German Studies Review

The Tender Gaze is an ambitious scholarly and political project. By developing the tender gaze as a theoretical and analytical approach, the coeditors set the stage for a collection of essays that explore applications of the concept in German film and literature. The tender gaze, "an empathetic encounter with others" (3), is a tool to uncover the ways in which narrative, power, and politics are intertwined, within films, performances, and texts and in the process of reception. It further, as Muriel Cormican states, "acknowledges representation as always already implicated in power structures [End Page 392] while simultaneously using representation to question those power structures" (39). This definition connects the tender gaze with theorizing representation as always also political, as a process, and as intricately connected to power, and points to one of the crucial interventions the authors make with this book: in broad terms, they engage affect studies to rethink the political in literature.

Cormican's introduction of the tender gaze focuses on examples in contemporary film, including a very perceptive discussion of Maren Ade's Toni Erdman (2016). She defines the concept in opposition to Laura Mulvey's "male gaze" and Ann Kaplan's "imperial gaze," and in conjunction with bell hook's Black feminist perspective, theorized as the "oppositional gaze" (17-20). The tender gaze, Cormican shows, draws attention to the structures of inequality that scholars have pointed out in media reception and attends to a new kind of political sensitivity toward these structures. Increasingly, people have become aware of bias and stereotypes in media representation. The tender gaze "resists objectification," "decenters the gaze," and opens up space for compassionate and tender ways of looking, understanding, and acting (see 20). Cormican argues that the tender gaze is set in motion by narrative and aesthetic form and that it operates regardless of whether consumers are aware of it or not. It, however subtle and relationally, shifts norms and opens up new political perspectives.

Turning from cinema to live performance, Jennifer M. William offers close readings of contemporary theater productions that elicit the tender gaze. William evokes Brecht's political theater but against the assertion that in order for theater to "work" politically it needs to disengage emotionally, William shows that politics are deeply intertwined with affect. Disentangling the two might not only be impossible but it is theoretically flawed. In addition to Brecht's idea that political theater should aim to spur people into action, William presents case studies of contemporary German stage productions to explore "the potential of theater . . . to foster empathy and compassion . . . even in nonconventional, nonidentificatory performances" (45).

These first two chapters, written by the coeditors of the volume, set the tone for the following essays; they also set the bar high. Both convincingly show how the tender gaze not only offers new analytical insights, but they also express the hope that it might "motivate us as a society to continue co-creating performance and embodying politics together, so that the urgency of addressing our shared social dilemma is kept foremost in mind" (44). These aims summarize the explicitly political and deeply theoretical project that the book sets out to undertake.

The following ten essays offer examples of reading the tender gaze in film, theater, and literature. The topics range from contemporary anti-racist documentary films (see Nancy Nenno's essay on Mo Asumang) and discussions of films from the last few decades (Nikhil Sathe, Erika Nelson Mukherjee, Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien, John Blair, and Gary Schmidt) to analyses of nineteenth-century literature and poetry (Lorna Martens, Anna-Rebecca Nowicki, and Joseph D. Rockelmann). The book concludes with an essay on a contemporary literary example (Christina Weiler's essay on Birgit [End Page 393] Vanderbeke). Among these chapters, the essays on films offer the most convincing application of the analytical framework; the tender gaze, however, also proves to offer productive insights into the politics of representation in literary works.

In some cases, the authors struggle to illustrate how the tender gaze functions as a political intervention. Doris Dörrie's film Keiner liebt mich (1994), for example, offers great examples of how the tender gaze creates spaces for empathy across racial, sexual, and gender divides. One wonders, however, how the tender gaze might obscure or fail to address some of the uncritical appropriations in the film that also perpetuate certain racist stereotypes. As the authors state at various points in the book, the reception of artworks is not homogenous. Thus, the question is not only whether or not the artworks are "moving" (89), but also of whom they move and in what way. This is where the concept becomes more complicated to apply: while analyzing the tender gaze as enacted on-screen between characters or within narrative structures proves very insightful, it remains more ambiguous and possibly even contradictory when it is applied to the process of reception. Overall, the examples in the volume convincingly show that theater, film, and literature manifest a new relationship to the political by depicting and eliciting tenderness, compassion, care, and "perspective taking" (41); it is challenging to assess how this might translate into broader shifts in political perspectives and action.

The volume impressively and convincingly illustrates how productive the concept of the tender gaze is to analyze complex political interventions in film, literature, and art; it also inspires scholars to explore the concept further. One wonders, for example, how one might read social media with the tender gaze in mind? There also might be analytical value in creating contrasts and examining tensions: What, for example, is the opposite of a tender gaze and what does it mean when a gaze merely pretends to be tender? Beyond the gaze, it could be productive to think about tender touch, sound, images, and narratives circulating in different cultural spheres.