Computer Graphics, Animation, Music and Video", Cologne 1990
  9. ↑ MultiMediale 1 30.10. - 04.11.1989 on zkm.de, accessed on May 27, 2013
  10. ↑ including 4human , Violence Protection , Save Selma , Ava2 , Fun or Violence . Accessed on December 29, 2010
  11. ^ Homepage of the Association of German Female Pilots , accessed on May 27, 2013
  12. ↑ Rentmeister's résumé and pilots & technology culture on cilli-rentmeister.de, accessed on May 27, 2013
  13. ↑ Melanie Katzenberger: Don't be afraid of flying - the professor and recreational pilot Cecilia Rentmeister encourages women to conquer the sky , MAZ, Pentecost 2002. Accessed December 29, 2010
  14. ↑ Cillie (Cäcilia) Rentmeister: "This is your captain speaking". The gender factor in aviation, in: Gorch Pieken (Hrsg.): Violence and gender. Male War - Female Peace? Volume of essays on the exhibition, Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr, Dresden 2018, p.176-189, with pictures. Full text essay on Rentmeister's website at [1]
  15. ↑ Cäcilia Rentmeister: Professional ban for the muses , in: “Aesthetics and Communication”, No. 25/1976, p. 93
  16. ↑ The riddle of the Sphinx - matriarchal theses and the archeology of the non-Oedipal triangle , in: Brigitte Wartmann (Ed.): “Male - Female”. Berlin 1980
  17. ↑ In: "Bauwelt" 32/32, 1979, pp. 1292–1296
  18. ↑ Homepage of the International Union of Women Architects ( Memento of the original dated February 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.uifa.fr
  19. ↑ Margrit Kennedy : "On the rediscovery of female principles in architecture", in: bauwelt 1979, H. 31-32, p. 1283; full text of the "bauwelt", focus "Women in architecture -: women architecture?" ( Online (PDF; 23.9 MB) ( Memento of the original from January 18, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / kennedy-bibliothek.info
  20. ↑ Paola Coppola Pignatelli: Spazio e Immaginario: maschile e femminile in architettura, Roma 1982, pp. 203-206.
  21. ↑ Christa Wolf : Requirements for a story: Kassandra. Darmstadt / Neuwied 1983, p. 80, p. 159
  22. ↑ “Women's worlds: distant, past, strange? The matriarchal debate in the new women's movement ” , in: Ina-Maria Greverus (Hgin): Kulturkontakt - Kulturkonflikt. To experience the foreign. Contributions to the 26th German Folklore Congress 1987. Frankfurt / M. 1988
  23. ^ Reproductive health at the World Health Organization , accessed January 18, 2016
  24. ↑ Development is female. About the connection between equality, reproductive rights and human development , in: Rehklau / Lutz (Ed.): Social Work of the South, Volume 1, pp. 91–122, with illustrations, Oldenburg 2007
  25. ↑ The riddle of the Sphinx - matriarchal theses and the archeology of the non-Oedipal triangle , in: Brigitte Wartmann (Ed.): “Male - Female”. Berlin 1980, p. 155
  26. ^ Cillie Rentmeister: Frauenwelten - Männerwelten, Opladen 1985, p. 31; previously already in Wartmann 1980 op.cit., p. 155
  27. ^ Cillie Rentmeister: Frauenwelten - Männerwelten, Opladen 1985, p. 32; Rentmeister's definitions have been widely accepted, including after 2000 by Herzog 2001, Becker / Kortendieck / Budrich 2004, Lenz 2008
  28. ↑ 1985 in "Frauenwelten - Männerwelten" most detailed, pp. 32–40
  29. ↑ Rentmeister in http://www.ava2.de/index.php?kap_seite=16,1,1 : The example of South India shows where women are the sole owners of land or houses, they are significantly less likely to be victims of domestic violence. See Panda, Pradeep: Marital Violence, Human Development and Women's Property Status in India, in: World Development Vol. 33, No. 5, 2005
  30. ↑ http://www.unfpa.org/rights/rights.htm
personal data
SURNAME Rentmaster, Cecilia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rentmeister, Cillie; Rentmeister, Cecilia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German gender and gender researcher
DATE OF BIRTH 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin