Vom ,dunklen Kontinent’ zur ,anschmiegsamen Exotin’

Abstract

The paper describes the interplay of gender and colonial representations in Germany and Austria around the turn of the century by analyzing the imagery produced around the 'savage woman'. Their interrelation can be observed on two different levels. On a scientific level, the nascent discipline of - a predominantly physical - anthropology breaks the ground for a demystification of traditional notions such as amazones and female cannibals. This de-emotionalization nullifies the inherent menace of these notions by reducing difference to measurable quantities, thus equaling otherness with backwardness. By assuming, that the female body reflects racial differences more clearly than the male body, European anthropologists in their research of native societies launch a senes of hitherto unparallelled, painstakingly - as well as lecherously - detailed descriptions of the female body and its sexual organs. By doing so they succeed in effectively linking the notions of femaleness and backwardness. On the popular level, the developing massmedia - in the form of the yellow press, exhibitions and popular amusements - tend to enact wildness as a spectacle and by doing this reinvent otherness in a controlled setting. Exotic female savagery becomes a commodity in itself.