Dzik i dama. Szkic o magazynie „Die Freundin” dla nienormatywnych cis- i transpłciowych kobiet
The Boar and the Lady. A Sketch on “Die Freundin”, a Magazine for Non-Normative Cisgender and Transgender Women

Summary/Abstract: The article examines 194 digitized issues of the magazine “Die Freundin” (1924–1933) published during the Weimar Republic and addressed to lesbians and transgender women. Traditional archival research is combined with methods of magazine content analysis, but above all, with approaches from visual culture studies: in the analysis of the representations of femininity, the article employs semiological tools inspired by the texts of Roland Barthes and Allan Sekula to interpret photographs. The main research question concerns determining what political strategies are implemented through the magazine’s visual and textual content. The dominant strategy identified in the narrative is naturalization (non-normativity is presented as “boring”, calm, unrelated to the extravagance of nightlife, biologically based, and impossible to change). The materials indicate that the newspaper’s visual side deviates from its textual declarations: cover photographs predominantly feature cisgender women, with an almost complete absence of transgender women, and the beauty standards and photographic compositions are not diverse. At the same time, in “Die Freundin” pictorial representations of masculinity are almost totally eliminated or they are caricatured, as in the case of the porcelain figurine of a woman with a wild boar on one of the magazine’s covers.

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