Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond: Flirtation, Passive Aggression, Domestic Violence

With the flare-up of #MeToo in 2017 (a movement created by Tarana Burke more than ten years earlier to support young Black women and girls from economically disadvantaged communities who had experienced sexual violence), the delusions of postfeminism were replaced by a new awareness—unprecedented in its social reach as well as its judicial and economic effect—of the pervasive violence of misogyny.¹ In her otherwise rather uninspired contribution to an editorial on the #MeToo campaign for the European Journal of Women’s Studies, Kathy Davis asks that we direct our attention “to the murky and complicated ambivalences in which sexual harassment . . . [is] embedded” (Zarkov and Davis 8). Davis draws upon an astute argument in favor of “cultivating ambivalence” as an anthropological method by Ciara Kierans and Kirsten Bell, who suggest that “an analytic of ambivalence . . . teaches us more about the character...