The Transgressive Representations of Gender and Queerness in Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite

Summary

IN A RECENT STUDY, Melanie Kohnen argues that during the 1990s there was an explosion of gay and lesbian visibility in American popular culture and that cinema started to dissociate non-normative sexualities from the problem-oriented discourses that proliferated in earlier films that cast homosexual characters. Notwithstanding the increase of queer characters on screen, cinematic constructions of queerness remain limited and ultimately limiting, observes Kohnen, meaning that only certain queer identities are rendered visible, while a whole range of others are either underrepresented or totally overlooked. In Kohnen's view, it is white gay and lesbian identities that have found their way to mainstream representation.

Kohnen's observations regarding the elusive cinematic representation of queer subjects are asserted by a study conducted by Gayatri Gopinath. Focusing particularly on films about the Asian diaspora, Gopinath engages critically with the absence of diasporic queer female subjectivities from cinematic texts. Her argument is that the figure of “woman” as a pure and unsullied sexual being is so central to dominant articulations of nation and diaspora that queer female subjects are rendered impossible. In Gopinath's view, female sexuality “is a crucial site of surveillance, as it is through women's bodies that the borders and boundaries of communal identities are formed,” and in this context normative heterosexuality is regarded as the only kind of sexuality that diasporic women are allowed to practice. Because the inclusion of queer diasporic subjects challenges the idea of non-Western sexualities as premodern and disrupts those narratives that imagine and consolidate the nation in terms of organic heterosexuality, as Gopinath argues, the representation of diasporic queer female subjectivities deserves more attention.

This essay explores how queer subjects are constructed in Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite(On the Other Side, 2007; in English as The Edge of Heaven, 2007), focusing primarily on how queerness is played out in relation to non-Western female identity. While the term “queer” is routinely used to refer to homosexual, bisexual, and transgender people, it is also a term that intimates the wide range of subjectivities that resist rigid categorization and are oppositional to the norm. As David Halperin puts it, “queer is by definition whateveris at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.”