Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Playing With Noise: Anne Elliot, The Narrator, And Sound In Jane Austen's And Adrian Shergold's Persuasion, Brianna R. Phillips

The Corinthian

This paper pushes against the critical tradition that views silence or listening in relation to passivity and powerlessness by exploring the role of noise in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and in Adrian Shergold’s experimental 2007 film adaptation of that novel and how sound relates to Anne Elliot’s emotional legibility. Austen fills the narrative landscape with sounds that are filtered almost exclusively through Anne so that even when she is silent, she is “making noise” through her focalizations and through free indirect narration. Both Austen and Shergold align noise with Anne’s emotions such that Anne’s sensorial responses to shocking, loud, and disruptive …

Towards Women’S Minor Cinema In Socialist Yugoslavia, Dijana Jelaca

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay theorizes the concept of women’s minor cinema in socialist Yugoslavia, conceptualized through examples of cultural texts that circulate within the so-called women’s genres: romance films, “chick flicks,” and TV soap operas. Women’s cinema is here not defined solely as films made by women, but rather, films that address the spectator as a woman, regardless of the spectator’s sex or gender. I argue that, in the context of Yugoslavia, such works frequently articulated emancipatory, feminist stances that did not demarcate a dichotomous opposition to the socialist state as such, but rather called for the state to fulfill its original …

Stray Thoughts And Desire Paths—A Dialogue, Jenna Butler, Yvonne E. Blomer

The Goose

In this dialogue, authors, teachers, and environmentalists Yvonne Blomer and Jenna Butler discuss the ways in which our desire paths—our intents for our lives—have changed since the start of the pandemic. Covering women's writing, feminism, daily life during the pandemic, environmentalism, and race, this dialogue is an act of allyship from two women of different backgrounds writing together.

“Valli” At The Border: Adivasi Women De-Link From Settler Colonialism Paving Re-Enchantment Of The Forest Commons, Deepa Kozhisseri

Journal of International Women's Studies

The forests of Attappady Hills part of the Western Ghats in Kerala homeland to Adivasi people is a frontier region where a settler population is now predominant. This paper aims to bring the concept of borders as a heuristic device to interpret gender-ecology-indigeneity in Attappady. The conversations among Adivasis, between Adivasis and settlers, between Adivasi women and their children become in media res dialogues of their border subjectivity. This was an empirical study in Attappady in which life experiences, oral history and myths were studied using narrative analysis. The paper discusses four findings: First how land dispossession disproportionately impacted Adivasi …

Explaining The Lack Of Progress In Yemeni Women’S Empowerment; Are Women Leaders The Problem?, Nadia Al-Sakkaf

Journal of International Women's Studies

Despite existence of women’s empowerment policies and the appointments of women leaders to oversee the implementation and sometimes design of those policies, the Republic of Yemen has repeatedly ranked last in the WEF Gender Gap Index since 2006. Is this a problem of capacity? Are the women leaders, who are driving the national women’s development agenda forward, lacking in this field? This article investigates this question through a mixed-method research by surveying and interviewing Yemeni women leaders who were involved in empowerment policies in health, education, economic participation and political empowerment between 2006 and 2014.

Findings from this research show …

The Turkish Women’S Movement In Abeyance, Gizem Kaftan

Journal of International Women's Studies

The Turkish women’s movement started during the Ottoman era, and it is still in process in the newly established Turkish Republic. This paper examined the Turkish women’s movement, which began after 1923 and found that the Turkish women’s movement had two abeyance cycles. The first abeyance period in the Turkish women’s movement took place between 1935 and the 1960s. In the first abeyance period, the reasons for the abeyance were economic problems, World War II, and the changing political arena in Turkey. In 1945, Turkey became a multi-party democracy, and this changed political opportunity structures. After 1960, the Turkish women’s …

“The Personal Is Political”: The Power Of Female Voices In 1970s Pop Music And Beyond, Jennifer Morrow

Backstage Pass

This essay examines how, in the male-dominated structures of the popular music industry, narratives about women have been marginalized, ignored, and undervalued. The female singer-songwriter, my research suggests, is, by definition, a contradiction and subversion of traditional gender roles, and this position has been claimed by female musicians as a form of rebellion and resistance. In the scope of my research, I focus on how female pop artists have embraced songwriting as a medium for authentic self-expression, and how these narratives have been embraced as autoethnographies that represent the collective experiences and frustrations of women in a patriarchal social landscape. …

Too Much And Too Graphic: Dr. Ruth Westheimer And The Struggle For 1980s And 1990s Feminism, Louisa Marshall

Voces Novae

During the second wave of feminism, spanning from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, the United States saw unprecedented levels of change regarding the status of women. However, the conservative administrations of Reagan and H.W. Bush that followed turned the tides against the feminist movement and towards re-establishing traditional gender roles. Trail blazing women, including sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, dedicated their 20th century careers to combating traditional sentiment, thus changing gender roles forever.

When Valerie Solanas Shot Andy Warhol: A Feminist Tale Of Madness And Revolution, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

In 1967 Valerie Solanas published the Society for Cutting Up Men (the SCUM) Manifesto. She shot artist Andy Warhol in 1968. Her Manifesto raises issues about whether a revolution can be fought or won without using violence. “Nice” girls were of no use to her Radical feminists, especially Ti-Grace Atkinson and Flo Kennedy, saw Solanas as a symbol of a feminist fighting back and rushed to her side. They found a smart, very paranoid woman who was a decided loner. Ultimately, Solanas would not work with Atkinson and Kennedy; she refused to allow them to help her or explain …

Waking Up The Dissident: Transforming Lives (And Society) With Feminist Counseling, Donna F. Johnson

Journal of International Women's Studies

When I was a student in the 70’s I took a year off to travel the world with a friend. Despite taking every precaution, I was sexually assaulted twice. The incidents changed the course of my life. I completed my studies and began working in a refuge for battered women. There I bore witness, not only to unimaginable cruelty, but to widespread institutional indifference to women’s suffering. Decades later, police, judicial and child welfare responses remain inadequate in Canada (as everywhere), and mental health practitioners continue to routinely blame and pathologize women. As a counselor, first at the shelter, later …

Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose: An American Sisterhood In Black And White, Ahmed N. Bensedik

Journal of International Women's Studies

In light of the theme of the 5th World Conference on Women's Studies 2019, 'Activism, Solidarity and Diversity: Feminist Movements Toward Global Sisterhood', this article contends that Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) is an appeal for an American bond of sisterhood between feminists and womanists. In the process, it examines the relationship between the novel's two Black and White heroines, Dessa Rose and Ruth Sutton respectively, through the lens of Bonnie Thornton Dill's definition of sisterhood in her seminal work, Race, Class, and Gender: Prospects for an All-Inclusive Sisterhood. While discomfort and distrust encircle their first encounter in the …

Orientalism, Gender, And Nation Defied By An Iranian Woman: Feminist Orientalism And National Identity In Satrapi’S Persepolis And Persepolis 2, Diego Maggi

Journal of International Women's Studies

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novels Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004) —focused on her youth and early adulthood in Iran and Austria— reveal in many ways the conflicting coexistence between the West —Europe and North America— and the Middle East. This article explores feminist Orientalism and national identity in both Satrapi’s works, with the purpose of demonstrating the manners that these comics complicate and challenge binary divisions commonly related to the tensions amid the Occident and the Orient, such as East-West, Self-Other, civilized-barbarian and feminism-antifeminism. In the first part of the …

Who Is Afraid Of ẸfúNṣetáN AníWúRà? Performing Power In Yoruba Masculinist Oligarchy, Omolola A. Ladele, Abimbola O. Oyinlola

Journal of International Women's Studies

The iconic Yoruba female personage of Ẹfúnṣetán Aníwúrà has, in several studies, been vilified; and at a first glance, it would seem that Akinwunmi Isola’s eponymous protagonist and heroine of that play reinforces the image of a villainous, wicked and self-centred woman. Contextualized within the Yoruba socio-political and economic national narratives of the late18^th and early 19^th centuries, this image appears both problematic and complexly contradictory. It is therefore useful to appropriately recuperate and verify the status of Ẹfúnṣetán Aníwúrà within the backdrop of Yoruba cultural context. This is illustrated through a feminist re-reading of Ẹfúnṣetán’s actions and …

Me Too: An Analysis Of Feminist Literary Anthologies, Elaine Brightman

Merge

No abstract provided.