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Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Can You Really See Through A Squint? Theoretical Underpinnings In The 'Our Sister Killjoy', Cheryl Sterling Mar 2010

Can You Really See Through A Squint? Theoretical Underpinnings In The 'Our Sister Killjoy', Cheryl Sterling

Cheryl Sterling

Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy is read as an inversion of the colonial travel narrative, addressing the continued asymmetrical power relations between Europe and Africa. The paper posits Sissie, its focal character, as a site of theoretical transformations, engaging with issues of racial subjectivity, sexuality and political positionality in relation to the neo-colonial African state. It further argues that Aidoo situates a performative self in the text through an interrogatory narrative voice that succeeds in both deforming the novelistic pattern and participating in the critique of Western subjectivity and hegemonic feminist positioning, while inserting a resistant feminist ideology into …


Still Figures: Photography, Modernity And Gender In Neera’S Fotografie Matrimoniali, Silvia Valisa Jan 2010

Still Figures: Photography, Modernity And Gender In Neera’S Fotografie Matrimoniali, Silvia Valisa

Silvia Valisa

This essay discusses author Neera's early novel "Fotografie matrimoniali" (1883) in light of its ambiguous engagement with modernity. I argue that modernity takes on different meanings and ideological connotations in the text, in particular in its discussion of gender, while participating in a nationalist rhetoric that simultaneously gives room to and ‘frames’ its female subjects. I thus investigate how the representation of gender roles is impacted by the changes brought forward by modernity, and discuss whether Neera’s formal (photographic) choice succeeds in opening a different narrative and ideological space.


Masterpieces Of Italian Literature In Translation, Silvia Valisa Jan 2010

Masterpieces Of Italian Literature In Translation, Silvia Valisa

Silvia Valisa

No abstract provided.


Women-Space, Power And The Sacred In Afro-Brazilian Culture, Cheryl Sterling Jan 2010

Women-Space, Power And The Sacred In Afro-Brazilian Culture, Cheryl Sterling

Cheryl Sterling

This article places Afro-Brazilian women in the midst of the discourse of globalization, in light of its impact on marginalizing women of color, economically, politically, and culturally. It extends the concept of globalizing discourses to the history of enslavement and the racialist policies in Brazilian society, as seen in its policy of embranquecimento and the myth of Brazil as a racial democracy. The article then analyzes the historic and present day role of Afro-Brazilian women in the religious tradition of Candomblé, focusing on one public festival in particular, the festa for the Yoruba-based orixá, Obaluaye, in Salvador da Bahia. It …


The S-Word: Discourse, Stereotypes, And The American Indian Woman, Debra Merskin Jan 2010

The S-Word: Discourse, Stereotypes, And The American Indian Woman, Debra Merskin

Debra Merskin

No abstract provided.