The Tender Gaze: Compassionate Encounters on the German Screen, Page, and Stage ed. by Muriel Cormican and Jennifer Marston William (review)

Abstract

symbol of resistance against regimes of flexibility and conformity—powerfully paint a portrait of a society in which feminist values are hopelessly neutralized under neoliberalism. This feminist-queer approach is discernible throughout the book, although it is most consistently and convincingly instrumentalized in the later chapters. In her reading of the underresearched film Fremde Haut (2005) directed by Angelina Maccarone, Baer productively builds on Halberstam’s labeling of the lesbian migrant Fariba who “passes” as Siamak as a trans* character and the theoretical framework this affords her. With an insightful and original focus on indebtedness in the film—that is, the different debts owed from each character to another—Baer exposes how precarity defines every person in the film, creating hierarchies, and reinforcing economies of exchange, while acknowledging the specific ways that these debts are particularly burdensome for minoritized genders and ethnicities. Baer further links economies of debt with the economies of looking that operate in the film, where reciprocal gazes or the exchange of a glance do not represent mutuality or understanding but are instead sexist or objectifying. This illuminating section left me wondering where the gaze of the spectator is focused in this film. Are we complicit in these neoliberal economies of debt as symbolized by the gaze? Or might the idea of the trans* gaze as theorized by Halberstam open up unexplored potential for challenging gendered and racialized gazes? German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism will be of great interest to scholars of cinema and of German, not least because of its forceful recasting of German cinema as saturated in money, i.e., the economization of society and its effects permeate filmmaking at every level. In this book, Baer lends us the language to examine further the unique ways in which films have the capacity to simultaneously exist within, reflect on, and challenge the neoliberal status quo. Leila Mukhida, University of Cambridge