Spotlight on Gender, Identity and Social Change

Across politics, technology, and personal relationships, today’s “identity debates” are, at their core, contests over who shapes discourse. This Spotlight brings together six German-language essays and interviews from newspapers exploring how the mechanisms of truth and belief are evolving: from Enlightenment-era ideas of intelligence to algorithmic text production; from changing patterns of male friendship to competing scripts of masculinity; from far-right “crisis of manhood” narratives to the quieter work of rethinking the categories we live by. Together, these pieces show how gender is never only “private” or “cultural,” but tightly linked to institutions, media ecosystems, and power. JOSHA’s editorial curation places these texts in dialogue to map a single question from multiple angles: what new forms of responsibility, literacy, and solidarity are needed when our old concepts of truth, masculinity, and even reality no longer hold?