Abstracts
Sixth Annual Conference on Austrian Literature and Culture
"Visions and Visionaries in Literature and Film of Modern Austria"
October 2001

Christina Schmid, University of Minnesota
"On the Austrian Transgender Filmmaker Hans A. Scheirl

In order to explore contemporary Austrian conceptions of gendered utopias/dystopias, I want to focus on the work of the Austrian transgender filmmaker Hans A. Scheirl, in whose films only one thing stands undisputed: namely, that gender is not a stable signifier. Instead of embracing the bipolar gender hegemony of Western cultures at large, Scheirl situates his characters in the fluid, postmodern space of "in-between" in his experimental film Dandy Dust. While film critic Alice Kuzniar places Scheirl's Dandy Dust and its gender-bending performativity in the tradition of Queer German Cinema, I am interested in mapping the undeniable influence of U.S. American feminist and transgender theories on Scheirl's work. In particular, Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" will be used to show that Scheirl's work cannot be understood in a merely German/Austrian context but is intellectually indebted to a transnational theoretical framework. By approaching Scheirl's Dandy Dust from an interdisciplinary perspective that combines the problematic of translatability with theories of gender performance and cyborgicity, I offer a new reading of Dandy Dust that explores its potential for constructing both a gendered utopia and/or a dystopia.

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