Arts and Humanities Commons^™

(Re)Imagining Haiti Through The Eyes Of A Seven-Year-Old Girl, Iliana Rosales Figueroa

Journal of International Women's Studies

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat’s new novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013) explores themes of love, loss, and death. The first character that is presented to us is Claire of the Sea Light, a seven-year-old girl, whose mother died giving birth to her and who is missing. It is at the intersection of this little girl’s loss that all the other characters and topics unfold. Madame Gaëlle, an upper class woman who has a fabric shop in Ville Rose, decides to adopt Claire in order to give her a better life. In this essay I demonstrate that Edwidge Danticat articulates …

Reassessing Caribbean Migration: Love, Power And (Re) Building In The Diaspora, Andrea Natasha Baldwin, Natasha K. Mortley

Journal of International Women's Studies

Traditional research has framed Caribbean migration as a socio-economic issue including discourses on limited resources, brain drain, remittances, and diaspora/transnational connection to, or longing for home. This narrative usually presents migration as having a destabilizing effect on Caribbean families, households and communities, more specifically the impacts on the relationships of working class women who migrate leaving behind children, spouses and other dependents because of a lack of opportunities in Caribbean. This paper proposes an alternative view of migration as a source/manifestation of women’s power, where women, as active agents within the migration process, in fact contribute to re building relationships, …

Claiming The Politics Of Articulation Through Agency And Wholeness In Two Afro-Hispanic Postcolonial Narratives, Silvia Castro Borrego

Journal of International Women's Studies

Following a context-based approach and the tenets of post-positivist realist theory, this paper will analyze two post-colonial Afro-Hispanic novels immersed in their articulation of moving towards Caribbeanness within the phenomenon of Diaspora Literacy: María Nsue Angüe’s Ekomo (1983) and Michelline Dusseck’s Caribbean Echoes (1997). As part of the Diaspora Literacy, these texts will be read employing the search for wholeness as a theoretical tool, towards an epistemology of anti-colonial feminist struggle. These texts take active part in a decolonizing process that fosters a definition and vision of agency which makes wholeness possible, becoming an active expression of black women’s spirituality …

A Subtlety By Kara Walker: Teaching Vulnerable Art, Marika Preziuso

Journal of International Women's Studies

In late Spring 2014, the nonprofit organization Creative Time commissioned artist Kara Walker to create her first large-scale public installation. Hosted in the industrial relics of the legendary Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby was as controversial as it was revered. The powerful presence of the installation, coupled with its immersion in historical consciousness, makes A Subtlety rich in educational value. This article engages in a comparative reading of A Subtlety in the light of female writers and thinkers from the Caribbean, but also incorporates some of the generative questions Walker’s installation has …

Finding Your Own Magic: How Obeah And Voodoo Provide Women Agency In Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea And Tiphanie Yanique's Land Of Love And Drowning, Matthew Cutter

Journal of International Women's Studies

One of the most important functions of Caribbean literature is to give voice to characters that would be otherwise voiceless. These characters are often slaves, women, racial minorities, and poor people; in other words, anybody who has been touched by the devastating oppression of a colonial society. The oppressed in the Caribbean have often turned to their belief in Obeah in order to assert themselves in the face of the colonizer. Obeah and magic are still ingrained in the culture of the Caribbean people because the culture of the European colonizer is still influencing society in the Caribbean.

Through this …

Carving Caribbean Spaces In Between: The Life Of Ruth Gourzong In 20th Century Puerto Limon, Costa Rica, Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper attempts to make visible the community and their descendants of free Jamaican blacks who immigrated into the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica (specifically Puerto Limon) at the turn of the twentieth century to help build the American owned Northern Railway and work on the banana plantations owned by the American owned United Fruit Company. I illustrate the life of my great grandmother, Ruth Gourzong as an example of a woman from this community who managed to thrive against the odds of racism and sexism during her life time in Costa Rica. In order to fully appreciate the context …

"Everything Remains The Same And Yet Nothing Is The Same": Neocolonialism In The Caribbean Diaspora Through The Language Of Family And Servitude, Laura Barrio-Vilar

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay examines Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, a novel that tackles the process of decolonization from old and new forms of colonialism through the language of servitude and family (specifically, mother-daughter relationships). The novel’s protagonist is not only an example of the wave of West Indian migration and the feminization of labor, but her agency also provides Kincaid with the necessary platform to deploy her views on U.S. imperialism. I propose reading Lucy’s evolution toward self-determination as not only an individual but also a collective experience. I interpret the novel as an allegory that can help us better understand the …

Wifredo Lam, The Shango Priestess, And The Femme Cheval, Paula Sato

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines Afro-Cuban painter Wifredo Lam and his iconic construction of Afro-Cuban identity. From the vantage point of a literary scholar rather than art historian, and in keeping with Lam’s description of his paintings as “poetry,” I read his artwork as terse lines of verse, rich in metaphors. Although Lam is regarded as the painter of Negritude, commonly understood as a male-centered movement, he distinguishes himself from his contemporaries by incorporating in his brand of Negritude two female figures as metaphors of the power to decolonize the mind. One of those figures is his Afro-Cuban godmother, Mantonica Wilson. Healer, …

Julia Alvarez And Haiti: Transgressing Imposed Borders In In The Time Of The Butterflies, A Wedding In Haiti, And Protests Against Ruling 0168-13, Ellen Mayock

Journal of International Women's Studies

Throughout her writing career Julia Alvarez has been examining definitions of the “Americas” and rethinking conceptualizations of the nation. Her multiperspectivist literary works have given voice to women of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the United States, and to those who, as Alvarez says, “shift from foot to foot.” This article looks at Alvarez’s recent activism along the Haiti-Dominican Republic border and calls upon Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) to establish how the author uses the feminist and activist transgressions of the Mirabal sisters to speak against the Dominican legacy of anti-Haitian sentiment and political action, so firmly …

The Politics Of Natural Knowing: Contraceptive Plant Properties In The Caribbean, Rachel O’Donnell

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper considers the eighteenth-century ‘voyages of discovery’ to the Americas within the framework of colonial history and the development of modern scientific practice and method. It uses a feminist methodological approach toward concepts of natural knowledge and knowledge production. The essay looks specifically at knowledges of particular plants from the Caribbean and their properties, focusing on one plant still used for fertility throughout the region. I investigate the centrality of Caribbean natural knowledge to the development of differing historical perspectives on nature as well as the relationship between the development of European botanical sciences and natural knowledge in the …

Fanm Vanyan: A Cultural Interpretation Of Resilience In Haitian Women, Castagna Lacet

Journal of International Women's Studies

The purpose of this study was to explore the factors that promoted resilience in Haitian women earthquake survivors. The literature on mental health among Haitians is sparse. Furthermore, the concept of resilience is not easily translated across cultures. In the aftermath of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, relocated victims struggled to adjust. This study looks at what factors helped women adjust to their new environment and cope with the traumas and losses suffered from the earthquake. A qualitative design was used to discover and describe resilience. Findings indicate that cultural values and strengths were key factors in the women’s perseverance.

A Narrative Review Of Maternal Depression Research Focusing On Women Of Caribbean Descent In The Diaspora And Caribbean Women In The Region, Fatimah Jackson-Best

Journal of International Women's Studies

Maternal depression is a global public health issue (Almond, 2009); however, much of the existing research on conditions like the ‘baby blues’ and postpartum depression have been conducted with White women in North America and Europe. This narrative review seeks to expand the scope of maternal depression research by including and analyzing maternal depression studies conducted with Caribbean descent women living in the Diaspora and women in the English-speaking Caribbean alongside some of the work from North America and Europe. Through this engagement with the existing research three thematic areas emerged. These are: widely used prevalence and incidence rates of …

Social Erotics: The Fluidity Of Love, Desire And Friendship For Same-Sex Loving Women In Trinidad, Krystal Ghisyawan

Journal of International Women's Studies

Love takes many forms and can serve different functions in a person’s life. Some forms, such as romantic love, familial love, and love within friendship, while sometimes distinct, at other times cannot be separated. This paper discusses love and friendship for same-sex loving women in Trinidad, exploring this mutability of love, the functions of love and intimacy in these women’s lives, the role of social media and social circles for finding love, all while considering the notion that love amongst same-sex loving women is an act of resistance. Forty same-sex loving women were individually interviewed, and this paper is written …

Interview With Patricia Mohammed: The Status Of Indo-Caribbean Women: From Indenture To The Contemporary Period, Lomarsh Roopnarine

Journal of International Women's Studies

The following interview with Patricia Mohammed discusses the status of Indo-Caribbean women from indenture to the contemporary period. The interview seeks to understand why Indo-Caribbean women have been marginalized in the general historiography of the Caribbean and how the status of Indo-Caribbean has evolved in a predominantly patriarchal Caribbean plantation system. Some central questions in the interview are as follows: Are women better off in the Caribbean than their ancestral home in India. Are they still subjected to patriarchal trends in the home and at the work place, or any other place in the Caribbean? If they are, what sort …

Introduction: Women And Gender: Looking Toward "Caribbeanness", Allyson S. Ferrante, Diana Fox

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this special issue of the JIWS, fourteen authors explore varying iterations of “Caribbeanness” and what it means to identify its specific cultural unity through diversity in literature, various forms of activism, and constructions of feminism, identity, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality.

"Growing Scar Tissue Around The Memory Of That Day": Sites Of Gendered Violence And Suffering In Contemporary South African Literature, Kate Every

Journal of International Women's Studies

In the words of renowned criminologist Antony Altbeker, South Africa is suffering from a “crisis of crime.” The outworking of tensions from the perceived inadequacies of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission have seen an explosion of violent crime, which has little improved in the two decades since the end of the Apartheid-state. Contemporary South African literature has spoken to this violent reality in myriad ways, from the violence of South Africa’s most written about novel, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, to the more recent trends in crime fiction and true-crime genres. The novels considered here, Disgrace and Margie Orford’s Like …

'What On Earth Is She Drinking?' Doing Femininity Through Drink Choice On The Girls' Night Out, Emily Nicholls

Journal of International Women's Studies

In a supposed “post-feminist” society of gender equality, engagement with contemporary spaces such as the Night Time Economy (NTE) may offer young women positive opportunities to redefine femininities through leisure activities and alcohol consumption. Whilst the NTE is depicted as an increasingly “feminised” space where women’s drinking is normalised and expected, this essay will demonstrate some of the ways in which alcohol consumption remains highly gendered and women continue to be expected to buy into normative femininity through their beverage choice by looking at a specific mode of engagement with the NTE - the “girl’s night out”. Drawing on the …

Happy Days Sinking Into Immanence: Samuel Beckett And The Second Sex, Susan Hennessy

Journal of International Women's Studies

Dysfunctional, fragmented, and restricted bodies are a cornerstone of Samuel Beckett’s stage, a place where characters and actors alike find themselves forced to express the inexpressible, with notoriously diminished resources. Historically, existentialist readings of the Beckett canon have offered an insight into works which seem to raise essential questions regarding what it means to be when normative metanarratives have ceased to govern and “realist” escapism is denied. When it comes to discussions of phenomenological existentialism and its proponents, however, the works of Simone de Beauvoir often seem to be eschewed, or assimilated into those of the more famous Jean-Paul Sartre. …

"Seething Underneath": Objectification In Iris Murdoch's Early Fiction, Emily Tait

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay is about the objectification of women in the early novels of Iris Murdoch, particularly A Severed Head (1961), Under the Net (1954) and The Italian Girl (1964), and how this is subverted by complex characterisation. In focusing on novels predominantly with male narrators and a first person male gaze, I will draw on Sartre’s analysis of “the look” in Being and Nothingness (1943) as well as feminist film theory to firstly consider evidence of immobilization and then re-examine criticism of Murdoch’s female characters as “puppets”. I will contend that Murdoch does not objectify her female characters but instead …

Exploring The Shifting Dynamics Of Female Victimhood And Vocality In Poe And Pirkis, Eva Burke

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay will examine the detective fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (published between 1841 and 1844) in conjunction with Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ 1894 work The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective in terms of their diverging authorial approaches to narratives of detection. While Poe, writing in the years preceding the first significant mobilisation of American women towards the attainment of civil liberties, is credited with creating the figure of the male detective, Auguste Dupin, for whom the paradigms of detection rested on a gendered dichotomy between the actively logical masculine and the passive (and usually dead) feminine, Pirkis’ seminal collection …

Taking A Break From The State: Indian Feminists In The Legal Reform Process, Shruti Iyer

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper examines the critique of what has been termed as “governance feminism” and analyses its conceptual utility with reference to the legal reform process undertaken in India in the aftermath of the Delhi anti-rape demonstrations of late 2012-early 2013. Governance feminism refers to the process by which feminists influence institutional decisions and policy, and critiques of governance feminism focus on its tendency to maintain an equivalence between womanhood and victimhood, and its blindness to unintended consequences of feminist legal reform. This paper will reflect on the critiques that have been made of governance feminist interaction with the state, and …

Reproducing The Homonormative Family: Neoliberalism, Queer Theory And Same-Sex Reproductive Law, Eliza Garwood

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper seeks to highlight the often overlooked interconnectivity of the cultural sphere and the economic sphere, particularly focusing on same-sex reproductive law and neoliberalism. Using The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, specifically highlighting its implications for same-sex couples, this examination demonstrates the way that policy and legislation frequently echo normative ways of being, encouraging the “good”, productive neoliberal citizen and/or family. This article is informed by Foucault’s notions of governmentality and biopower, problematising this limiting legislation, arguing that it is grounded on an internalised ideal of the traditional family, discouraging more transgressive or creative family formations. Specifically, I …

Introduction: New Writings In Feminist Studies, Charlotte Mathieson, Kehinde Olowookere

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Film Review: Maestra, Lobna Ismail

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Maestra (2011), documentary, directed by Catherine Murphy.

Book Review: Gut Feminism, Carolyn Laubender

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Gut Feminism by Elizabeth A. Wilson. Duke University Press, 2015.

Book Review: Provocations: A Transnational Reader In The History Of Feminist Thought, Maia L. Butler

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought, edited by Susan Bordo, M. Cristina Alcalde, and Ellen Rosenman. University of California Press. 2015.

Book Review: Polygyny: What It Means When African American Muslim Women Share Their Husbands, Lara Watkins

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Polygyny: What It Means When African American Muslim Women Share Their Husbands by Debra Majeed, University Press of Florida. 2015.

Book Review: India's Working Women And Career Discourses: Society, Socialization And Agency, Jayne Howell

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of India’s Working Women and Career Discourses: Society, Socialization and Agency by Suchitra Shenoy-Packer. Lexington Books. 2014.

Book Review: Domestic Violence And The Islamic Tradition, Esraa Osama

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition by Ayesha S. Chaudhry. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Book Review: Cora Dubois: Anthropologist, Diplomat, Agent, Robert A. Mcmanus

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Cora DuBois: Anthropologist, Diplomat, Agent (Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology) by Susan C. Seymour. University of Nebraska Press. 2015.