FLB home News resources for undergraduates graduates faculty staff graduate assistants flb business office flb graduate student services   staff directory FLB directories UIUC home old browsers April 8, 2005 2004-2005/039 Lecture April 14 on gender-bending in early modern Germany Professor Judith Aikin of the University of Iowa will present a lecture titled, “Woman as Man: Gender-bending in Early Modern Germany,” on Thursday, April 14, 2005, at 5:15 p.m., in Lucy Ellis Lounge, Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana. The lecture is free and open to the public. Men's and women's roles were clearly circumscribed in Reformation Germany, yet gender identity was seen as role-playing, not as a biologically determined extension of male and female bodies. Thus, under some circumstances, especially among the ruling classes, a woman could take on responsibilities normally associated with the male gender. A case in point is Aemilia Juliane, Countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, who presented herself as male in some of her texts, and who prevailed upon painters, dramatists, poets, preachers and polemicists at court to give symbolic expression to her gender-bending activities. Aiken received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching and research interests include 17th-century German literature, music-literature relations, and formal approaches to literature. She is the author of several books, most recently “A Language for German Opera: The Development of Forms and Formulas for Recitative and Aria in Seventeenth-Century German Libretti” (2002). The talk is sponsored by UIUC’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.