Arts and Humanities Commons^™

All The Ways…, Natasha Lobo

Journal of International Women's Studies

‘all the ways…’ was written for a Women’s Studies module – ‘Identity, Difference and the Body’. This module explored feminist perspectives on the nature/culture divide and the production of sexed, gendered and raced bodies, and surveyed a range of different feminist analytical approaches to the body, including postmodern, phenomenological, Black feminist and post-colonial perspectives. It considered the construction of sex, gender and sexuality through different cultural and social practices which take the body as their principal focus, and examined a variety of case studies such as: body image and norms of femininity; food, dieting and eating disorders; body modification; …

The Rationality And Femininity Of Mary Wollstonecraft And Jane Austen, Rachel Evans

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay addresses the issues of self-representation in women’s writing of the early nineteenth-century British literary culture. I explore the subordination of women by a construction of femininity which did not allow them to be rational thinking subjects. Through the work of Mary Wollstonecraft I demonstrate how she provided a space for the rights of women to be discussed in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the impact this had on a patriarchal society. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park serves as a fictional articulation of this, which illustrates the way in which women writers were disguising their political intent …

The Social World Of Prostitutes And Devadasis: A Study Of The Social Structure And Its Politics In Early Modern India, Karuna Sharma

Journal of International Women's Studies

This research paper discusses two groups of professional women who had a distinct place in the sexual economy of the period under review. By analyzing the actions and situations of prostitutes and the devadasis (literally meaning servants of God) in terms of a broader context of relationships, I consider the sexual-services and the entertainment provided by them as a meaningful labor, which got integrated at both the social and cultural levels. I have looked at how and to whom the prostitutes and the devadasis sold their labor, and how they related to other women, to men, and to various social …

Deconstructing Masculinity In A ‘Female Bastion’: Ambiguities, Contradictions And Insights, Charles C. Fonchingong

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article is informed by my experiences teaching women’s studies and specifically feminist theory to predominantly female and male students offering Women’s studies. As a mainstream academic discipline at the University of Buea, housing the only such Department in Cameroon’s Higher Education system, this study uncovers the broader polemics regarding gender and women’s studies.

Against the backdrop of a patriarchal society, this study attempts to account for the shifting strands on masculinity and femininity and gender transgressions as played out by students taking women’s studies. It also analyses the notions, misconceptions and stereotypes that characterise the discipline of women’s studies, …

‘What Happens, Or Rather Doesn’T Happen’: Death And Possibility In Alice James And Christina Rossetti, Erika Kvistad

Journal of International Women's Studies

The idea of the dying Victorian woman as passive victim or object of desire has justly received critical attention, but this has meant a comparative neglect of the dying Victorian woman as an active, speaking, writing subject. In response, this article focuses on the death writing of Alice James and Christina Rossetti, reading the central role of death in their work as a way of articulating a space of possibility beyond what life has to offer. In Rossetti’s death poetry and James’s Diary, death is what gives form to the text, and represents the possibility for the text and its …

Understanding Antiwar Activism As A Gendering Activity: A Look At The U.S.’S Anti-Vietnam War Movement, Say Burgin

Journal of International Women's Studies

Research into the gendered nature of war experiences has provided rich ways of understanding how gender constructs society and the nation. Scholarship on peace activism and gender has deepened our knowledge of women’s roles within warring societies and the ways women have understood themselves as promoters of peace. While much of this research asks how antiwar activities and war are predicated upon dominant gender ideals and focuses in particular on women’s experiences, this article aims to explore how some wartime events, specifically antiwar activism, constitutes or reconstitutes gender. Focusing on the United States’ anti-Vietnam War history, I examine how activists …