In and Out of Uniform: Imagining and Illustrating Queer Subjects, Institutional Spaces, and Counterpublics in Christa Reinig’s Mädchen ohne Uniform and “Die ewige Schule”

Abstract

This essay explores ways of reading Christa Reinig’s 1981 Mädchen ohne Uniform, which was revised and republished in 1982 as the short story “Die ewige Schule,” in conversation with the texts that inspired them, stressing connectivities in gender, sexual, and educational politics across time. Mädchen ohne Uniform and “Die ewige Schule” revisit the iconic stories of Christa Winsloe’s Ritter Nérestan and Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform from the point of view of a fictional Christa Winsloe and feature an updated version of her protagonist Manuela living in West Germany a half-century later. In conversation with gender and queer theories about belonging, resistance, and futurity (Michael Warner, Heather Love, Sara Ahmed, and José Esteban Muñoz), we read the eruption of queer moments as interventions into heteropatriarchal privilege, cultural and pedagogical traditions, and institutional power structures. Our analysis attends to the circulation of imagery and illustrations in and around Reinig’s narrative, including intertextual references to Weimar-era visual culture as well as the black-and-white lithographs by Klaus Endrikat that adorn the Eremiten-Presse edition of Mädchen ohne Uniform.