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

Beyond Victimhood: Female Agency In Nigerian Civil War Novels, Enajite E. Ojaruega Feb 2022

Beyond Victimhood: Female Agency In Nigerian Civil War Novels, Enajite E. Ojaruega

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Enajite E. Ojaruega discusses in her “Beyond Victimhood: Female Agency in Nigerian Civil War Novels” the agential roles women played during the Nigeria-Biafra war as reflected in selected fictional narratives. Female characters are generally impacted negatively by their individual and collective war-time experiences. However, there is another important aspect of women's war-time experiences that has largely been underplayed in most historical or literary accounts on war. Female agency recognizes this gender’s participatory roles during the conflict as they reconstruct their subjectivity in more beneficial ways in the unfolding circumstances of war. Women are depicted as being able to explore their …


Looking Back, Or Re-Visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets On “Lot’S Wife”, Anat Koplowitz-Breier Oct 2021

Looking Back, Or Re-Visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets On “Lot’S Wife”, Anat Koplowitz-Breier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Although mentioned only twice in Genesis (19:17, 26), Lot’s wife has been a topic of much discussion amongst both traditional and modern commentators and exegetes. The traditional midrashim seek to explain why she chose to disregard the instructions she was given and the nature of her punishment. In doing so, they follow two principal directions, representing her a) negatively as a wicked sinner, a Sodomite who acted as such even before disobeying the divine decree not to look backwards—thus linking her disobedience with her intrinsic character (e.g., curious, greedy, inhospitable, faithless); or b) positively as a loving mother and daughter. …


Strategies Of (In)Visibility And Resilience: Women Writers In A Digital Era, Miriam Borham-Puyal, Daniel Escandell-Montiel Mar 2021

Strategies Of (In)Visibility And Resilience: Women Writers In A Digital Era, Miriam Borham-Puyal, Daniel Escandell-Montiel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Women’s presence in literary history has been particularly conditioned by their place in society and by the limited spheres in which their production was expected to appear (e.g. the sentimental novel, romances or children’s literature). In today’s digital, open and connected society, women continue to face visibility problems in the publishing industry and in the online spaces that grant presence and agency. Their role in cultural creations is still hindered by vertical powers that operate as main censors. This circumstance takes place even in a rhizomatic and decentralized virtual space, where dissident discourses have highlighted it, although without enough discursive …


“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González Mar 2021

“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I discuss Algernon Swinburne’s and Dora Greenwell’s engagement with the myth of Proserpine through an analysis of the motif of the garden, which takes central stage in both accounts. The examination will illustrate how the authors’ outlined images of the garden challenge the dominant representation of the motif within Western literary tradition, offering a re-interpretation of the myth as social commentary.


Deconstructing Feminine And Feminist Fantastic Through The Study Of Living Dolls, Raquel Velázquez Mar 2021

Deconstructing Feminine And Feminist Fantastic Through The Study Of Living Dolls, Raquel Velázquez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her "Deconstructing Feminine and Feminine Fantastic through the Study of Living Dolls," Raquel Velázquez analyzes the treatment of one idiosyncratic image within the fantastic genre, and one that also has a special impact on the configuration of the feminine: the doll. On the one hand, she examines the evolution of this fantastic motif in order to determine whether it involves a transformation of how the feminine fantastic is represented. On the other hand, she establishes some correlations between the image of the fantastic doll, and the development of processes such as the dollification of women or the humanization of …


Transgression, Essentialism And Literary System: An Approach To The Viability Of The Female Fantastic, Alfons Gregori Mar 2021

Transgression, Essentialism And Literary System: An Approach To The Viability Of The Female Fantastic, Alfons Gregori

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The main aims of this article are firstly to find out whether the concept of “fantastic female” is a contradictory and ambiguous construct, and secondly to challenge the feasibility of applying it to literary studies. The matter of the existence of the “female fantastic” refers to the theoretical approaches made to undertake a double-edged task in the 1970s and 1980s: the conceptualization of a dual scheme establishing a female aesthetic opposed to the dominant patriarchy on the one hand, and on the other, the promotion of non-mimetic narrative modes as formulas for transgressing the patriarchal system. However, the crystallization of …


Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain Feb 2020

Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Through comparing the Hollywood films Arrival and The Shape of Water, this article explicates the films’ similar portrayals of gender, social collaboration, and monstrosity. Although the mainstream media in the United States has linked the idea of the monstrous to larger global forces, the two films suggest that “the monster” exists much closer to home. Hence, this article makes the case that monstrosity occurs in a variety of formulations such as the actions of national authorities like governmental officials that oppress and endanger a myriad of American citizens as well as newcomers. Further, this article makes the case that …


Resilience As Regeneration In Kate Atkinson’S Life After Life, Beatriz Domínguez García Mar 2019

Resilience As Regeneration In Kate Atkinson’S Life After Life, Beatriz Domínguez García

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In Life After Life (2013), British writer Kate Atkinson returns to the rewriting of History as her-story that characterized her early fiction. The protagonist’s lifespan overlaps with the major historical events of the twentieth century, allowing the writer to explore how those affected the individual lives of women and, at the same time, problematizing history, memory, and the past. Above all, Life After Life highlights the deep vulnerability of women to systemic gender violence, although it also emphasizes women’s resilience. The purpose of this paper is to examine Atkinson’s peculiar rendering of resilience, which interestingly she locates in the body, …


The Rise Of The Neoliberal Chinese Female Subject In Go Lala Go, Su-Lin Yu Dec 2018

The Rise Of The Neoliberal Chinese Female Subject In Go Lala Go, Su-Lin Yu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Built upon feminist critique of neoliberalism, this paper will examine a prominent medium through which neoliberal feminist ideology is disseminated: Go Lala Go. By analyzing the film, I will show how it co-opts the discourse of neoliberalism, and reworks it to construct neoliberal female subjects. First, I will explore what kind of role neoliberalism has enacted in the formation of an emergent type of female subject in China. Then, I will demonstrate how the contentious process of neoliberal feminism affects young career women’s identities. More than career guides promoting different techniques for making women more successful at their workplaces, …


En-Gendering Memory Through Holocaust Alimentary Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvári Sep 2015

En-Gendering Memory Through Holocaust Alimentary Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "En-gendering Memory through Holocaust Alimentary Life Writing" Louise O. Vasvári aims to underline the cultural and gendered significance of the sharing of recipes as a survival tool by starving women in concentration camps during the Holocaust and the continuing role of food memories in the writing of Holocaust survivor women she considers a genealogy of intergenerational remembrance and transmission into the postmemory writing of their second generation daughters and occasionally their sons. Vasvári argues that the study of multigenerational Holocaust alimentary life writing becomes important today because as direct survivors of the Holocaust disappear there is a …


Narrating Wartime Rapes And Trauma In A Woman In Berlin, Agatha Schwartz Sep 2015

Narrating Wartime Rapes And Trauma In A Woman In Berlin, Agatha Schwartz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Narrating Wartime Rapes and Trauma in A Woman in Berlin" Agatha Schwartz examines the reception of the controversial wartime diary published anonymously first in 1954 in English translation. The book is a narrative representation of the mass rapes committed by Red Army soldiers during the siege of Berlin in 1945. Schwartz argues that A Woman in Berlin's portrayal of the rapes and the rapists, although not unbiased, leaves room for the initiation of the healing of trauma and forgiveness. Schwartz reflects on how life writing, particularly by women about a difficult chapter of German history …


A Survey Of Slovenian Women Fairy Tale Writers, Milena Mileva Blazić Mar 2013

A Survey Of Slovenian Women Fairy Tale Writers, Milena Mileva Blazić

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "A Survey of Slovenian Women Fairy Tale Writers" Milena Mileva Blažić begins with an introduction to the Slovenian fairy tale writing tradition dating back nearly 150 years. While male authors published collections of tales, women writers published only individual fairy tales and owing to their biographies giving birth to children and caring for their families gained less, if any, recognition in literary history. Blažić's overview of Slovenian women writers of fairy tales and scholarship about the genre includes the related genre of youth literature. Blažić's survey is placed in the context of West European fairy tale writing …