240028 SE Seminar Individual Specialisation I (2021S)

The seminar examines possibilities of making women and their agency visible in the early 19th century and asks whether and to what extent gender specific norms and experiences can be traced and reconstructed in sources. What methodological-theoretical considerations are required to scrutinise the lives of individual people from a gender-historical perspective and thereby shed light on broader contexts and questions? How can biographical methods as a feminist practice make women's lives visible and at the same time avoid essentialisation? How do historically constructed epochal boundaries influence the perspective on individual life stories?

Gender is understood as a question of social performance and, like the study of agency, as a process that requires an examination of structures and power relations. The way people negotiated these structures depended on many aspects and was influenced by specific mechanisms of social inequality, as theoretical texts and discussion of biographical-historical material will show. Through reading secondary literature and becoming familiar with source examples from private and official correspondence, students will critically engage with the interaction of categories of difference and questions of transmission of knowledge and visibility.

The first part of the seminar offers an introduction to central concepts of gender history research with a focus on approaches of biographical research and microhistory as well as the question of agency. On the basis of secondary literature, theoretical-methodological approaches are discussed and analytical skills with regard to knowledge production are enhanced. In the second part, students learn to historicise "structure" and situate individual possibilities of action on the basis of concrete case studies. This insights into source work will find practical implementation in the seminar paper in the form of a critical discussion of the possibilities that selected primary sources offer with regard to the reconstruction of a life story. Concerning the current boom in the publication of heroine collections ("Rebel Girls"), references to the present will be made.

Active participation in the proseminar, ongoing submissions and the completion of a final paper will help to strengthen the skills of written and oral presentation and to critically question assumptions in the generation of historical knowledge.