Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Bodies Of Silence And Space: Victimhood, Complicity, And Resistance In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sana H. Mufti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the complexity of resistance and the conditions of power for women in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Using feminist theory, theories of neoliberalism, and Dominionism, this thesis works to understand the ways in which victimhood and complicity influence resistance in totalitarian regimes. I argue that neoliberal ideologies skew understandings of freedom, agency, and power in a way that ensures individuals, specifically women, remain trapped in the system. Focusing on reproduction, I examine how Gilead controls women’s bodies and reproductive abilities to ensure a future for itself. The Eve-Complex is one way that the state integrates itself …

The Simultaneous Book: Women's Writing In Contemporary Art, Maryse Lariviere

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Novels written by women authors who don’t adhere to the classification “visual artist” are nonetheless gaining momentum in today's contemporary art world. Yet works by authors such as Chris Kraus or Catherine Millet are often not recognized as artist’s novels because their authors are not or/and do not consider themselves to be visual artists. I contend that we can usefully situate their work within the genre of the artist’s novel by addressing how they invent artistic postures and artistic alter-egos within the autofictional worlds of their texts. My dissertation The Simultaneous Book proposes to open up the definition of the …

Talking Nonsense: Spiritual Mediums And Female Subjectivity In Victorian And Edwardian Canada, Claudie Massicotte

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study traces the development of mediumship in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially popular among women, this practice offered them an important space of expression. Concealing their own identities under spiritual possession, mediums ubiquitously invoked well-known historical figures in séances to transmit their opinions on current issues. As such, they were able to promote new ideas to interested audiences without claiming responsibility for their potentially controversial words.

While many studies have been conducted in the United States, Britain, and France regarding the significant role of mediumship in the emergence of women on the political scene, …

A Mutiny Of Silence: Swarnakumari Devi's Sati, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Aim:
To discuss how Swarnakumari Devi's family connections as much as her sex contributed to why her work faded from the memory of nationalist India.

Introduction:

The historical context that helped to produce the writing of Swarna-kumari Devi Ghosal also gives us a glimmer into some of the possible reasons why her work faded from the literary memory of nationalist India. Some of that context is hinted at in the back pages of her collection of short stories in English, published in 1919 by Ganesh and Co., Madras. Reminding us of the inescapable connection between capitalism and knowledge, these back …

In Pursuit Of Feminist Postfeminism And The Blessings Of Buttercup, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking that the term “postfeminism” is often and perhaps most frequently used—by the mainstream media generally and by actual people—as a kind of casual dismissal of feminism that comes implicitly coupled with the suggestion that the cutting-edge place to be these days, with regard to women, is the one where the old victim mentality has been sloughed off and a new flying-free-of-those-chains approach to gender in all its diversity and in all its equal opportunity has been boldly embraced. Given the terms of this unstated argument, any criticism of this postfeminism automatically …

The High Cost Of Dancing: When The Indian Women's Movement Went After The Devadasis, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

On the other side of patriarchal histories are women who are irrecoverably elusive, whose convictions and the examples their lives might have left to us--their everyday resistances as well as their capitulations to authority--are at some fundamental level lost. These are the vast majority of women who never wrote the history books that shape the manner in which we, at any particular historical juncture, are trained to remember; they did not give speeches that were recorded and carefully collected for posterity; their ideals, sayings, beliefs, and approaches to issues were not painstakingly preserved and then quoted century after century. …

Charting The Anger Of Indian Women Through Narayan's Savitri, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

From the introduction:

Written in the late 1930s, when a new irascibility crept into the largely female-produced discourse on the status of women in India, The Dark Room is about a particular woman's indignation and revolt. Savitri is a Hindu wife following in the glorified footsteps of other Hindu wives, such as her namesake from the Mahabharata and Sita of the Ramayana. Although she lives up to the ideals of servitude and devotion implicit in these powerful feminine figures, Savitri of The Dark Room is betrayed by a patriarchal system that allows her husband the freedom of infidelity but denies …