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Women and the 1832 Reform Act

Kathryn Gleadle

in Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender and Political Culture in Britain, 1815-1867

The Reform Act of 1832 stands as one of the defining moments in the political history of Britain, yet its implications for women and their involvement in its passage remain underexplored. The reform ... More

The Reform Act of 1832 stands as one of the defining moments in the political history of Britain, yet its implications for women and their involvement in its passage remain underexplored. The reform bill pertaining to Scotland did not specify that the parliamentary voter should be male. It presumably did not occur to those drafting the Scottish legislation that such clarification was necessary; whereas the gender-specific wording of the statutes covering England, Wales, and Ireland suggests an awareness that there was a theoretical possibility that it might be otherwise open to challenge. These differences are indicative of the subtle fissures in seemingly dominant assumptions concerning female citizenship. This chapter examines how, within the interstices of parliamentary legislation, there were many such moments of telling indeterminacy in the collective understanding of women as political subjects. It also explores the notion of women as ‘borderline citizens’, women in parliament and their political rights from 1830 to 1832, women's involvement in the campaign for reform, and the impact of the reform crisis on female subjectivities.Less

In Search of Byzantine Women: Thre Avenues of Approach

Judith Herrin

in Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium

This chapter examines some of the roles of women in early medieval Byzantine society. It follows three particular avenues of approach, devised as a means of identifying the positions, activity, and ... More

This chapter examines some of the roles of women in early medieval Byzantine society. It follows three particular avenues of approach, devised as a means of identifying the positions, activity, and authority of women in Byzantine society. The first is to pick up chance references to female activity in the sources written by men, especially those that occur spontaneously in narratives unconnected with women, incidental remarks, and stray observations. The second seeks to document the ingenuity with which women exercised their limited legal rights and is therefore dependent upon the case law that survives—the Peira (Teaching) of Eustathios Romaios is the outstanding example. The third approach attempts to outline the significance of ecclesiastical institutions and Christian beliefs for women, an area in which female subjectivity is perhaps most closely revealed. The overall aim of these avenues is to illuminate a practical reality rather than a legal ideal.Less

Kinuyo and Sumie: When Women Write and Direct

Ayako Saito

in Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity

Female authorship is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates on Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955). This was her first collaboration with scriptwriter ... More

Female authorship is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates on Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955). This was her first collaboration with scriptwriter Tanaka Sumie, and the chapter reveals the negotiation between two very different women of the same generation who worked together to articulate female subjectivity. Examining their distinct life experiences and approaches to the depiction of women (and female sexuality in particular) works to position Tanaka in the history of Japanese women’s cinema and melodrama. An exhaustive analysis of screenplays, shooting scripts, interviews, and contemporary reviews renders visible Tanaka’s authorial voice as a woman and her visual translation and intervention in Sumie’s script. The chapter makes a case of Tanaka’s creative directorial worth, while exposing why both the film industry and film studies may have hitherto overlooked her directed works.Less

Women in the Director’s Chair: The ‘Female Gaze’ in Documentary Film

Lisa French

in Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and Aesthetics

This essay examines the concept of a ‘female gaze’ in documentary film with a specific consideration of the work, and viewpoints, of women directors. The question asked is whether a film as a ... More

This essay examines the concept of a ‘female gaze’ in documentary film with a specific consideration of the work, and viewpoints, of women directors. The question asked is whether a film as a creative artefact, as well as if the working opportunities within the film industry, are affected by the fact that the person making the film is biologically female. French concludes that it is indeed so, and that “part of this recognition is due to visible female aesthetic approaches, world, views, and treatments of subjects, themes, and the overall privileging of female subjectivity.”Less

Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

Rachel Falconer

in Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945

This chapter investigates fictional descent narratives where the female character descends into the underworld. It first looks at the gender dynamics involved in descent narratives, where the descent ... More

This chapter investigates fictional descent narratives where the female character descends into the underworld. It first looks at the gender dynamics involved in descent narratives, where the descent heroes are usually men, while women play the role of the medium through which the quest is realised. The chapter then studies the feminist descent, and discusses in detail three descent narratives where the route to female subjectivity is down through a patriarchal Hell.Less

Imaging Modern Girls in the Japanese Woman’s Film

Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano

in Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s

This chapter examines how the trope of the moga, or modern girl, is depicted in the Japanese woman’s film. It considers how latent Japanese anxieties over modernization are made visible through ... More

This chapter examines how the trope of the moga, or modern girl, is depicted in the Japanese woman’s film. It considers how latent Japanese anxieties over modernization are made visible through representations of the modern girl image in critical discourse and film. It analyzes the woman’s film as both a critical term and a historical practice in the context of Japanese modernity and asks what sort of female identifications the genre allows. It also discusses the inherently political nature of the woman’s film by focusing on the construction of Japanese female subjectivity, along with some alternative structures for how to understand the apparent changes in Japanese identity in the historical transition between modernity and 1930s nationalism. Finally, it explores the use of the modern girl image in the films A Burden of Life and Woman of Tokyo to show how the Japanese woman’s film genre created an imagined female subjectivity as a visible reenactment of Japanese anxiety over the transformative aspects of modernity.Less

Power, Eros, and Genocide: Capitalism and Black Female Subjectivity in The Farming of Bones

Donna Aza Weir-Soley

in Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings

This chapter discusses Edwidge Danticat's representation of subject formation within the Haitian migrant community in the Dominican Republic during the 1930s. It explores Danticat's treatment of the ... More

This chapter discusses Edwidge Danticat's representation of subject formation within the Haitian migrant community in the Dominican Republic during the 1930s. It explores Danticat's treatment of the concomitant destabilization of Haitian identity in the wake of the 1937 Haitian Massacre enacted under the former Dominican dictator General Rafael Trujillo. The interdependent relationship between the material and the spiritual is carefully introduced in this narrative as Danticat attempts to demonstrate that human beings need to have both realms in balance if they are to be fully functional. The discussion proposes that Danticat purposefully downplays Voudoun as a leitmotif in this novel to force the reader to engage with the historical realities she is fictionalizing. Like the preceding chapters, this chapter also examines the healing potential of the erotic.Less

Characterization (Constraint)

Andrew Piper

in Enumerations: Data and Literary Study

Quantity has a role to play in understanding the nature of characters and the process of characterization (the writerly act of generating animate entities through language). With Alex Woloch’s ... More

Quantity has a role to play in understanding the nature of characters and the process of characterization (the writerly act of generating animate entities through language). With Alex Woloch’s question of “the many” in mind, the chapter begins with a survey of an estimated 85 characters per novel in the nineteenth century, a conservative estimate of 20,000 novels published during this period in English, producing ca. 1.7 million unique characters appearing in one century in one language. Simultaneously, the process of characterization poses challenges of scale: the great number of characters, plus the vast amount of information surrounding even a single, main character. Characters (like other textual features) are abundant across the pages of novels. Through an examination of over 650,000 characters using new techniques in natural language processing and entity recognition, this chapter explores the "character-text" of novels (how characters are activated, described, objectified). The (surprising) evidence here suggests that the process of characterization is best described as one of stylistic constraint, aligning the practice of characterization more closely with a character’s etymological origins (as representative, general, or “characteristic”—not individualistic). The chapter then explores the rise of “interiorly oriented” characters and Nancy Armstrong’s notion of strongly gendered “deep character.”Less

Three-Women Fiction, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies

Tan See Kam

in Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues

At work in Peking Opera Blues is a deeply intertextual relation to the film adaptations (three-women films) of a popular form of sentimental romance fiction - mandarin duck and butterfly fiction ... More

At work in Peking Opera Blues is a deeply intertextual relation to the film adaptations (three-women films) of a popular form of sentimental romance fiction - mandarin duck and butterfly fiction (yuanyang hudie) - which emerged when China, after thousands of years of dynastic rule, first experimented with democracy as an alternative mode of governance and lifestyle. This “fiction of comfort” came under attack by the May Fourth Movement after 1919, and was eventually consigned to the margins of modern Chinese literature. Reading through the lens of “three-women” films like Fate in Tears and Laughters (1932), Three Modern Girls (1933), Sun Moon Star (1960), and The Story of Three Loves (1963), and their women-centered narratives, enables a reading of Peking Opera Blues which reveals some of the ways in which Tsui Hark is able to emphasize the idea of women as narrative images; to highlight female agencies and subjectivities and to explore the rising status of women in the more globally connected, post-Confucian, and post patriarchal consumerist society of Hong Kong.Less

The Problem with Parody: Masochism, the Death Drive, and the Laws of Thermodynamics in “Satō Haruo” and The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi

in This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud

This chapter examines masochism and the death drive in Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's autobiographical essay “An account of the first half of my life, for Satō Haruo” and the novel The Secret History of the ... More

This chapter examines masochism and the death drive in Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's autobiographical essay “An account of the first half of my life, for Satō Haruo” and the novel The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi. It suggests that the essay shows Tanizaki coming to terms with the idea that domestic homosocial intimacies while the novel translates the inertness of a wife who could be passed but not loved into the universality of a female “subjectivity”. This chapter also considers Tanizaki's portrait of the Lord of Musashi alongside Freud's account of the death drive to show how both authors describe aggressivity according to a hydraulic model.Less

. A Momentary Taste of Being

Inez Van Der Spek

in Alien Plots: Female Subjectivity and the Divine in the Light of James Tiptree's 'a Momentary Taste of Being'

This book has examined James Tiptree Jr's ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’, a story about alien encounter, and its strange spatio-temporal settings from an interstellar spaceship to the vastness of outer ... More

This book has examined James Tiptree Jr's ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’, a story about alien encounter, and its strange spatio-temporal settings from an interstellar spaceship to the vastness of outer space and indefinite time. By reading Tiptree's narrative within the framework of a variety of theoretical discourses, heuristic images, and intertexts, it has uncovered a range of possible layers of the text, including the alien mother/daughter plot and the plots of Dr Aaron Kaye and his sister Lory. The book has also discussed the three salient issues of the text: the painful quest for female subjectivity, the figuration of the posthuman, and a multiple vision of the divine. This chapter further elaborates on female subjectivity, the posthuman, and the divine beyond the boundaries of ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’. It considers the figuration of the posthuman in relation to negativity in the formation of (female) subjectivity and to the unfathomability of the alien.Less

Introduction

Inez Van Der Spek

in Alien Plots: Female Subjectivity and the Divine in the Light of James Tiptree's 'a Momentary Taste of Being'

Within the science fiction community, the work of James Tiptree Jr, whose real name was Alice Sheldon-Bradley, is generally acknowledged to be among the best of the genre. During the 1970s, Tiptree ... More

Within the science fiction community, the work of James Tiptree Jr, whose real name was Alice Sheldon-Bradley, is generally acknowledged to be among the best of the genre. During the 1970s, Tiptree had won Hugo, Nebula, and Jupiter Awards for science fiction writing. Recently, the importance of her work for the development of feminist science fiction has been acknowledged by authors. This book examines Tiptree's 1975 text, ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’, which radically transformed the conventional figure of the alien encounter. In particular, it considers the ways in which the story may interact with feminist and other critical theories on the issues of female subjectivity and the meaning of the divine in a postmodern context. This introduction provides an overview of the life and work of Tiptree, and a synopsis of ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’, followed by an explanation of the central figure of the text – the alien.Less

On Suffrage Militancy and Modernism: Femininity and Revolt

Ewa Płonowska Ziarek

in Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

This chapter develops the political theory of revolution and female subjectivity produced by the British suffrage militancy in the context of Hannah Arendt's theory of revolution and Theodor Adorno's ... More

This chapter develops the political theory of revolution and female subjectivity produced by the British suffrage militancy in the context of Hannah Arendt's theory of revolution and Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory. What is at stake in the analysis is the conflicting relation between women's political and literary discourses of revolution and their relevance for feminist aesthetics. This juxtaposition of suffrage militancy with aesthetic and political theory allows us to rethink the pervasive modernist preoccupation with the new beyond mere formal experimentation for innovation's sake and address it instead in the context of political struggles. Without this intersection between political and aesthetic struggles, it is all too easy to dismiss the rhetoric of the new as a symptom of either the aestheticization of politics or the commodification of art instead of recognizing it as a transformative political and aesthetic force.Less

The Feminist Voice: Improvisation in Women’s Autobiographical Filmmaking

Gabrielle McNally (ed.)

in Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and Aesthetics

The essays discusses the mindful use of improvisational methods in women’s autobiographical filmmaking as a means to establish a feminist documentary voice that lies outside of patriarchy and ... More

The essays discusses the mindful use of improvisational methods in women’s autobiographical filmmaking as a means to establish a feminist documentary voice that lies outside of patriarchy and established Western notions of subject, using intersections between improvisational theory and the well-established theories of subjective voice in documentary. The author concludes that “improvisation as a working method invites practitioners into a space of community, empowerment and political change.” … “”Through the utilisation of improvisation as a method of feminist autobiographical documentary praxis, filmmakers can take a step in the direction towards a future promising personal growth and both social and political change and define their work outside of standardised, patriarchal means.”Less

Conclusion

Saswati Sengupta

in Mutating Goddesses: Bengal's Laukika Hinduism and Gender Rights

The Conclusion addressees the question of the relevance of this study in the contemporary context: Do women still observe bratas? Are these kathās still in circulation? Does the arrival of the novel ... More

The Conclusion addressees the question of the relevance of this study in the contemporary context: Do women still observe bratas? Are these kathās still in circulation? Does the arrival of the novel and later cinema and television reduce the mode of storytelling of the bratakathā to solemn but specious nonsense? Ironically, modern technology has also aided the propagation of caste-patriarchal stereotypes of women and generated new bratas. The laukika bratakathās of Manasā, Caṇḍī, Ṣaṣṭhī and Lakṣmī can also be used as a site from which the totalizing assumptions of caste-patriarchal societies may be challenged.Less

How to Speak about It? Kateb Yacine's Feminine Voice or Literature's Wager: A Reading of Nedjma

Mireille Calle-Gruber and Jane Hiddleston

in Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form

This chapter explores Kateb Yacine's ‘feminine voice’. It focuses not so much on the autobiographical as on the author's struggle to represent a female subjectivity that comes to stand for Algeria ... More

This chapter explores Kateb Yacine's ‘feminine voice’. It focuses not so much on the autobiographical as on the author's struggle to represent a female subjectivity that comes to stand for Algeria itself.Less

Writing Her “Self”: The Politics of Gender in Nangyarkuttu

Mundoli Narayanan

in Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments

This chapter provides a historical perspective on the evolution and contemporary significance of Nangyarkuttu, the “female” derivative of Kutiyattam, which developed into an independent solo ... More

This chapter provides a historical perspective on the evolution and contemporary significance of Nangyarkuttu, the “female” derivative of Kutiyattam, which developed into an independent solo performance form by the late twentieth century. Against this background, the author focuses on the artistry and innovations of one of Nangyarkuttu’s leading performers, Usha Nangiar, who has succeeded over the years in recovering and reinstating several major female characters who had disappeared from the Kutiyattam stage. Calling attention to two marginalized female characters from the Ramayana repertoire, notably Mandodari and Ahalya, the essay delves deeply into Usha Nangiar’s process of research as she recreates performances around them, combining an approach that is both deeply subjective and scholarly. Through excerpts from a detailed interview with the artist, the author demonstrates how Usha Nangiar’s interpretations of these roles, while drawing primarily on the performative tradition of Kutiyattam, constitutes a radical revisioning of the same tradition.Less