Queer Elements: The Poetics and Politics of Antje Ravic Strubel's Literary Style

The fiction of Antje Ravic Strubel (b. 1974), author of the critically acclaimed novels Tupolew 134 (2004, Tupolev 134) and Kaltere Schichten der Luft (2007, Colder layers of air), is experimental, challenging, polyvalent, and socially critical. These facets of her work give shape to a writing style that is multiply queer. Her stories construct an array of dynamically queer identities and take queer approaches to narrative conventions and German cultural history. This essay develops the concept of queer style and explores connections between poetics and politics through five distinctive elements of Strubel's fiction: disorientation, uncanniness, writerly plurality, mysterious narrators, and multivalent symbolism. It features a reading of Strubel's lesser-known novel Fremd gehen (2002, Going astray) as exemplary of this queer style.