En la historia intelectual de América Latina existe una laguna respecto a la producción de las mujeres en el género de ensayo. Son los ensayos de identidad criolla, de hechura masculina, los que construyen el canon respecto a las temáticas y a las maneras de ser abordado. Los ensayos de género que las escritoras han realizado se articulan como respuesta a esta visión dominante de los procesos sociales, políticos y culturales de los países latinoamericanos. Revelan un fuerte descontento con la (...) construcción de la identidad femenina, una preocupación por la construcción de una ciudadanía plena y representan una respuesta a las demandas sociales políticas y culturales de las mujeres y otros grupos marginales. Las intelectuales debatieron, discutieron y polemizaron con las propuestas que al respecto portaban los discursos dominantes y el ensayo de género se vuelve el “arma de combate”. Lo que aquí se presenta, tiene como objetivo la recuperación de este corpus de conocimiento en la historia literaria de Cuba, Puerto Rico y República Dominicana. Una labor de arqueología literaria de temas, obras y autoras a partir del siglo XX. Se brinda, a partir del libro Mujeres ensayistas del Caribe Hispano: Hilvanando el silencio (2007) deAnna Freire Ashbaugh, Lourdes Rojas y Raquel Romeu, una visión panorámica del conjunto de ensayistas de cada país. Otras investigadoras como Catharina Vallejo, Ivette Sóñora, Carmen Dolores Hernández y Consuelo Meza Márquez ampliaran ese corpus y señalan algunos rasgos temáticos de la obra ensayística de autoras como Luisa Campuzano, Mirta Yáñez, Nara Araujo, Marta Núñez Sarmiento y Zaida Capote Cruz de Cuba; Concha Meléndez, Rosario Ferré, Norma Valle Ferrer, Nara Negrón Marreño y Silvia Álvarez Curbelo de Puerto Rico; y, de República Dominicana, Camila Henríquez Ureña, Carmita Landestoy, Carmen Durán y Rosa Inés Curiel Pichardo. (shrink)

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while (...) its feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

The essay analyses the utopian imaginary in women’s writings with specific reference to the 1970s. Since the late 19 th century, utopia as a genre becomes a space to deconstruct and re-elaborate women’s identity and subjectivity. The appropriation of the utopian paradigm enriches the classical critique of the existing social systems with the deconstruction of gender roles and female stereotypes as a means to fight gender discrimination as well as other forms of oppression which lie (...) at the foundation of the Western symbolic and social orders. It also implies the restructuring of the technical and stylistic devices of the utopian genre. The imaginary worlds represent a space of empowerment that will enable the transformation of power systems, gender and sexual policies against any discriminations. This transformation is seen as salvific for both men and women. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophies of America Reader: From the Popol Vuh to the Present ed. by Kim Díaz and Mathew A. FoustBernardo R. Vargas (bio)The Philosophies of America Reader: From the Popol Vuh to the Present. Edited by Kim Díaz and Mathew A. Foust. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. Pp. 480. Paperback $46.75, isbn 978-1-4742-9626-7.Philosophy in the United States continues to be among the least diverse disciplines in the humanities, dominated (...) statistically by white males, with the next largest group being white female philosophers.1 This lack of diversity affects how we define philosophy and who counts as a philosopher. As the editors of The Philosophies of America Reader, Kim Díaz and Mathew A. Foust, put it, "Just as history has fashioned and popularized distorted accounts of the 'discovery' of America, it has done the same in its presentation of American Philosophy" (p. xv). This exemplary collection of essays from across the Americas allows the readers and instructors to reimagine what we construe as philosophy and who we imagine an American philosopher to be.The editors offer diverse essays covering an impressive timeframe, ranging from the Popol Vuh, whose oral tradition from Guatemala predates Spanish colonization and was recorded in the mid-1500s, to contemporary philosophers such as Gregory Pappas. The collection excels in offering texts that typical philosophy anthologies are unlikely to include, which the editors call "unusual suspects" that have been historically marginalized, while also maintaining more familiar or "classical" figures (pp. xv–xvi). These "unusual suspects" include women, Latinx, American Indigenous, Black, and Caribbean thinkers.The Philosophies of America Reader offers various resources to enhance the student and instructor's experience. The book is structured into four themes: (1) Selfhood and Identity, (2) Knowing and Learning, (3) Aesthetics and Spirituality, and (5) Violence and Peace. The editors design these themes to fit the traditionally understood areas of philosophy of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. Even if the instructor's course description does not specifically target American Philosophy, these thematic categories are valuable for th ose who wish to incorporate a more diverse reading list. For example, these essays could easily apply to courses such as Critical Philosophy of Race, Introduction to Philosophy, or Introduction to Ethics. Each thematic section also features a "For Further Reading" segment, which includes selected secondary sources to broaden research or substitute texts. In addition, the editors provide a detailed [End Page 1] syllabus example, including a Course Description and Outline of the Course for a bi-weekly class, which is neatly divided into a 16-week reading schedule. They also include instructive sections such as a Note to the Teacher to aid in thinking through how to interact with the unfamiliar texts and a Note to the Student to guide their disposition and readings.Moreover, the text presents introductory essays for each thematic section. These essays provide an overview of the content and delve into the author's positionality, such as their geography, context, motivations for writing, race, ethnicity, and native tongue. The introductions are philosophically robust yet accessible to new philosophy students and are not filled with unnecessary philosophical jargon.Due to its large scope of thinkers, this text offers a vibrant opportunity to dialogue with philosophers who share or differ in their perspectives across the major thematic categories. The editors emphasize that although this is not a history of thought, the texts present lineages of progression, elaboration, and disagreement intended to guide instructors in connecting the texts with their students (p. xx). Furthermore, this allows the reader and the instructor to avoid isolating their discourse to a particular time, geography, gender, or race and ethnicity. In addition to the biographical and contextual information given in the introductions, a small yet helpful detail is a timeline of the selections that further contextualizes the readings.I wish to underscore two key clusters of essays amidst the vast array of 50 readings related to Asian-American and Mexican-American discourse for the instructor's consideration, particularly those teaching in the United States. These two large population groups deserve consideration as enrollment rates for Asian Americans and Hispanics (of whom Mexicans are the largest population... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface In this issue, one cluster of articles presents scholarly and creative work focused on Latin American queer politics. Each article reveals queer challenges—theoretical, aesthetic, political, ideological, libidinal, corporeal—to prevailing logics of heteronormativity and neoliberalism, and to asymmetrical processes of knowledge production and circulation. Rafael de la Dehesa examines how political responses to AIDS in Brazil enabled surprising alliances between NGOs, activists, and the state, which produced radical social (...) change and, at times, engendered exclusion and vulnerability. Christine Keating and Amy Lind’s essay explores indigenous and transfeminist efforts to transform the Ecuadorian constitution, producing new conceptions of both state and family. Constanza Tabbush and Melina Gaona trace the rise and fall of a neighborhood organization in Argentina called Tupac Amaru, which provided a space of encounter for lesbian, non-gender normative, and marginalized women. In a review of recent work on Latin American sexualities, Juan Camilo Galeano Sánchez finds LGBT people across Latin America and the diaspora deploying “queer revolutionary gestures” as a form of resistance to social, political, and economic marginalization. María Amelia Viteri’s commentary examines the intellectual trajectories of a network of queer scholars from across the Americas. The art essay by Tara Daly engages Iquitos artist Christian Bendayán’s visual efforts to queer prevailing conceptions of the Amazon, and tatiana de la tierra’s* poems offer a deep celebration of female eroticism. * We have spelled tatiana de la tierra’s name in lower case in accordance with the wishes of her literary executors. 256Preface Another cluster of essays highlights reproductive rights and race in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez and Lynn M. Morgan study the tactics that right-wing, US-based organizations deploy against sexual and reproductive rights in Mexico and Central America. Jennifer L. Shoaff examines the Dominican cultural construction of the Haitian mother as “beggar-mother,” which shores up ideas of pathological black maternity. Ana-Maurine Lara’s article considers the gendered and sexual logics of anti-blackness, and anti-Haitianism, in the Dominican Republic. The provocation for our cluster on representations of queer identities and politics in Latin America came, broadly, from developments in Latin America in recent decades: the wave of LGBT organizing around issues from same-sex marriage to transgender rights, alongside the continued, if not escalated, violence against trans, travestis, and other queer people in countries throughout the region. More immediately, it came from a symposium on Latin American/Latin@ queer and sexuality studies, cosponsored by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS) and the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), Amherst, in March 2013. Several of the papers published here were initially presented at that event and have been complemented and extended by other analytical essays and creative material on similar questions. Based on their familiarity with the debates, Sonia Alvarez, UMass CLACLS Director and professor of political science, and Amy Lind, head of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, offered invaluable input for this issue, and we thank them for their intellectual generosity and collaborative spirit. Three of the articles in the cluster take us inside the complex relations between queer movements and neoliberal institutions, illustrating the distinctive ways these dynamics play out in different national contexts and political configurations. In “NGOs, Governmentality, and the Brazilian Response to AIDS: A Multistranded Genealogy of the Current Crisis,” Rafael de la Dehesa argues that the AIDS crisis served as a “doorway to the state” for marginalized actors, such as sex workers and LGBT activists. These groups pushed for and won a national AIDS program that dramatically reduced rates of mortality and new infections in Brazil in the 1990s through universal access to treatment and a nonstigmatizing approach to prevention. Its success was based, in part, on World Bank Preface 257 loans and, in part, on a participatory model of public-private partnerships characteristic of neoliberal government. De la Dehesa argues that, “Far from encapsulating activism in a seamless web of biopolitical management... nodes of articulation between officials and activists became sites of conflict and productive tension.” However, while the alliances between NGOs... (shrink)

In the postmodern era the impact media have on our lives is continuously growing. Not only do media reflect reality, but they also shape and reconstruct it according to the public's hopes, fears or fantasies. Reality itself is not the sum of all objective processes and things, but it is socially constructed by the discourses that reflect and produce power. On the other hand, the public does not simply accept or reject the media messages, but interprets them according to its (...) social background (Zoonen, 1994, p. 41). My interest lies in identifying how are women represented in the media and what are the dominant images of femininity, as well as the alternative ones. There is a strong connection between image and identity as the latter can not be constructed without the former. Basically, the postmodern subject has been reduced to an image, therefore the image plays an important part in constructing the feminine identity. (shrink)

Had only from the early feminist social status and rights of women, the pursuit of development to the differences between women and men and the women's own recognition of the unique construction of identity. In the era of globalization, migration and cultural identity of the nation's more to gender studies of fuzzy multi-development of this condition, topics at the forefront of contemporary gender studies is that female homosexuality and the resulting strange phenomena. Both theoretical (...) research projects has begun to attract the attention of domestic scholars, and the status quo may be carried out with appropriate domestic comparative study. Continuing its author's previous work on cultural studies, the present essay offers a theoretic reflection on the origin and development of Western feminism in the context of cultural studies. To the author, contemporary feminism has long shifted its emphasis from pursuing women's social right and position onto the level of identifying themselves as female and constructing their own unique identity different from male. In the current age of globalization, the large-scale immigration and the obscurity of national and cultural identity enable gender study to develop in a pluralistic orientation. The main focus of contemporary gender studies is put on lesbian and queer studies, which have already attracted the attention of domestic scholars and which will be further carried out in comparison with the current Chinese practice. (shrink)

This article examines the influence of race/ethnicity and gender identity on the politics of American Indian and Hispanic women leaders. The data are drawn from personal interviews with 50 public officials and grassroots leaders active in state, local, or tribal politics in New Mexico. Borrowing from Tolleson Rinehart's model of “gender consciousness,” the author creates a classification scheme for assessing the role that race/ethnicity and gender play in the political ideology and motives of the leaders. (...) The findings reveal that racial/ethnic identity is generally more important to Native leaders and grassroots activists, while gender identity is somewhat more salient for Hispanic leaders and public officials. Her classification system for measuring racial/ethnic and gender identity is useful for analyzing qualitative data and may be helpful to other researchers. (shrink)

The essays deal with diverse topics including the role of women in Caribbean art; the development of "women's history" and "gendered history"; the ...

Despite the shifting ideologies of gender of the seventeenth century, the arrival of the first actresses caused deep social anxiety: theatre gave women a voice to air grievances and to contest, through their own bodies, traditional gender roles. This paper studies two of the best-known actresses, Nell Gwyn and Anne Bracegirdle, and the different public personae they created to negotiate their presence in this all-male world. In spite of their differing strategies, both women gained fame and (...) profit in the male-dominated theatrical marketplace, confirming them as the ultimate “gender benders,” who appropriated the male role of family’s supporter and bread-winner. (shrink)

The inclusion of girls and women in sport at all levels depends on single sex categories for most sports from puberty onwards, because of the biological differences between the sexes. Most sport is, by definition, competitive; involving invasion games, teams, leagues, races, competitions and sometimes rankings, from foundation to excellence. Girls and women are underrepresented, particularly in traditional sport, as recognised by the UK Sports Councils and most governing bodies of sport. This paper uses feminist philosophy: Lister on (...) androcentric citizenship, and Fraser on justice as balance, framing, recognition, representation and redistribution. It investigates the impact on the inclusion of girls and women, of eligibility policies adopting ‘self-identification of gender’ guidelines for the inclusion of transgender people in sport, at participation rather than elite levels. It explores fairness and equality as incorporated in law in the 2010 Equality Act in Britain, and contributes to ‘equality evidence’ available to the UK Sports Councils and GBS. These bodies are charged with developing fair and inclusive evidence-based eligibility criteria, in sports participation settings, for both girls and women, and transgender people. (shrink)

Personal identity requires agentic mediation of overlapping social structures and categories; and further the maintenance of a coherent self across different life contexts. A central means of achieving/maintaining identity is through self-narratives and modes of discursive positioning. In this article, we examine the intersection of two key identity categories, gender and nationality, in the biographical accounts of two female friends. Both categories can be seen to structure the speakers’ identities as particular types of people, and to interact in (...) mutually defining ways. However, the speakers actively negotiate these structures and constraints to produce specific versions of themselves. While, on occasion, they invoke national stereotypes in constructing their identities, they both counter-position themselves in relation to gendered expectations within their respective national contexts. Drawing on selected extracts, we examine the discursive strategies through which they construct and maintain such identities across different biographical contexts. (shrink)

The inclusion of girls and women in sport at all levels depends on single sex categories for most sports from puberty onwards, because of the biological differences between the sexes. Most sport is, by definition, competitive; involving invasion games, teams, leagues, races, competitions and sometimes rankings, from foundation to excellence. Girls and women are underrepresented, particularly in traditional sport, as recognised by the UK Sports Councils and most governing bodies of sport. This paper uses feminist philosophy: Lister on (...) androcentric citizenship, and Fraser on justice as balance, framing, recognition, representation and redistribution. It investigates the impact on the inclusion of girls and women, of eligibility policies adopting ‘self-identification of gender’ guidelines for the inclusion of transgender people in sport, at participation rather than elite levels. It explores fairness and equality as incorporated in law in the 2010 Equality Act in Britain, and contributes to ‘equality evidence’ available to the UK Sports Councils and GBS. These bodies are charged with developing fair and inclusive evidence-based eligibility criteria, in sports participation settings, for both girls and women, and transgender people. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bearing the Other and Bearing Sexuality: Women and Gender in Levinas’s “And God Created Woman”Deborah Achtenberg (bio)Much ink has been spilled on the question of the role of women for Levinas’s ethics in accounts containing a gamut of claims, from Stella Sandford’s that woman is aligned with sexual difference in such a way that Levinas’s attempts to install her within the human fail,1 to Diane Perpich’s (...) that one reason Otherwise than Being is preferable to Totality and Infinity is that the ethics in the former does not rest on a failed narrative of family life and woman’s role in it as ethics does in the latter,2 to Claire Katz’s that there is a rich, positive ethical component to women’s role for Levinas since he uses maternity as an example of being-for-the-other.3This essay complements those accounts by giving a detailed analysis of the discussion of women in Levinas’s talmudic commentary, “And God Created Woman.”4 Specifically, I ask whether Levinas is right, in his commentary, that, according to Talmud Berakhot 61a, women are not ultimately inferior to men because both men and women are human and their humanity precedes the division of humanity into male [End Page 137] and female. I pursue the question by reading the talmudic passage the way Levinas, in his commentary, tells us that we should read Talmud, namely, by situating texts quoted in it in their broader textual context in Torah rather than treating them as proof texts.When I put quotations cited in Berakhot 61a in their textual context, I find that the male figures treated in the texts from Torah are dismayingly dismissive of women in distress, suggesting that women are treated as inferior, but then learn their mistake and treat the women as equal or even superior, suggesting that Talmud does see them as having a humanity that precedes sexual difference. Nonetheless, I go on to argue, though the talmudic passage does not see women as ultimately inferior to men, it nonetheless treats them as inferior on the day-to-day level and such treatment belies the attempt to treat them as human.I go on to ask about Levinas’s stance toward this problem in the talmudic text, Does he accept the treatment of women as inferior? I argue, to the contrary, that Levinas sees the problem and attempts to overcome it by criticizing two ways the talmudic passage treats women as inferior on the day-to-day level: he rejects the passages’ prohibitions on certain types of male contact with women—such as looking at them!—and he reinterprets its association of women with makeup and deception. His stance is more complicated, though, because he goes on to find a kernel of truth to preserve in each of the problematic talmudic positions: in the first, the fundamental ethical ambiguity of sexuality, since sexuality points toward the other as other but also toward one’s own satisfaction; in the second, what we might anachronistically call women’s ways of knowing that, for Levinas, have a certain ethical superiority over the ways men know. The two resolutions have their own problems, I maintain, since if Levinas is to avoid gender norming and gender hierarchy, he needs to make it clear that both the problematic ethical ambiguity of sexuality and also the ways of knowing he thinks are ethically superior are not essentially associated more with women than with men. [End Page 138]1Reading Levinas’s way, I search out the context of quotations, taking them not as proof texts, but as invitations to interpret. In “And God Created Woman,” he says, “each time a biblical verse is brought in as proof it is not likely that the sages of the Talmud are looking in these texts, squeezed every which way in spite of grammar, for a direct proof of the thesis they are upholding. It is always an invitation to search out the context of the quotation” (NT 166/DSS 130–31). As a feminist, when I search out the context of the quotations Levinas refers to in his reading of Berakhot 61a, I... (shrink)

A striking number of hysterical or insane female characters populate Francophone women's writing. To discover why, Orlando reads novels from a variety of cultures, teasing out key elements of Francophone identity struggles.

A striking number of hysterical or insane female characters populate Francophone women's writing. To discover why, Orlando reads novels from a variety of cultures, teasing out key elements of Francophone identity struggles.

Although we can observe noticeable progress in gender diversity on corporate boards, these boards remain far from gender balanced. Our paper builds on social identity theory to examine the impact of corporate elites—men and women who sit on multiple corporate boards—on board diversity. We extend the main argument of social identity theory concerning favouritism based on homophily by suggesting that boards with men with multiple appointments are unwilling to include female board members to protect the monopoly (...) value generated by their elite status. The empirical analysis, based on DAX 30 firms in the period of 2010–2015, shows that the presence of multi-board men is negatively associated with women’s participation, while the presence of multi-board women and other women on management boards is positively related to gender diversity on boards. Furthermore, robustness tests support and confirm our conclusion that multi-board men have a significant association with board diversity, even with small size. Additionally, we find a significant effect arising from pressure related to the introduction of gender quotas in Germany, effective in 2016, indicating the effectiveness of gender quota policies for board gender diversity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 341 Petrus Liu Thinking Gender in the Age of the Beijing Consensus Originally formulated to dispute biologically deterministic explanations of women’s subordination, the analytical distinction between sex and gender has developed in unexpected ways in transitions from one language to another. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from John Money’s sexological writings to Simone (...) de Beauvoir’s dictum, “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” Anglophone feminists in the 1970s developed the distinction between sex (understood as anatomy) and gender (understood as social identity) to argue that a woman’s biological sex ought not dictate the kind of work she should do or the kind of life she should live.1 In her landmark 1975 essay, “The Traffic in Women,” Gayle Rubin coined the phrase “sex/gender system” to examine “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”2 In more recent years, however, the distinction 1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Paris: Gallimard, 1949; New York: Knopf, 1993), 281. Citations refer to the Knopf edition. For an account of feminist reformulations of John Money and Robert Stoller, see Jennifer Germon, Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 2. Gayle S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 34. It is worth mentioning that sex in Rubin’s sex/gender system refers to sexual practice rather than the distinction between male and female. This understanding forms the basis of her theoretical disagreements with Judith Butler, who preserves the semantic ambiguity of sex (as 342 Petrus Liu between sex and gender has taken on an entirely different meaning as it comes to inform transgender movements and politics seeking to decouple a person’s sex assignment at birth from their future gender identity. At the same time, theories of intersectionality, women-of-color feminisms, and transnational feminisms have all developed their own theses of gender variability to contest the myth of the universal woman. The life of gender—in academic theory, politics, and social movements— has confounded the original intentions of its American theorists. It is clear that there is no singular or stable account of gender; rather, gender is always in a state of flux, incessantly rethought and reforged by the demands of an increasingly complex and asymmetric world.3 Gender is always a translation—from one discipline, context, or language to another—ineluctably intertwined with the geopolitical problems created by the violences of imperialism, colonialism, and transnational capitalism. The translation of gender into non-European languages, such as Chinese, raises questions about whether spaces previously resistant or exterior to world capitalism are now being assimilated and enfolded into the structure of neoliberal globalization defined by the Washington Consensus. Against this view, some critics maintain that China’s precipitous ascent presents an alternative model of development for the Global South called the Beijing Consensus. Considering how gender has entered different languages, including Chinese, to create new coinages that may at times appear as instruments of an imperial takeover, Judith Butler argues that the translation of gender actually offers a path of linguistic humility for English, a reminder that we cohabit a multilingual world in which no one ever owned the term.4 But how exactly do we describe that complex, multilingual world and how does gender both gender and sexuality) as the point of departure for a different kind of feminist inquiry. See Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, “Interview: Sexual Traffic,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 67. 3. See Heather Love, ed. “Rethinking Sex.” Special issue, GLQ 17, no. 2 (2011): 1–221. This collection of essays conveys a sense of how Rubin’s methodological distinction between sex and gender has given rise to new ways of thinking across different disciplines about sex radicalism, crip sexuality, Black feminism, and sex trafficking. 4. Judith Butler, “Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism,” philoSOPHIA 9, no. 1 (Winter 2019). Petrus Liu 343 transform it? How is the translation of gender inflected by the material conditions... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women in TibetRae Erin DachilleWomen in Tibet. Edited by Janet Gyatso and Hanna Havnevik. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 436 pp.Empowerment, transcendence, and the performance of identity are common themes in the study of gender and religion across cultures. As these themes are elucidated across cultures and in different historical moments, they are troubled by a persistent refusal of gender as a category of (...) enduring symbolic and real meaning by both historical and contemporary cultural actors. In the cases of Tibetan and Buddhist studies, the approach to womanhood as a category is repeatedly subsumed by concerns with religious or ethnic and political identity. This trend has forced many scholars to appeal to the symbolic realm of the iconic female or the construction of womanhood from sparse individual accounts as representative of an artificial subcultural entity. In response to the impasse created by these methods, the editors of Women in Tibet have chosen an approach that seeks to level the field. In doing so, they have produced a work that combines textual and anthropological projects aimed at recovering the specificities of lived womanhood across a range of historical moments. Allying themselves with a historical versus a feminist agenda, they succeed in laying the groundwork for a new approach to the study of womanhood.This approach surveys the vast artillery of historically embedded social dynamics available for Tibetan women to emulate, embody, or resist. In the diversity of their selections, Gyatso and Havnevik intentionally leave room for the possibility that women continue to perform as historical actors in spite of as well as because of their association with womanhood and the disempowering social and religious stereotypes attached to it. In leaving this issue open-ended, the editors sustain the tension between approaches that locate "specifically female" elements within traditions and those that posit the category of womanhood to be subservient to other cultural categories and phenomena. Exploring the participation of women in lineages as diverse as the oracular described by Hildegard Diemberger, the medical addressed by Tashi Tsering, and the imperial aristocratic presented by Helga Uebach, the essays in this volume represent an oscillation in the perceived relevance of femaleness. Inconsistency in the priority of the category of womanhood in historical interpretation reflects fluctuating attitudes on the part of Tibetans themselves as well as of European and American scholars as interpreters of the region's religious, social, and political realities.Asceticism in particular has been a highly charged site for the exploration of these themes in both Buddhist and Christian studies, along with determining the specific nature of female monasticism. As an instance of the deliberate embrace of a social category thriving upon the confluence of the ideal and the marginal, asceticism provides a lens for considering the ways in which women exploited opportunities to survive and excel spiritually and socially, often in spite [End Page 172] of female embodiment. Several of the authors in this volume address the tension between the socially sanctioned spaces for female asceticism within the nunnery or hermitage and the identities that individuals and communities of female ascetics strive to inhabit. Kurtis Schaeffer, for example, presents the tensions operating within acts of ascetic self-clarification in the autobiography of the medieval Tibetan hermitess Orgyan Chokyi. This account provides a rare glimpse of a historical woman defining her marginality and femaleness in relationship to Buddhist notions of suffering. Schaeffer reminds the reader that even from the hermetically sealed space of the cave, social, geographic, and historical elements play a fundamental role in constructing an individual's narrative identity and conditioning the terms of her self-realization.Charlene Makley's astute observations on the identity of nuns in contemporary Amdo taps into the various power dynamics at play in the social construction of nuns as parasitic, marginal, and dispensable members of the Labrang community. These acts of identification occur in the enduring and influential discursive field of gossip centered upon the "inappropriate otherness" of female monastics and their rumored failure to perfectly embody what Makley, following Charles Keyes, terms the "third gender" of celibate monasticism. Makley uncovers the powerful signifiers of the body of the nun in this geographical and historical context as... (shrink)

Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and opportunity (...) that continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residences as well as essays that analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory--such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing. While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education. (shrink)

There are a broad variety of sex and gender resonances in sport, from the clash of traditional ideas of femininity and athleticism represented by female athletes, to the culture of homophobia in mainstream male sport. Despite the many sociological and cultural volumes addressing these subjects, this collection is the first to focus on the philosophical writings that they have inspired. The editors have selected twelve of the most thought-provoking philosophical articles on these subjects from the past thirty years, (...) to create a valuable and much needed resource. Written by established experts from all over the world, the essays in this collection cover four major themes: sport and the construction of the female objectification and the sexualization of sport homophobia sex boundaries: obstruction, naturalization and opposition. The book gathers a broad range of philosophical viewpoints on gender in sport into one unique source, subjecting the philosophical origins and characteristics of some of the most controversial topics in sport to rigorous scrutiny. With a balance of male and female contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, and a comprehensive introduction and postscript to contextualize the source material, Philosophical Perspectives on Gender in Sport and Physical Activityis essential reading for all students of the philosophy of sport, sport and gender, and feminist philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reclaiming the Works of Early Modern Women Authorship, Gender, and Interpretation in the Nouveau recueil de lettres des dames de ce temps (1635)1Aurora Wolfgang (bio) and Sharon Diane Nell (bio)Reclaiming the forgotten texts of women writers has been a major feminist undertaking of the last half-century. Indeed, believing in the importance of this sort of work, we have each spent much of our careers studying the (...) women writers absent from our own graduate-school education. What follows, however, is a cautionary tale about discovery and reclamation: first, our discovery of what we thought was a hitherto-neglected text by eminent seventeenth-century writer Madeleine de Scudéry—her Lettres amoureuses de divers auteurs de ce temps (1641); second, our discovery that the text was not (even as indexed in Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History microfilm collection) authored by Scudéry but was written instead by a Franciscan priest, Jacques Du Bosc. Clearly, our second discovery pointed out both our own rush to judgment as well as that of other literary scholars interested in the tenuous project of historical reclamation. In this essay, we seek to explore the implications of attribution and authorship for our cautionary tale. Does the fact that a work is not Scudéry’s Lettres amoureuses but instead Du Bosc’s Nouveau recueil de lettres des dames de ce temps (1635) diminish its importance to the history of women’s letters?The First DiscoveryWe became interested in Scudéry’s Lettres amoureuses because of a brief description of the text in Joan DeJean’s Tender Geographies, a pioneering study of women novelists of the seventeenth century. DeJean describes a one-volume work that constituted the first publication of one of the most important writers of the seventeenth century, Madeleine de Scudéry. This work was a reversal of and “forceful response to” the so-called Ovidian model of epistolary fiction in which a “seduced and abandoned” woman complains in letter form about the infidelity of her male lover. In Scudéry’s text, however, men wrote long letters complaining about the women who did not reciprocate their love (DeJean, Tender Geographies 79).We obtained a copy of the Lettres amoureuses from the Women’s History microfilm collection, which was created in the 1970s (published 1983) in order to make available [End Page 1] an extensive array of texts and documents relating to women’s lives. We were surprised to see that all of the letters in the Lettres amoureuses were written by women—not men. Moreover, most of the letters were written by women to other women. No letters by men were included at all. Our copy of Lettres amoureuses contained letters and responses written between women, meant to show the excellence of women’s writing skill. The letters discussed and debated a wide variety of topics of interest to seventeenth-century French women; more strikingly, however, they reflected a close-knit homosocial world of women who openly expressed love, devotion, desire, and longing for each other’s company.Given the differences between our copy of Lettres amoureuses and the text described by DeJean, we wondered if we were looking at the same book. Was our collection the one to which DeJean referred? Yes and no. In another DeJean article about the Lettres amoureuses, we discovered that DeJean had used a particular copy of the text, one found in the holdings of Harvard’s Houghton Library. Upon first obtaining a microfilm copy of the Houghton volume, and later examining the physical book itself in Houghton’s rare books room, we saw that it (unlike our own copy) did indeed contain only letters by men who complain about their female beloveds. At this point, we thought we had discovered a second volume to Scudéry’s work: it seemed clear to us that the Lettres amoureuses had been halved at some point in the last several centuries and that we had a chance to reunite the volumes. After all, the preface in the Houghton volume tells the reader, “Si vous receuez fauorablement ce volume, ie vous en prepare un second” [“If you receive this volume favorably, I will prepare a second one... (shrink)

Biology is seen not merely as a privileged oppressor of women but as a co-victim of masculinist social assumptions. We see feminist critique as one of the normative controls that any scientist must perform whenever analyzing data, and we seek to demonstrate what has happened when this control has not been utilized. Narratives of fertilization and sex determination traditionally have been modeled on the cultural patterns of male/female interaction, leading to gender associations being placed on cells and (...) their components. We also find that when gender biases are controlled, new perceptions of these intracellular and extracellular relationships emerge. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir and the Colonial Experience presents a gendered and female perspective of French colonialism between 1946 and 1962. Beauvoir’s colonial reflections can help us to better gauge how women—White, Asian, Arab, Caribbean, Latina, mixed race, and Black—decipher the crimes and injustices of French colonialism.

Dynamic engineering models have yet to be evaluated in the context of feminist engineering ethics. Decision-making concerning gender in dynamic modeling design is a gender and ethical issue that is important to address regardless of the system in which the dynamic modeling is applied. There are many dynamic modeling tools that operationally include the female population, however, there is an important distinction between females and women; it is the difference between biological sex and the social construct (...) of gender, which is fluid and changes over time and geography. The ethical oversight in failing to represent or misrepresenting gender in model design when it is relevant to the model purpose can have implications for model validity and policy model development. This paper highlights this gender issue in the context of feminist engineering ethics using a dynamic population model. Women are often represented in this type of model only in their biological capacity, while lacking their gender identity. This illustrative example also highlights how language, including the naming of variables and communication with decision-makers, plays a role in this gender issue. (shrink)

Social and political theorists have traced in detail how individuals come to possess gender, sex and racial identities. This book examines the nature of these identities. Georgia Warnke argues that identities, in general, are interpretations and, as such, have more in common with textual understanding than we commonly acknowledge. A racial, sexed or gendered understanding of who we and others are is neither exhaustive of the 'meanings' we can be said to have nor uniquely correct. We are neither always, (...) or only, black or white, men or women or males or females. Rather, all identities have a restricted scope and can lead to injustices and contradictions when they are employed beyond that scope. In concluding her argument, Warnke considers the legal and policy implications that follow for affirmative action, childbearing leave, the position of gays in the military and marriage between same-sex partners. (shrink)

The present essay discusses how women calypsonians in the English-speaking Caribbean use Calypso performances as a theatrical platform to offer a gendered critique of the nation and engage in a dialogue, which despite exhibiting pride in the nation, questions its various exclusions in ways that seek to redefine dominant constructions of the nation as ‘we’. Not only do they offer a vision of the nation and its cultural aspects that is more inclusive, they also speak out against cultural (...) and political oppression. I analyse specific performances by Singing Sandra (Trinidad) and Queen Ivena (Antigua) from my position as an ‘indigenous-outsider’ and ‘outsider within’ in order to demonstrate that Calypso performance is a post-colonial form of theatre in the English-speaking Caribbean that is being used by women as a site for feminist action and agency. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the relatively recent integration of feminist thinking in the discipline of International Relations. We argue that the theoretical foundations of International Relations are still primarily based on traditional male–female dichotomies, particularly that of separate public and private spheres. By extension, women are largely excluded from state power and decision making. The state is itself gendered. The growing recognition of the links between the global economy and gender forces us to engage with International (...) Relations in foreign and international policy. In this article we look at feminist interpretations of three main International Relations areas: international security, human rights, and international political economy and their implications for gender policies in the Caribbean. We also look at the contributions of Caribbean women to the international feminist agenda and suggest a research agenda for ongoing feminist theorizing in the discipline of International Relations. (shrink)

This book presents in-depth investigation of the language used about women and ageing in public discourse, and compares this with the language used by women to express their personal, lived experience of ageing. It takes a linguistic approach to identify how messages contained in public discourse influence how individual women evaluate their own ageing, and particularly their ageing appearance. It begins by establishing the wider cultural context that produces prevailing attitudes to women, before turning to an (...) analysis of representations of the ageing female body in beauty and cosmetic advertising and the lifestyle media. The focus then moves to a detailed investigation of women’s own perceptions of the process of ageing and of their ageing appearance as revealed through their personal narratives. The final chapters challenge dominant attitudes to women and ageing by presenting two case studies of women who for different reasons and in different ways refuse to conform to cultural expectations. This work provides a platform for further academic research in the fields of linguistics, gerontology, gender and media studies; as well as offering meaningful applications in the wider domains of business and advertising. (shrink)

This article focuses on the relationship between memory, female identity and the history of women: issues and areas of scholarship that have a comparatively recent history, but already present a rich spectrum of contrasting approaches and studies. In the case at hand, interpretations rooted in Foucault’s genealogical approach are contrasted with more recent postcolonial studies, against the backdrop of the political history of European and American feminism, a position that can scarcely be reduced to the more familiar terms (...) of the debate between philosophers and neuroscientists. The writing that springs from female memory is not the function of an alleged specificity of the female brain, but the product of the ability of a specific cultural subject to construct a genealogy from the point of view of its unprecedented reality: a seemingly minor “supplement,” but one that has the power to subvert the main corpus of history and knowledge, as Virginia Woolf already showed in magisterial terms as early as 1929. (shrink)

_Gendered Agents_, edited by Silvestra Mariniello andPaul A. Bové, presents essays by influential feminist theorists who challenge traditional Western epistemology and suggest new directions for feminism. By examining both literary and historical discourses, such critics as Gayatri Spivak, Hortense Spillers, and Lauren Berlant assess questions of sexuality, ethics, race, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and identity. Gathered from various issues of the journal _boundary 2_, the essays in _Gendered Agents_ seek to transform the model of Western academic knowledge by restructuring its priorities and (...) values. In the introduction, Mariniello urges feminists to begin anew but take as their starting place the achievements of feminism and feminist theory: an understanding of language that considers the implications of silence, the motivation to decompartmentalize experience, and the acknowledgement that everything is political._ _Challenging both a canonical organization of knowledge and the persistently self-referential "ghettoization" of feminism, contributors subsequently tackle subjects as diverse as pre-Marxist France, the American fetus, black intellectuals, queer nationality, and the art of literary interpretation. _Contributors_. Lauren Berlant, Karen Brennan, Margaret Cohen, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Freeman, Carol Jacobs, Silvestra Mariniello, Larysa Mykyta, Laura Rice, Ivy Schweitzer, Doris Sommer, Hortense J. Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Wilt. (shrink)

Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity.

A collection of essays which considers how the personal is political. The intertwining of gender with class and ethinicity is examined along with a technological theory of gender and parenting. Emphasis is placed upon the gendered perspective in political theory in this text.

This research aspires to represent the subversion of pre-defined gender roles in the novels; The Shadow of the Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto, Butterfly Season by Natasha Ahmed, and Stained by Abda Khan. The researchers aim to depict the destabilization of gender-based stereotyped identity from the Pakistani perspective. The selected method of study is Feminist Analysis by Tyson, which examines literature as a medium to represent feminist issues, whereas; the theoretical angle of “Matrix of Domination” from Collins’ Feminist/ (...) class='Hi'>Gender theory is used as a principle to analyze and depict the subversion of pre-defined gender roles in the selected novels. This study aims to establish the notion of gender as a social construct that could be subverted through literary discourses that have the potential to challenge the power-based gender roles within a patriarchal society. In this regard, different critical works of prominent theorists and writers have been discussed briefly in the literature review to project the significance of the works by contemporary Pakistani women writers as a medium to subvert identities formed by their society. Gender is also a means of power through which the dominant seeks to control the subordinate. The objective of this research is to suggest that gender is socially constructed, therefore, it can be deconstructed through literature. The selected novels exemplify the current gender inclinations of today’s Pakistan with the pen of female writers. Stereotyped gender identity is a socially constructed vice that divides humans into segments, hence it is required of the contemporary discourses to decenter such power discourses that perpetuate hegemonic boundaries and restrict the women into social shackles of imposed identities. (shrink)

Abstract:AbstractDrawing from qualitative data in a Southern African context, this article explores meanings assigned to names for female genitalia to establish whether males and females assign the same meanings to the same vocabulary used in naming or whether they associate the same vocabulary with different meanings. The study illustrates that while males associate the meanings of terms for female genitalia with well-established, stigmatized views of women, female informants associate the same terms with different meanings that provide (...) alternative views about women and, at the same time, appear to be a form of reclamation of Southern African women’s personhood, identity, and agency. Although males, through these vocabulary items, metaphorically associate female genitalia with possession, which discursively constructs women as powerless objects that can be owned and commoditized, females draw from the philosophy of Africana womanism, indicating that even in asymmetrically structured societies, some women subjectively and purposefully construct their own identities as strong, smart, socially conscious, and independent. (shrink)

We used a multi-dimensional framework to assess current stereotypes of men and women. Specifically, we sought to determine (1) how men and women are characterized by male and female raters, (2) how men and women characterize themselves, and (3) the degree of convergence between self-characterizations and charcterizations of one’s gender group. In an experimental study, 628 U.S. male and female raters described men, women, or themselves on scales representing multiple dimensions of the two (...) defining features of gender stereotypes, agency and communality: assertiveness, independence, instrumental competence, leadership competence (agency dimensions), and concern for others, sociability and emotional sensitivity (communality dimensions). Results indicated that stereotypes about communality persist and were equally prevalent for male and female raters, but agency characterizations were more complex. Male raters generally descibed women as being less agentic than men and as less agentic than female raters described them. However, female raters differentiated among agency dimensions and described women as less assertive than men but as equally independent and leadership competent. Gender stereotypes also were evident in self-ratings, with female raters rating themselves as less agentic than male raters and male raters rating themselves as less communal than female raters, although there were exceptions (e.g., no differences in independence and sociability self-ratings for men and women). Comparisons of self-ratings and ratings of men and women in general indicated that women tended to characterize themselves in more stereotypic terms – as less assertive and less competent in leadership – than they characterized others in their gender group. Men, in contrast, characterized themselves in less stereotypic terms – as more communal. Overall, our results show that a focus on facets of agency and communality can provide deeper insights about stereotype content than a focus on overall agency and communality. (shrink)

Existing research on women’s construction of professional identities and, more specifically, on leader identities in the workplace, has traditionally focused mainly on western contexts. This article aims to extend this focus by investigating the position of women in the workplace in India. We do this by discursively analyzing audio-taped semi-structured interviews with women who are working in the corporate sector in India. The aim of these analyses is to present a number of case studies about the unique (...) challenges that women face at the workplace in the urban Indian context, especially when they take up leadership positions. The issues they grapple with are the collision of the traditional dominant discourses on appropriate female behavior and the new professional identities that these women wish to embrace. The paper discusses how these female professionals mainly construct two quite diverging identities: either as nurturing mentors or as aggressive professionals who are involved in activities traditionally viewed as “a man’s domain”. Conclusions are then drawn regarding how these professional identities acquiesce to, counter, or — as is the case in one interview — carefully mould, hegemonic discourses of femininity in India. (shrink)

There have been many different historical-intellectual accounts of the shaping and development of concepts of liberty in pre-Enlightenment Europe. This volume is unique for addressing the subject of liberty principally as it is discussed in the writings of women philosophers, and as it is theorized with respect to women and their lives, during this period. The volume covers ethical, political, metaphysical, and religious notions of liberty, with some chapters discussing women's ideas about the metaphysics of free will, (...) and others examining the topic of women's freedom in their moral and personal lives as well as in the public socio-political domain. In some cases, these topics are situated in relation to the emergence of the concept of autonomy in the late eighteenth century, and in others, with respect to recent feminist theorizing about relational autonomy and internalized oppression. Many of the chapters draw upon a wide range of genres, including polemical texts, poetry, plays, and other forms of fiction, as well as standard philosophical treatises. Taken as a whole, this volume shows how crucial it is to recover the too-long forgotten views of female and women-friendly male philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the process of recovering these voices, our understanding of philosophy in the early modern period is not only expanded, but also significantly enhanced, toward a more accurate and gender-inclusive history of our discipline. (shrink)

Building on the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, literary critics, and feminist philosophers of science, the essays in Women Out of Place: the Gender of Agency and Race of Nationality investigate the linkages between agency and race for what they reveal about constructions of masculinity and femininity and patterns of domesticity among groups seeking to resist varied forms of political and economic domination through a subnational ideology of racial and cultural redemption. Does agency have a gender? Does (...) nationality have a race? Does the race of nationality predetermine the gender of agency? This volume asks these questions of a variety of nationalist ideologies, some at the same point in history, others as precursors of or predecessors to an initial nationalist formation. Contributors are: Richard G. Fox, Eva Haseby-Darvas, Paulette Pierce, Deborah Rubin, Louisa Schein, Carol A. Smith, Jacqueline True. (shrink)

As the lowest in the caste hierarchy, Dalits in Indian society have historically suffered caste-based social exclusion from economic, civil, cultural, and political rights. Women from this community suffer from not only discrimination based on their gender but also caste identity and consequent economic deprivation. Dalit women constituted about 16.60 percent of India’s female population in 2011. Dalit women’s problems encompass not only gender and economic deprivation but also discrimination associated with religion, caste, and (...) untouchability, which in turn results in the denial of their social, economic, cultural, and political rights. They become vulnerable to sexual violence and exploitation due to their gender and caste. Dalit women also become victims of abhorrent social and religious practices such as devadasi/jogini, resulting in sexual exploitation in the name of religion. The additional discrimination faced by Dalit women on account of their gender and caste is clearly reflected in the differential achievements in human development indicators for this group. In all the indicators of human development, for example, literacy and longevity, Dalit women score worse than Dalit men and non-Dalit women. Thus, the problems of Dalit women are distinct and unique in many ways, and they suffer from the ‘triple burden’ of gender bias, caste discrimination, and economic deprivation. To gain insights into the economic and social status of Dalit women, our paper will delve more closely into their lives and encapsulate the economic and social situations of Dalit women in India. The analyses of human poverty and caste and gender discrimination are based on official data sets as well as a number of primary studies in the labor market and on reproductive health. (shrink)

En 1974, Lucille Mathurin Mair soutient sa thèse de doctorat à l’université des Indes occidentales (UWI) de Jamaïque. Son travail sera publié une première fois en 2006 sous le titre A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 1655-1844 ; il s’agit du premier long ouvrage d’histoire sur la vie des femmes caribéennes. En 1993, Verene Shepherd organise un colloque, toujours à l’université des Indes occidentales de Jamaïque, qui donnera lieu à une collection d’essais, publiés en 1995 sous le titre (...) Engendering History : Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Ces deux événements marquent dès le début des années 1970 l’éclosion d’un ensemble significatif d’ouvrages sur les femmes et le genre dans l’histoire des Caraïbes anglophones ; les travaux de recherche dans ce domaine et leur publication ont connu un essor considérable depuis le milieu des années 1990. Ils se sont appuyés sur des archives administratives et privées mais ont aussi innové en pratiquant l’histoire orale et en enquêtant sur la tradition orale de la Caraïbe. (shrink)

This paper examines how gender and identity function in the personal memoirs of female Holocaust survivors. The memoirs of Nanda Herbermann and Sara Tuvel Bernstein, two survivors of Ravensbrück, the Nazis' concentration camp for women, are explored as case studies of how feminine gender identity influenced female inmates' experiences and recollections of life in Nazi concentration camps. The different backgrounds of these women, as a German Catholic and a Jew, respectively, also affected their lives (...) as inmates, and influenced how they constructed their personal narratives and identities through memoirs. Thus, gender and other aspects of personal identity intertwined both during their time in Ravensbrück and in their writings of their experiences. Their memoirs, moreover, serve as means of personal empowerment as they rewrote themselves into history on their own terms. These memoirs, therefore, enhance our understanding of the gendered and the personal dimensions of the Nazi concentration camp systems and the Holocaust. (shrink)

This paper looks at Vālmīki’s use and placement of his female characters as significant markers of religious identity. It argues that Vālmīki conceptualizes and creates specific types of female figures and carefully locates the episodes in which they appear to mark specific narrative transitions and real or imagined anxiety-inducing threats to the author’s idealized world. Moreover, Vālmīki provides his audience with potential resolutions to those threats. Thus, in addition to such major figures as Sītā, Kausalyā, and Kaikeyī, characters (...) such as Anasūyā, Śabarī, Svayaṃprabhā, and even the non-human characters Surasā and Nikumbhilā are demonstrated to have a specific and integrated function within the narrative and are argued to form part of a larger, gendered narrative frame in which the epic action occurs. Each of these characters, I contend, represents a particular level of the feminine intruding into the culture’s religious practices in an ever-increasing destabilization of the poet’s idealized vedic world or as the means for its reemergence as a stronger, more stable, and less corruptible one. Vālmīki’s creation and use of these intriguing figures provide further testament both to the author’s genius and the underlying unity of structure of his great epic. (shrink)

The article discusses how women murderers embedded in the victim-turned-avenger narrative function as vehicles of social criticism in three contemporary Swedish crime novels, Henning Mankell’s The Fifth Woman, Håkan Nesser’s Woman with Birthmark and Fredrik Ekelund’s Nina och sundet [Nina and the Strait]. The murderers’ performances of murder, based on parody and irony, question masculinity and its institutionalized practices. By rendering vulnerable the discourse of hegemonic masculinity, these performances prove their subversiveness and critical potential. At the same time they (...) renew the crime fiction genre and particularly the feminist crime novel in which female agency is identical with the agency of the detective. (shrink)

Malgré la paucité des sources, les historiographies sur les femmes et le genre dans les sociétés avec esclavage des Caraïbes anglaise et française ne cessent de prendre de l’importance depuis les années 1970, même si les recherches sur les Antilles françaises sont beaucoup moins prolifiques que celles sur les British West Indies. Après avoir présenté le champ des études caribéanistes, l’article analyse les travaux relatifs aux femmes esclaves, qui ont longtemps prédominé, puis ceux concernant les femmes libres de couleur et (...) blanches, ainsi que les masculinités. (shrink)

This essay has examined a women's subculture within a broader discipline. In the Victorian era physiology, understood in its then-dominant meaning as hygiene, en- tered the women's colleges and was likely also to have been found in modified form in other types of colleges. Toward the turn of the century physiology began to be redefined as a male-oriented experimental biomedical science. Physiology in the five women's colleges under discussion was transformed in light of that new meaning, but (...) in such a manner as to preserve a female network with an identity of its own. (shrink)