The Failing Family : Changing Constellations of Gender, Intimacy, and Genre

This chapter examines a boundary-crossing archive of popular and countercinematic West, East, and post-unification German films that all focus on precarious intimacies: Dörrie’s Men (1985); Wortmann’s Maybe…Maybe Not (1994); Carow’s Coming Out (1989); and Grisebach’s Longing (2006). Shifting focus onto a consideration of men and masculinity in the postfeminist era, I analyze how these films subject the heteropatriarchal family to scrutiny, often exploring homosocial bonds and queer relations. In addition to investigating the precaritization of gender, sexuality, and intimacy pictured by these four films, this chapter sheds new light on the much vaunted “return to genre” in the German cinema of neoliberalism.