Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Prison As A Living Being: ‘Assad’S Syria’ As A Model For The Imprisonment State, Jaber Baker

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Syrian Assad regime used prisons as tools of domination. As such, prisons had the power not only of active repression but also as places of detention and disappearance for Syrians. The expansion of political detention in Syria over fifty years transformed prison into a living being in the sense that prison became a part not just of Syrians' political life, but also of their social identity. One can recognize it in voices, attitudes, lifestyles, and even written and oral culture. Syrian cities are full of weapons since a large area of the urban space is inhabited by the buildings …

From Prison To The World: A Comparative Reading Of Naji’S Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence, 2020) And Abd El-Fattah’S You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021), Teresa Pepe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article analyses Ahmed Naji’s Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence) and Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated through the lens of ‘prison literature’, that is “literary works produced in, about, or through the experience of political detention” (Taleghani 13). Comparing them to previous forms of prison literature from Egypt, it shows that both books depart from the social-realistic mode that has prevailed throughout the 20^th century. Rather they renovate the genre with aesthetic traits drawn from postmodern and digital literature, exemplified by autofictional or anonymous modes of authorship and co-authorship, narrative fragmentation, and bodily exposures. These aesthetic …

Khairy Shalaby’S Novel The City Of The Enslaved: Egyptian Prison Literature With A Russian Twist, Sarali Gintsburg

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Although the interconnectedness of Russian and Arabic literatures has been demonstrated by Soviet/Russian and, to a limited extent, Western Arabists, this research remains limited to a few names. However, the role that the Russian/Soviet literary tradition had in shaping contemporary genres of Arabic literature is complex and diverse. This is, for instance, the case with prison literature—Russian/Soviet literature has a long tradition of turning to the topic of imprisonment. It was Dostoyevsky, who turned to the genre of katorzhnaya proza (prison literature) and popularized it. Later, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky dedicated a number of their influential literary works to further …

Terrorists, Spies, And Diplomatic Crises: The Birth Of Morocco’S Multimedia Prison Literature, Brahim El Guabli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article captures the literary shift that accompanied the transformation of the nature of political imprisonment in Morocco in the last twenty years. Focusing on the new victims of state violence, who fall within two categories: prisoners accused of terrorism and those accused of heinous sexual crimes, this article argues that the emergence of these new criminal profiles has led to the establishment of a transnational “Multimedia Prison Literature” (MPL). Drawing on the cases of Ali Arras, a Belgian-Moroccan whom Spain delivered to Morocco for terrorist charges, and Mohamed Hajib, a German-Moroccan citizen whom Germany extradited to his country of …

The Absurdity Of Liberation In Moroccan Prison Narratives, Hakima Choukri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Moroccan prison narratives have been credited with major political and social changes, yet their existential value is equally worth acknowledging. The prison narratives of Aziz Binebine, Mohamed Raiss, Malika Oufkir, and Fatna El Bouih, to mention but a few, are fraught with existentialist patterns that are uncovered upon reading them comparatively. One pattern that persists through these narratives is the absurdity of liberation. Borrowing Camus’ concept of the absurd, this article highlights the absurdity of the post-prison chapter for being nothing more than an extension of the prison episode that makes the impossibility of freedom acutely felt. The absurdity of …

Captivity, Resistance And Political Consciousness In Walid Daqqa’S Prison Literature, Ashjan Ajour

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines the prison literature of the Palestinian intellectual Walid Daqqa who has been serving a life sentence for resistance since 1986 in Israeli prisons. From the depth of his experience he writes about his conceptualization of captivity, colonial violence, the resistance of the Palestinian political prisoners in the Israeli prison system and the construction of Palestinian national imagination in his book Consciousness Molded: or The Re-Identification of Palestinian Torture (2010) Published in Arabic and his first young adults novel The Story of the Oil’s Secret (Ḥikayat Sir al-Zeit) published in 2018 in Arabic. Daqqa has become …

Palestinian Prisoners: Smuggling Freedom, Writing From Captivity, Basil Farraj

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article discusses writings by Palestinian political prisoners and the broader body of prison literature situating them as practices of ‘smuggling freedom’ from Israel’s carceral regime, shedding light onto their political and social meaning. Through discussing writings by prisoners, the article points to a long history through which Palestinian prisoners confronted the Israeli regime’s torture and violent practices, and its broader project of eliminating the political nature of captivity. The article argues that prisoners’ writings reveal much about the dynamics of carceral power and violence, and the logic behind the confrontation practices used by prisoners in Palestine and beyond. These …

New Approaches To Mena Prison Literatures After 2011, Anne-Marie Mcmanus

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Suburbanization As A Post-Industrial Essentiality: Revisiting Sweden's Miljonprogrammet, Colin Wood

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Definitively speaking, suburbanization does not equate to post-industrialism in the same limelight as would urbanization and industrialism. However, anomalous cases, such as the one being discussed in this paper, tangentially interlink on a socioeconomic basis. In 1965, Sweden began construction of the Miljonprogrammet (Million Programme), where over the next ten years, over one million domiciles were built in a suburban setting leading to a mass diaspora of ‘slum living’ Swedish industrial workers. The nation’s renowned welfare state, built on a collaborative system between public and private sectors as well as federal and municipal actors, overlooked housing in its social …

When Dystopia Becomes Political Criticism: Why Margaret Atwood Wrote The Handmaid's Tale, Celeste Deale

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she didn’t think it’d still be relevant nearly forty years later. Yet, her use of historical imagination helped her create a novel that permeates time and space. This essay explores the production and reception of The Handmaid’s Tale, asking how the novel was both a product of the political and cultural context of its production in the 1980s and a critique of Atwood’s own contemporary moment. Atwood drew on biblical themes, Puritan history, and the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu to construct Gilead's social and political order and comment on American …

Juegos Panamericanos Y Parapanamericanos 2023. Estudios Sobre El Impacto Social, Turismo, Voluntariado, Y Equilibrio De Género, Gonzalo A. Bravo, Daniel Duclos-Bastías, Jorge Silva-Bórquez, Jose María López-Gullón, Jose Miguel Vegara-Ferri, Salvador Angosto-Sánchez, Melissa L. Roco-Olivares, Patricio A. Rubilar-Arancibia, David Gallegos-Meza, Natasha Santos-Lise

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

During the Santiago 2023 Pan American and Parapan American Games, held between October and November of 2023 in Santiago, Chile, six researchers from universities in the United States, Spain and Chile, conducted data collection for four research studies. These studies focused on: (1) the Games’ social impact on residents; (2) tourist profiles and their evaluations of the event; (3) volunteer motivations, empowerment, satisfaction, and future intentions; and (4) progress toward gender equity in Pan American sport organizations. Over 13,000 responses were collected. Findings on social impact showed improved public perception, enhanced infrastructure, a better city image, and a stronger sense …

Towards The Non-Spectacle: Responses To Necropolitics In The Artwork Of Teresa Margolles And Maya Watanabe, Leslie Anne Condon

Masters Theses

How do we engage with artwork that addresses complicated histories

of colonialism and political violence, specifically intangible and

incomprehensible violence? Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’ 2005 work, Lote

Bravo, is named after and composed of the soil from a mass grave site

discovered in 1995 in the southeastern corner of Ciudad Juárez, a city known

internationally for the femicide that has continued to haunt its streets and

peripheries since the 1990s. Peruvian filmmaker Maya Watanabe’s 2019 film

Liminal cinematically documents the official exhumation of two mass graves

in the Ayacucho and Huánuco regions of the Andes highlands, where

thousands of …

Rainbow Road To Prismatic Playwriting: Black Women's Dramatic Praxis In Practice, Taren Wilson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the lived experiences of Black women in academia, uplifting those interested in non-traditional or creative scholarship. Underrepresentation and attrition due to exclusionary academic practices is a systemic problem. What can Black feminist playwriting as research do for Black women in academia hoping to resist and connect to themselves and their community? What can playwriting as a Black woman doctoral student elucidate about the utility of playwriting as research, culturally informed epistemologies, and African American women's drama? By merging African American women's drama, Black feminist epistemologies, Practice as Research, and playwriting as research, I developed an onto-epistemological method …

Queen's Pride: A Queer Reading Of Star Wars Character Padmé Amidala, Madeleine Loewen

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

Ever since Luke Skywalker and Han Solo first appeared onscreen together in 1977, LGBTQ+ Star Wars fans have harnessed the power of queer reading to write themselves back into a galaxy far, far away, despite Lucasfilm’s long-term disapproval of such practices. Nonetheless, there exists little scholarly literature on queerness in the franchise, and even less on the potentially sapphic characters. Queen Padmé Amidala, first introduced onscreen in Episode I: The Phantom Menace, proves a surprising—but no less salient—queer figure in Star Wars. From her intimate relationships with her handmaidens, to her experimentation with gender performativity, to her quiet yet …

Trans Inequity, Intersectional Ritual, And Jewish Tikkun Olam (Healing Of The World), Valerie Estelle Frankel

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

As Jewish science fiction expands into twenty-first-century questions of identity, some authors explore the trans experience and build bridges towards intersectionality. Ritual and tradition become popular subjects. In the post-apocalyptic Fragments of the Brooklyn Talmud by Andrew Ramer, diverse rabbis create new prayers and practices. A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys offers protagonists from a diverse commune who welcome aliens and rise up against the corporations. Bogi Takács’ short story “Three Partitions” questions where to segregate the shapeshifting Adira, and how the Orthodox space colony can change. Several of these stories ask how comfortable Jewish protagonists are with alien rituals …

Towards An Ethos Of Discussing In-Corporeal Gender In Fantasy Literature: Part I—A 'Feminine' Eldil And A 'Masculine' Vala, Luke Shelton

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people engaged with others on social media in ways that they had not before. During this time, many new interpretive communities arose. In one of these conversations, the way that fans interpreted Tolkien’s description of the physical characteristics of the Valar resonated with a passage in C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra (the second book of his Space Trilogy) where the narrator describes the physical manifestation of Perelandra and Malacandra. In this paper I perform a close read of the two passages, to examine the textual meaning, to see what interpretive room there is in …

The Mariner (And His Wife): Rethinking Aldarion's (A)Sexuality, Rory M. Queripel

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

“Aldarion and Erendis” (Unfinished Tales) is a rare example in Tolkien’s work of a marriage gone severely awry. Many readings of the tale apportion blame to Aldarion, who is seen as “unwilling” to make the marriage work, and cruel and unfeeling towards Erendis, who herself is characterised as resentful and unaccepting. However, these readings rely on an assumption of a cisheteronormative and, more importantly, allosexual relationship between the couple. This paper proposes an alternate view of Aldarion and his role in the story, suggesting the possibility that he is asexual and/or aromantic (i.e., he does not experience sexual …

Myth, Murder, And Mayhem: Discerning The ‘Other’ In Our Flag Means Death, Sara Brown

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

Although the television series Our Flag Means Death presents on the surface as a romantic comedy, it is enhanced by mythic elements that infuse the narrative with a clear sense of the fantastic. Here, the pirates exist in a Secondary World that openly draws upon the Primary (both in terms of historiography and legend); hence 18th-century piracy and British colonialism can interact seamlessly with human-to-animal-transformations (paying homage to the Greek myth of Ceyx and Alcyone) without seeming either disconcerting or anomalous – all co-exist comfortably in Faerie. OFMD both inverts and deconstructs mythopoeia; the Primary World myths of the Gentleman …

Uncovering Maria Edgeworth’S Strategic Political Influence Through Her Unpublished Letters, Autumn G. Hall

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) was one of the most prolific Anglo-Irish novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While Edgeworth’s novels are regularly discussed among Regency-era scholars, researchers have rarely considered her letters and correspondence, especially in relation to her role in contemporary politics. During my time on the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project team, I researched Edgeworth’s previously unpublished letters, which provided a unique view of her strategic political correspondence network. Through her writing, Edgeworth was able to voice her thoughts while also remaining publicly complacent with restrictive societal norms imposed on women. In my article, I argue that through her …

Recasting Gender Roles: A Study Of Indian Television Commercials (2011– 2020), Himika Akram, Alicia Mason

Faculty Submissions

On media, television commercials (TVCs) play a significant role in shaping societal perceptions of gender roles. This study examines gender depictions in Indian TVCs, focusing on key dimensions such as gender ratio in primary characters, voiceovers, settings (home, outdoor, workplace), and product categories. A content analysis of 120 TVCs from Indian brands (2011–2020) was conducted, with coding performed by the researcher. Findings reveal that men were primary characters in 54.6% of the advertisements, while women featured in 45.4%. Male voiceovers dominated at 70.1%, compared to 29.9% for females. Women were portrayed in home settings in 66.7% of TVCs, while men …