This paper presents a theory-driven Natural Language Processing model designed to examine the construction/contestation of masculinity and femininity in 71 German-language novels from Southeastern Europe between 1990 and 2025. The timeframe captures the critical transition from late-socialist legacies to post-war and transnational realities. A core objective is the tracking of gendered topoi—such as the village, the city, the home, the border—to analyze gender as a semiotic response to systemic power structures like totalitarianism and war. I am using computer tools to track how the experience of living through war or dictatorship changes the definition of being a man or a woman in these specific places. By investigating a corpus that bridges ethnic minority perspectives and migrant narratives, the study interrogates whether the German language functions as a critical external lens. It explores the hypothesis that writing in German enables a de-centering of the region’s traditional heroic gender archetypes, providing a subversive distance. To address the multi-dimensional nature of gender, this project integrates Pierre Bourdieu’s (1998) theoretical constructs of habitus, capital, and field into computationally traceable elements. It builds on existing approaches that analyze gender through pronoun–verb pairings but broadens the scope of feature extraction to include pronoun–noun, pronoun–adjective, pronoun-setting pairings, thus moving beyond purely action-based representations. Thus, the study provides a new empirical basis for understanding how German-language literature from Southeastern Europe serves as a transformative space for dismantling entrenched patriarchal archetypes.

Authors:
Claudia Spiridon Șerbu, Transilvania University, Romania

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Claudia Spiridon Șerbu is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at Transilvania University of Brașov, Romania.

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