Verwandertes Leben, verwandertes Gehirn? On Else Lasker-Schüler, Neurodiversity and Migration
Liselotte Van der Gucht (Ghent University)
In recent years, both social and scholarly interest in the effect of migration on societies has skyrocketed. Right-wing political parties have profusely claimed that migration is a threat to the putatively homogeneous identity of Western society; more progressive scholars hold the view that migration is often beneficial to the host country. This paper would like to slightly shift away from the sociological repercussions of migration and focus on neurocognitive underpinnings of mobility instead. This shift is concisely expressed in the title by the term
‘verwandert’, as employed by the subject of this paper as well . I will do so by turning to a
‘Musterbeispiel’ of diversity and its many possible perspectives, namely the Jewish-German literary author Else Lasker-Schüler, who rose to the challenge of tackling the concept of identity unambiguously. In her writings, she deals with topics such as ethnicity, Orientalism, exile and foreignness, which all dial back to the notion that identity is a cultural construction and ultimately a matter of choice and active performance.
In order to express her permanent sense of socio-cultural exile, even prior to her actual migration to Palestine, Lasker-Schüler self-identified as Jussuf, Prince of Thebes, her queer and transcultural alter ego. While this constellation has been duly investigated as both a proto- Butlerean understanding of identity as performance as well as an exotic appropriation with problematic overtones, I propose to explore the relation between identity, migration and the neurological specificities that perspire in Lasker-Schüler’s writings and ‘biography as artwork’.
In particular, I will deal with Lasker-Schüler’s experience of ‘St. Vitus’ dance’, which, as an umbrella term, was used to point to an ill-defined spectrum of epilepsy, hyperkinesia, manic and bipolar conditions and its numerous traces in her biography and performance art.
Of course, it remains to some extent speculative to claim a neuroqueer identity for a writer who, although patently transgressing all borders, may have done so for various reasons and on the basis of lived (migratory) experiences (cf. Rozga 2020). Restrictive social expectations and conservative gender roles have been pointed out as external causes of distress, relating to neurodiverse conditions. But in view of recent trends in neurophenomenology and of an emerging body of biographies of unconventional women of strong intelligence who lived in a kind of restless 'permanent migration' (Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Alice Miller), I aim to show why the propensity to wrestle free from orthodox upbringings and to engage in polemical and polarizing communication, as well as to embody contrarian positions, may have come more "natural" to some women than to others.
Bibliography
Egner, J. E. 2018. ‘The Disability Rights Community was Never Mine. Neuroqueer Disidentification’. Gender & Society 33 (1): 123-147.
Finney, G. 2003. ‘Queering the Stage: Critical Displacement in the Theater of Else Lasker- Schüler and Mae West’. Comparative Literature Studies 40 (1): 54-71.
Lasker-Schüler, E. 1917. ‘Das Lied meines Lebens’. In Gesammelte Gedichte. Leipzig: Verlag der Weißen Bücher.
Rozga, M. 2020. ‘Mother(less) Exiles: The New Woman’s Absence from the Migration of the Expressionists to Hollywood’. In Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape, edited by Daniel Stein. Rowman & Littlefield.
