Abstract (eng)
This master’s thesis addresses the possibilities and potentials of a feminist re-reading of the Paris Commune (1871). The first chapter is dedicated to a reconstruction of the interpretations of the Paris Commune by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. From this, the argument is developed that these three theorists, by framing the Paris Commune as, among other things, a “workers’ revolution” or the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, formulate an androcentric position. This leads to the methodological consideration of decentering the focus in order to allow a feminist re-reading. Thus, in the second chapter, a variety of persons involved are explored, who had already organized themselves for everyday practices as well as in assemblies in the clubs as central spaces of debate over a longer period of time. These practices are examined in both their connection to the desire of transforming society as well as in their relation to the anti-feminist context of the Commune. On the one hand, this will draw attention to the defamation and repression especially of the communardes; on the other hand, it will be argued that an erasure of diverse participants from the historiography of the Commune was thereby reinforced and remains effective. Based on these considerations, the numerous practices, especially those of the communardes, will be placed in an overall societal context: They will be framed as (attempts of) transgressions of patriarchal, capitalist, and bourgeois gender relations and spatial order. The political-theoretical concepts of representation, transgression, prefiguration, praxis, and democratic experimentalism are updated on the basis of the feminist re-reading. This highlights the co-constitutive relationship between theory and praxis.