Molting
Skinning is Verena Stefan's autobiographical debut novel with the subtitle Biographical Notes. Poems. Dreams. Analyzes from 1975, which caused a sensation as the first German-language literary text of the new women's movement and became a bestseller.
content
The main theme of the book is the experience of sexuality of the first-person narrator: of "self-surrender" and adaptation to the wishes and ideas of the male partner, the process of her search for her own, "true" gender identity, combined with turning to women and the Self-realization of the female ego in lesbian sexuality. Stefan describes a process of emancipation in which the work of memory and detachment from the alienating relationships with the opposite sex is metaphorically experienced as a molt . She occupies this image with the snake, the mythical symbol for female sexuality. At the end of the book is the sentence: "I am the person of my life."
History and effect
At the beginning of the 1970s Verena Stefan belonged to the feminist group Bread and Roses in Berlin , with which she organized women's congresses and campaigns against § 218 . For the magazine Kursbuch the group was asked to write an article on the topic “How can the emancipation of women be reconciled with the relationship with a man?”. This resulted in the manuscript on moulting . When Verena Stefan began to write her book in 1974, there were no women's bookshops or feminist publishers in Germany . She considered writing a book "the most appropriate form of acting for the women's cause".
After just one year, the book was printed in its fifth edition. In 1980 it had a circulation of 200,000, even though it was advertised only through word of mouth. Skinning made possible the establishment of the Frauenoffensive publishing house , which published it as the first book, and opened the market for “literature by women for women”. With around 500,000 copies sold, it is the most widely read book in modern women's literature .
Expenses (selection)
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Molting. Autobiographical records. Poems, dreams, analyzes. Women's offensive, Munich 1975, ISBN 3-88104-000-5 .
- Mues. Éditions Des Femmes, Paris 1977, ISBN 2-7210-0090-X . (French)
- Shedding. Daughters Publishing, New York 1978, ISBN 0-913780-22-7 . (engl.)
- Molting. With a foreword to the new edition. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-596-11837-9 .
- Molting. Fischer E-Books, Frankfurt am Main 2015, ISBN 978-3-10-560553-0 .
literature
- Nicola Huber: Emancipation in word, writing and action. The second wave of the women's movement using the example of Verena Stefan's “Skinning” and Christa Wolf's “ Kassandra ”. Grin, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-656-68289-9 .
- Roman Weber: Verena Stefans “Skinning”. An analysis of your criticism of the prevailing heteronormative understanding of sexuality. Grin, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-656-65815-3 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Franziska Frei Gerlach: Script and gender. Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-503-03793-4 , p. 42f.
- ↑ Quoted in: Margret Brügmann: Das Gläserne Ich. Reflections on the relationship between women's literature and postmodernism using the example of Anne Dudens "Das Judasschaf" In: Mona Knapp, Gerd Labroisse: Women's questions in German-language literature since 1945. Rodopi Verlag, Amsterdam 1989, ISBN 90-5183-043-2 , p 253/254.
- ↑ Interview with Verena Stefan, taz from May 10, 2008
- ↑ Quoted in: Karen Ruoff Kramer: The politics of discourse. Peter Lang Verlag, 1993, ISBN 3-261-04409-8 , p. 240.
- ↑ Munzinger Archive, as of June 1, 2009