Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Ladybugs, Gabrielle Bologna

Comparative Woman

No abstract provided.

Women, Animals, Food: Planetary Perspectives On The Non-(Hu)Man, Samu/Elle Striewski

Comparative Woman

The paper comparatively reads Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Pirtha, and Puran Sahay (1995) and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) to trace the ways in which both novels show the complex intertwinement of the climate crisis with gender, class, race, subalternity, anthropocentrism, and veganism. Bringing together Gayatri C. Spivak’s notion of “planetarity” with ecofeminist philosophy and literary criticism, the article proposes a planetary ecogender reading of the two texts and their representation of the non-man, non-human, and non-subject. Building up further on Jacques Derrida’s critique of carno-phallogocentrism, the pedagogy of a relational ethics of “nurturing” is hence presented …

"Too Immoral To Be Narrated By A Woman": Censoring Erotic Fiction Of Arab Women Writers In Girls Of Riyadh And Distant View Of A Minaret And Other Stories, Muhammed Salem

Comparative Woman

In the Arab world, bargaining with censorship has been an ongoing struggle for writers, particularly female authors. How could we explain that only male writers were allowed to discuss sexuality in the Arabic canon, insofar as female characters are portrayed as passive sexual objects? Are Arab women writers victims of double censorship? One is imposed on their fellow male writers, and another is tacit censorship which judges women’s morality based on their writing. Girls of Riyadh (2007) by Saudi novelist, Rajaa Abdullah Alsanea, and Distant View of the Minaret and Other Stories (1987) by Egyptian novelist, Alifa Rifaat, are two …

Interculturality, Creolization, And Globalization In "Ángeles Nómadas" By Minelys Sánchez, Cecily Bernard

Comparative Woman

No abstract provided.

Madness As Response To Inherent Cultural Conflicts In Anglophone Fiction From 1700 To 2020, Anna Klambauer

Comparative Woman

Madness in literature has a long and colourful history. While its representation varies significantly in different literary periods, madness is nonetheless a consistent theme responding to inherent conflicts of civilisation. Thus, in the eighteenth-century novel, madness is subdued and forced to express itself in the language of rationality, while in the nineteenth century the theme becomes increasingly subversive. In the form of the madwoman trope (Gilbert and Gubar 1979), madness is simultaneously a reaction to restrictive patriarchal norms, and a frame in which the gender conflicts of the time can be safely and effectively played out. In the twentieth century, …

5 Poems, Rebecca Ruth Gould

Comparative Woman

These poems examine the challenges facing the woman creator, and focus in particular on the problem of the muse, and how this relates to the feminist reconceptualization of traditional notions of gender and sexuality. As part of this broader poetic inquiry, I also challenge traditional notions of monogamy and heterosexual desire.

Gotra I Choose, Aparajita Dutta

Comparative Woman

This poem is about kinship terms explored by a Bengali girl who came from West Bengal , India to Louisiana and found a family there after facing discrimination as an independent non-Brahmin woman.

Reverberations Of Boarding School Trauma In Upstate New York, Grace A. Miller

Comparative Woman

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices …

Wolfpen Hollow, Amy Wright Vollmar

Comparative Woman

No abstract provided.

Magpies, Bridge And Goddess: Unearthing The Hidden Symbols And Rediscovering The Lost Goddess In Chinese Qiqiao Festival, Juan Wu

Comparative Woman

The Qiqiao Festival, also known as the Qixi Festival, or Chinese valentine’s day, is a festival celebrating the annual meeting of the Cowherd and Weaver Maid in mythology. The most influential version focuses on the romance or love theme; however, it ignores its underlying historical context, gender tension and mythical belief. This paper takes the texts, rituals and materials related to the Qiqiao festival to investigate its origin and evolution. First, it takes the anthological case of the Qiqiao festival in Xihe county to explore its core image of the holy bridge and Goddess Qiao. Second, it traces the bridge …

Poems On Gender, Sexuality, And Kinship, Elisa Subin

Comparative Woman

The attached poems are a series thematically linked through gender, sexuality, and kinship.

Twitter As Limited Digital Rhetorical Forum – The Reproductive Rights Discourse Online, Jacob L. Longini

Comparative Woman

Rhetorical discourse has long been characterized by patriarchal systems, and this reality has persisted in online spaces. How might today’s scholar dissect and better understand the nature of online communities, specifically those that engage in women’s rights discourses? I argue that using Thomas Farrell’s notion of “rhetorical forum”, James P. Zappen’s outline for digital rhetorical theory, and Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s feminist understanding of rhetorical practice, one can account for the current state of such discourses on Twitter. The patriarchal flaws that Foss and Griffin identify in traditional rhetoric can shed light on the negative aspects of …

Kinship Poems, K. Avvirin Gray

Comparative Woman

In the appended collection of three poems, canopied under the title, ”Kinship Poems” I explore the possibilities for and practice of kinship between Native and African American women. In my first poem, ”Auntie,” a prose poem, I center non-sanguineous kinship affiliation in the decolonial project. In my final poem, I give equal consideration to biological kinship, by staging a speaker’s direct address to her unborn child.

Wise As You Will Become

Comparative Woman

No abstract provided.

Las Voces Desde La Liminalidad Sino-Peruana: –Una Lectura Comparativa De Mongolia Y La Vida No Es Una Tómbola–, Jing Tan

LSU Master's Theses

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Peru in the mid-19th Century. Since then, the Sino-Peruvian community has lived through myriad vicissitudes. Today, despite its indisputable influence in Peru’s history, it is still largely invisible in society, just as the concept of an Asian Latin American identity remains elusive in the national consciousness. In the literary and academic world, the scarcity of a voice highlighting Chinese legacies in Peruvian literature is echoed by the dearth of such a voice in the criticism regarding works by Sino-Peruvian writers about Sino-Peruvian experiences.

This comparative analysis engages with two novels that evince deep parallelism with …

Notation That Considers The Body: The Glyphs Of Nancy Stark Smith, Margarita Delcheva

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

No abstract provided.

Elgin's "Native Tongue": A "Me Too" Universe?, Amir Barati

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue (1984) provides a fascinating critique of the ideologies inscribed into patriarchal language and evokes an extremely valuable linguistic and political awareness. This article will examine the liability of the ways the novel revolts against the patriarchal society via the introduction of a gynocentric linguistic intervention. I claim, Elgin’s novel showcases an invaluable instance of how it is possible for women to revolt against the pillars of patriarchy through manipulations at the gestalt and schematic level of language and most specifically, the bodily metaphoric quality of the English. This proposed transformation of the schematic and …

Witnessing And The Gaze In Barbusse’S Hell, Rebecca Stobaugh

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Stripped down to its most basic plot summary, the premise of Henri Barbusse’s 1908 novel Hell, or L’enfer, sounds like the plot of a cheap porno: a man discovers a peep hole in his hotel room and proceeds to spy on the private lives of the people next door. Indeed, the novel obsesses over the erotic; yet, this obsession is often just as unsensual as it is pleasurable, as descriptions of sex become increasingly disillusioning, and the characters, unsatisfied. Moreover, the narrator does not spy on others for a strictly sexual thrill, but because he believes seeing people …

The Sensible Body Of The Female Reader, Anoosheh Ghaderi

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

No abstract provided.

Women Of The Dalit Unrest: Rewriting Bodies, Reinforcing Resistance, Suddhadeep Mukherjee

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

The paper aims to take the scholarship on corporeal feminism and Dalit Studies forward by focusing on the Dalit woman’s body. The body is not treated as an inert surface in this paper but is considered as a transformative medium that can alter its embedded codifications and significations through transgressive performances in the face of systemic and systematized caste violence. In doing so the gendered body not only challenges to rewrite the Dalit epistemology from the vantage of resistance but also initiates a rethinking of Indian feminism. The paper begins with a discursive discussion on the importance of the gender …

The Affective Construction Of Plurality Of Nationalism And Citizenship, Aparajita Dutta

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

No abstract provided.

The Resisting Female Body In India, Nancy Boissel-Cormier

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

No abstract provided.

Imagined Locality Of A Girlhood Home: A Performative Reading Of Maxine Hong Kingston’S “White Tigers”, Jing Tan

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Both the locality and the language of Sze Yup are of immense significance to Kingston, as well as to her narrator-protagonist: it is the locus of her mother’s storytelling, the land whence her mother absorbed the incredible power of “talking-story” that has been inherited by Kingston and has permeated her text, the soil whose spirit has been transplanted to her birthplace in America and whose mystery has never ceased to inspire her imagination. Likewise, the Sze Yup dialect is the language that both the writer and her narrator first learned to speak (Jaggi): she “entered school speaking no English” (Talbot …

Transgressing Boundaries Of Identity, Geography And Time In Transmutadxos And La Mucama De Omicunlé, Lucinda Smith

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

The literary works of Rita Indiana (1977) and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (1970) are recognised for exposing and challenging hegemonic ideas of identity, sexuality and power. The transgression of boundaries appears time and again in the fiction of both writers, whether these be boundaries of sexual or gender identity, desire, geography, time or even life and death. Using Rita Indiana’s novel La mucama de Omicunlé (2015) and Arroyo’s collection of short stories Transmutadxs (2016), the authors’ representations of such transgressions are the focus of this essay.

Further to addressing similar themes in their texts, both Rita Indiana and Arroyo Pizarro were …

“Bovarique” Bodies From 19th Century France To 20st Century London, Andisheh Ghaderi, Anoosheh Ghaderi

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Women’s bodies have always been charged by social associations that aim to control, shape, and discipline women. The frustrations and the ennui caused by sociocultural and political constraints push women to a state of existential crisis and eventually a erasure through biological death. Such vicious cycles had been depicted in the literary works to which Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) serves as a prominent example. Flaubert’s protagonist, Emma Bovary represents the pathway of a young, provincial, woman to a tragic adulthood filled with banality, emptiness, and despair. Objects, ranging from journals to clothes, are omnipresent in Emma’s life and shape …

Writing Desire On The Lesbian Body: Baudelaire’S Fantasies And Vivien’S Realities, Emily Wieder

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

In The Flowers of Evil [Les Fleurs du Mal (1857)], French poet Charles Baudelaire paints three female bodies: the mistress, the prostitute, and the lesbian. The latter appears in three of one-hundred poems but so captivated Baudelaire that he almost titled the collection The Lesbians. Censors nevertheless condemned the anthology and suppressed two of the lesbian poems. The remaining lesbian poem compares the “damned women” to “thoughtful cattle.” A rare representation of lesbian bodies, this metaphor problematically depicts them as savage.

Yet this “Other” exemplifies the baudelairean poetic ideal. By crafting Beauty, the Poet immortalizes his corpus. As the …

"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The history of colonial and racial oppression made hair stories and testimonials fundamental to understanding hair as a unifying element particular for women of African descent in the post-slavery era. Seen as such, their hair narrations provide the first-person perspective of their life experiences while at the same time inviting a critical investigation of colonial and racial oppression. Contemporary women writers develop these types of narrations into a special language of hair that helps them tell a story that is not apparent or straightforward. This literary device that uses hair to uncover deeper social and political issues is bound up …

My Mother On Dream Interpretation And The Lack Of Finality In Death, Liz Johnston

Comparative Woman

This is an interview with my mother, a dream interpreter. Here, we explore her practice of reading dreams and discuss her experiences in communicating with spirits.

My Mother On Dream Interpretation And The Lack Of Finality In Death, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston

Comparative Woman

This is an interview with my mother, a dream interpreter. In this interview we explore her process of interpreting dreams and her contact with the spirit world.

Ekatvam, Atreyee Chakraborty

Comparative Woman

"What is spirituality? Is this all about God? And what is God? A mystical concept? All I know that if we surrender to the will of God, if we pray and repent for our sins, we will be saved out of our trouble and we will get peace of mind. To me, my dance is my God. Through my dance I have touched the essence of spirituality."