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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Wife, Mother, Vampire: The Female Role In The Twilight Series, Lauren Rocha
Wife, Mother, Vampire: The Female Role In The Twilight Series, Lauren Rocha
Journal of International Women's Studies
This article explores a feminist critique of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005-2008), analyzing the ways in which the series is a symbolic backlash against feminism. Whereas previous vampire works depicted vampires as threats and outsiders to society, the Twilight series depicts the vampire characters as accepted in society, integrating their lives into mainstream society; as such, they highlight modern society’s fascination with female beauty ideals and physical beauty. In this article, I examine the ways in which Meyer’s portrayal of the Cullen vampires is reflective of repressive beauty ideals targeted towards women, arguing that Bella devalues herself because as a …
Trivializing The Female Body: A Cross-Cultural Analysis Of The Representation Of Women In Sports Journalism, Diane Ponterotto
Trivializing The Female Body: A Cross-Cultural Analysis Of The Representation Of Women In Sports Journalism, Diane Ponterotto
Journal of International Women's Studies
This paper addresses the question of the representation of female athleticism in the press. By means of a corpus-assisted analysis of sports reporting of the tennis athlete Maria Sharapova in both the English and Italian press, it offers a cross-linguistic description of the stereotyped language reserved for women in sports settings. The study reveals the presence in the corpus of a discursive frame which tends to trivialize the body of female athletes. This frame emerges from two basic discourse strategies, a thematic strategy, which eroticizes the female body, and a metaphorical strategy, which conceptualizes the female athlete as child-like. The …
Tunisian Women's Activism After The January 14 Revolution: Looking Within And Towards The Other Side Of The Mediterranean, Giulia Daniele
Tunisian Women's Activism After The January 14 Revolution: Looking Within And Towards The Other Side Of The Mediterranean, Giulia Daniele
Journal of International Women's Studies
Tunisia is widely considered to be the country in which the current round of major upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East began. This paper explores the most prominent instances of women’s activism which have taken place in Tunisia in the time which has followed the revolution of 2011. Through analysis of the principal literature related to the subject and the information gathered as a result of fieldwork conducted in the capital city of Tunis in February 2013, the paper examines the most significant transformations which have arisen from the active participation of women in the uprising. The involvement …
The Palestinian Women's Movement Versus Hamas: Attempting To Understand Women's Empowerment Outside A Feminist Framework, Sara Ababneh
The Palestinian Women's Movement Versus Hamas: Attempting To Understand Women's Empowerment Outside A Feminist Framework, Sara Ababneh
Journal of International Women's Studies
This paper asks whether–and if so, how–Islamic groups such as Hamas that clearly define themselves outside a feminist framework can be studied in terms of women’s empowerment. The material discussed is based on fieldwork conducted with Hamas-affiliated female Islamists, as well as women’s rights activists in general, in the occupied Palestinian territories in 2007. Centrally, this work debates whether it is possible to think of women's empowerment in non-feminist terms. The significance of this study lies in two critical contributions to questions of women’s empowerment in Muslim societies: Firstly, the case of Islamism exposes the hegemony of feminism–religious and secular–as …