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"We Sick": The Deweys As Women's Willful Self-Destruction In Toni Morrison's Sula, Kathleen Anderson, Gayle Fallon
"We Sick": The Deweys As Women's Willful Self-Destruction In Toni Morrison's Sula, Kathleen Anderson, Gayle Fallon
Journal of Feminist Scholarship
Toni Morrison explores the complexities of race, gender, and matrilineal influence in Sula. Although much recent feminist criticism has addressed the operations of race and gender in the novel, this essay provides the first developed examination of Morrison’s strategic use of three diminutive boys, all named “dewey,” to emphasize the willfully self-destructive tendencies of the novel’s female characters. Burdened with their community’s limiting idealizations of femininity and motherhood, the women of Sula practice various forms of self-harm in an effort to develop and proclaim their holistic, autonomous selves. The deweys’ mischievous childhood games foreshadow the consequences of female self-harm, but …
Precarious Responsibility: Teaching With Feminist Politics In The Marketized University, Lena Wånggren
Precarious Responsibility: Teaching With Feminist Politics In The Marketized University, Lena Wånggren
Journal of Feminist Scholarship
One of the most pressing characteristics of the neoliberal restructuring of academia, together with increased managerialism, performativity measures, and a “customer service” approach, is the casualization or precarization of academic work. Casualization entails a fragmentation of academic work, where academics are forced to move between workplaces on hourly-paid and fixed-term contracts, often doing their job without access to resources such as an office, training, or paid research time. While a number of feminist scholars have investigated the ways in which feminist academics negotiate the ever-increasing mechanisms of individualization, ranking, and auditing of their work, this article focuses on the precarious …
Reclaiming The Streets: Investigating Female Experience Of Cinematic Urban Violence, Angelica De Vido
Reclaiming The Streets: Investigating Female Experience Of Cinematic Urban Violence, Angelica De Vido
Journal of Feminist Scholarship
The spatial ideologies and narrative tropes of gendered victimhood, which are designed to induce fear and anxiety, are routinely employed to govern and restrict female access to and experience of urban spaces—both in cinematic depictions and in the real world. This paper explores how such tropes are challenged and rewritten in three screen narratives based in urban landscapes: London in Happy-Go- Lucky (2008), Paris in Amélie (2001), and New York in Sex and the City (1998–2004). Contrary to the ideologies of fear that routinely dominate urban narratives, I will argue that the texts under discussion instead display the city as …
Emancipating The Passive Muse: A Call For A Feminist Approach To Writing Biographies On Historical Women, Ina C. Seethaler
Emancipating The Passive Muse: A Call For A Feminist Approach To Writing Biographies On Historical Women, Ina C. Seethaler
Journal of Feminist Scholarship
This essay analyzes two popular biographies on historical women to interrogate how a focus on gender has shaped the genre: Nancy Ruben Stuart’s The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation (2008) and Jung Chang’s Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013). I argue that biographers who perpetuate gender stereotypes miss a momentous opportunity during the current life writing boom in the United States to educate readers on women’s social, cultural, and political contributions worldwide. In proposing that feminist-informed biographies are more accurate, complete, and make social …