Womanliness Instead of Masquerade: Gendered Masks

At the beginning of his Theories of Cold, Lethen asks himself whether it is “in the nature of the thing” that his “treatise has turned into a men’s book” (Lethen 1994, p. 14). He thus refers to Werner Krauss, whose rediscovery of a 17th-century oracle is a key text for the Theories of Cold. Krauss, in turn, attributes to his subject the task of “constructing a purely male world in which the polarization of the sexes is driven to the point of silencing the female voice” (ibid.).