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Mothers and Infants

Sudhir Kakar

in The Inner World: A Psychoanalytical Study of Childhood and Society in India

This chapter suggests that infancy is the foundation for all later psychological experience. Moreover, the nature of an individual’s first relationship—with his mother—profoundly influences the ... More

This chapter suggests that infancy is the foundation for all later psychological experience. Moreover, the nature of an individual’s first relationship—with his mother—profoundly influences the quality and ‘dynamics’ of social relations throughout his life. The infant’s development and the relationship with the mother which nurtures it are optimal only when that relationship becomes a kind of psychological counterpart to the biological connection of pregnancy. The discussion considers the psycho-social matrix of infancy, feminine identity in India, the ‘good mother’, the ‘bad mother’, infancy and ego, and the origins of identity in a patriarchal culture.Less

Allegories of Postsocialism

Lisa Rofel

in Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism

Turning in this chapter to the current period and to the youngest cohort, which came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, one can readily see the disjunctures that distinguish this most recent project of ... More

Turning in this chapter to the current period and to the youngest cohort, which came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, one can readily see the disjunctures that distinguish this most recent project of modernity from previous ones. In this context, gender has become highly visible as a category of analysis and a subject of controversy. There has been an explosion of public discussion in China on the marking, defining, and inhabiting of feminine and masculine identities. The chapter doubles as a debate on the socialist state and the means and mode of reaching modernity. The naturalization of gender forms the central motif in the postsocialist allegory of modernity.Less

Pink Girls and Ball Guys?: Gender and Competitive Children’s Activities

Hilary Levey Friedman

in Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture

This chapter presents studies that explains why most children's activities are associated with aspects of feminine or masculine identity. Barrie Thorne's Gender Play demonstrates how both adults and ... More

This chapter presents studies that explains why most children's activities are associated with aspects of feminine or masculine identity. Barrie Thorne's Gender Play demonstrates how both adults and children actively construct gender in schools through collective practices. Most of these practices occur through teachers and other school personnel who create and maintain separate physical spaces and cultures for boys and girls. Scholars David Hibbard and Duane Bushmaster's Sex Roles asserts that “boys are ‘trained’ from an early age to be “competitive” while girls are taught “to mask” their competitiveness and aggressiveness since these attitudes oppose the ideals of a nice girl.Less

Introduction: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-first Century

Elana Levine

in Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century

This introductory chapter briefly tackles the broad scope of scholarly literature on feminized popular culture, and also provides an overview of this area in the twenty-first century. Its focus is on ... More

This introductory chapter briefly tackles the broad scope of scholarly literature on feminized popular culture, and also provides an overview of this area in the twenty-first century. Its focus is on forms of early-twenty-first-century popular culture that are strongly associated with femininity—the social and economic forces that create such culture, the ways these cultural products speak to and about feminine identity, and the ways that audiences, readers, and users engage with and experience this culture. In addition, the chapter details in brief the influences, both current and historic, which inform the central themes of this volume, as well as the aims and specific lines of inquiry that this volume seeks to pursue.Less

Feminine latin/o American Identities on the American Alternative landscape: From the Women of love and rockets to la Perdida

Ana Merino

in The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts

This chapter examines the work of the Hernandez brothers and contextualizes these creators within “contemporary women’s comics” and the way different material contexts of production invoke particular ... More

This chapter examines the work of the Hernandez brothers and contextualizes these creators within “contemporary women’s comics” and the way different material contexts of production invoke particular reading communities. It discusses the Hernandez brothers’ legacy in the work of Jessica Abel regarding the terrain of feminine identities of Latino Americans. The chapter explains how Abel, conscious of the weight and importance of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s comics, sought to articulate feminine identity within the parameters of a fictional comics narrative in her work, La Perdida. Gilbert and Jaime were credited for rejuvenating alternative comics by breaking with the autobiographical trends of the countercultural comix. In 1981, they entered the field with their self-published comic Love and Rockets. The chapter demonstrates how Abel and the Hernandez brothers try to represent the range of possibilities for creating characters at the point where Latina femininity crosses the boundaries of gender and nationhood.Less

§ American Girls and French Jeunes Filles: Negotiating National Identities in Interwar France

in Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890-1970

Women comprised the vast majority of undergraduates in the United States who went to study in France in the 1920s and 1930s. This chapter examines the unique experience of American women students who ... More

Women comprised the vast majority of undergraduates in the United States who went to study in France in the 1920s and 1930s. This chapter examines the unique experience of American women students who had to deal with gendered national stereotypes from both sides of the Atlantic during their junior year in France. Two of these stereotypes—the French jeune fille (the submissive, chaste, sheltered daughter of the respectable bourgeoisie) and the American girl (excessively independent, outspoken, and even sexually promiscuous)—shaped the experiences of American women students in France between the wars. By negotiating these stereotypes, American women students were able to reassess American and French cultures in very distinct ways, and, in addition, constructed original, individual feminine identities that reflected this new understanding, along with newly acquired confidence and self-reliance from studying and living in France. Women's participation in study abroad between the wars played a key role in its resumption after 1945.Less

Narratives of Nine Italian-American Women: Childhood, Work, and Marriage

Carol Bonomo Jennngs and Christine Palamidessi Moore

in American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana's Best Writings on Women

The author was a participant-observer of some first- and second-generation Italian-American women in New York City. The thematic content of the life stories of these women, who had lived all of their ... More

The author was a participant-observer of some first- and second-generation Italian-American women in New York City. The thematic content of the life stories of these women, who had lived all of their childhood and adulthood in Little Italy, New York, emerged and unfolded spontaneously during meetings with the author. Their stories are the source of a rich psychological narrative that gives insight into the intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics of these women. This narrative describes their struggle to make lives for themselves within the parameters of their social class and the sexual, legal, and religious mores set for them by tradition. A lesson that can be learned from the narratives of the lives of these women is making the unmastered past conscious, becoming free psychologically to meet the developmental challenges of integrating aspects of feminine identity which have been split and dissociated for centuries.Less

‘Being Female’: Verse Commemoration at the Coemeterium S. Agnetis (Via Nomentana)

Dennis Trout

in Being Christian in Late Antiquity: A Festschrift for Gillian Clark

What can inscriptions add to our conversations about the ways of being Christian and female in the fourth and fifth centuries? More particularly, did the medium of epigraphic poetry, with its ... More

What can inscriptions add to our conversations about the ways of being Christian and female in the fourth and fifth centuries? More particularly, did the medium of epigraphic poetry, with its peculiar scope for the expression of individuality and idiosyncrasy, provide opportunities to stake out a territory of female identity different from that mapped by our literary sources? This chapter pursues those questions through an examination of the carmina epigraphica associated with the cemetery of S. Agnese on Rome’s Via Nomentana: though the databasea is relatively small, daughters and young wives commemorated by parents and husbands predominate. Here too male projections of ‘femaleness’ may seem to block access to the realities of ‘being female’. Yet this essay argues that it is possible to recover from the verse inscriptions of S. Agnese facets of late antique feminine identity less overtly mediated by men than the images extracted from patristic literature.Less