Women's Studies Commons^™

Im/Possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, And Affinal Solidarity In Modern South Asia, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila,South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the “modern” selves envisioned within them are …

Innocent Initiations: Female Agency In Eroticized Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Bawdy folktales have generated controversy and scholarship for centuries, and their literary, sexually explicit descendants, eroticized fairy tales, are also deserving of attention. Marketed in short story collections as erotica, eroticized fairy tales use fairy-tale characters, plots, and themes as the setting for sexual adventures. Some of these tales focus on a naïve heroine’s initiation into sexual pleasure without her knowing precisely what is going on. I have termed these “innocent initiation” tales. Their use of traditional fairy-tale motifs contributes to discourse about female sexuality, agency, and objectification.

Pond-Women Revelations: The Subaltern Registers In Maithil Women's Expressive Forms, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Ponds are ubiquitous in the Maithil region of Nepal, and they figure prominently in folk narratives and ceremonial paintings produced by women there. I argue that in Maithil women's folktales, as in their paintings, the trope of ponds shifts the imaginative register toward women's perspectives and the importance of women's knowledge and influence in shaping Maithil society, even as this register shift occurs within plots featuring male protagonists. I argue further that in the absence of a habit of exegesis in their expressive arts, and given the cross-referential, dialogic nature of expressive practices, a methodology that draws into interpretive conversation …

Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? And Other Questions Of Value, Meaning And Identity In The Circulation Of Janakpur Art, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

In this article, I examine the values and meanings that adhere to objects made by Maithil women at a development project in Janakpur, Nepal – objects collectors have called ‘Janakpur Art’. I seek to explain how and why changes in pictorial content in Janakpur Art – shifts that took place over a period of five or six years in the 1990s – occurred, and what such a change might indicate about the link between Maithil women’s lives, development, and tourism. As I will demonstrate, part of the appeal for consumers of Janakpur Art has been that it is produced at …

Becoming A Nun, Becoming A Man: Taiwanese Buddhist Nuns’ Gender Transformation, Hillary Crane

Faculty Publications

This paper explores apparent contradictions in the gender identifications of Taiwanese Buddhist nuns. Because the texts and teachings of their tradition provide conflicting messages about women's spiritual abilities, the nuns create a complex gender cosmology as a means to accommodate textual contradictions without rejecting any textual statements. This strategy allows the nuns to assert that they have spiritual abilities equal to those of men without rejecting or contradicting textual statements that they do not. Without denying that they are women (and that they are therefore threatening to men) the nuns primarily identify with the male gender. Compartmentalizing and contextualizing gender …

Gender Lessons On The Fields Of Contemporary Japan: The Female Athlete In Coaching Discourses, Elise M. Edwards

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Dr. Edwards' contribution to : Kelly, William W., and Atsuo Sugimoto. 2007. This Sporting Life : Sports and Body Culture in Modern Japan. Yale CEAS occasional publications, v. 1; Yale CEAS occasional publications, v. 1. New Haven, Conn.: Council on East Asian Studies, Yale University.

L’Espace Sexué Dans Riwan Ou Le Chemin De Sable De Ken Bugul, Antje Ziethen

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Riwan ou le chemin de sable by Ken Bugul, the protagonist lives in the interstice between her own house and that of her husband’s, between the life of a woman educated in Europe and the life of a wife subjected to the laws of mouridism. In her circular movement along the sandy road evoked in the novel’s title, she gradually creates a space that allows her to reconcile the two facets of her identity. Merging different genres, stories and languages, the text itself enacts the symbolism of the road as a transitional sphere.

The Bond And The Beautiful!, Nicole Rearick

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

My Independent Study Project (ISP) research was conducted in Mombasa, Kenya. I initial intention was to focus on Swahili beauty alone and then it led me to a more in depth study. I came upon the idea of women, beauty, and how they come together for beauty processes and how it creates a bond between them. I was aiming to focus on ways females pull together and help each other in order to become beautiful. I also wanted to discover the many traditions which Swahili women use to beautify themselves and what they consider to be beautiful.

'Listen, Rama’S Wife!’: Maithil Women’S Perspectives And Practices In The Festival Of Sāmā-Cakevā, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

As a female-only festival in a significantly gender-segregated society, sāmā cakevā provides a window into Maithil women’s understandings of their society and the sacred, cultural subjectivities, moral frameworks, and projects of self-construction. The festival reminds us that to read male-female relations under patriarchal social formations as a dichotomy between the empowered and the disempowered ignores the porous boundaries between the two in which negotiations and tradeoffs create a symbiotic reliance. Specifically, the festival names two oppositional camps—the male world of law and the female world of relationships—and then creates a male character, the brother, who moves between the two, loyal …

Feminist Tigers And Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies And Instrument Effects In The Struggle For Definition And Control Over Development In Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

This article offers an analysis of a struggle for control of a women’s development project in Nepal. The story of this struggle is worth telling, for it is rife with the gender politics and neo-colonial context that underscore much of what goes on in contemporary Nepal. In particular, my analysis helps to unravel some of the powerful discourses, threads of interest, and yet unintended effects inevitable under a regime of development aid. The analysis demonstrates that the employment of already available discursive figures of the imperialist feminist and the patriarchal third world man are central to the rhetorical strategies taken …

Book Announcement: Women, Art And Geometry In Southern Africa, By Paulus Gerdes

Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal

No abstract provided.

Toward Historizing Gender In Polynesia: On Vilsoni Hereniko’S Woven Gods And Regional Patterns, Jeannette Marie Mageo

Pacific Studies

This article considers possible parallels between Rotuman and Samoan gender history through Vilsoni Hereniko’s book Woven Gods. Hereniko draws upon the work of Victor Turner to analyze his Rotuman data, arguing that wedding clowns reverse normative social structures. Wedding clowns are expert female practitioners of Rotuman joking discourse. This discourse is not only ritualized on special occasions but is also an everyday informal discourse and, I argue, is in this sense normative; it counterbalances respect discourse, which is likewise practiced in ritual (ceremonial) contexts but also in everyday polite contexts. In the Samoan precolonial sex-gender system, males and females had …

Vol. 22 No. 1 (1999): Pacific Studies Full Issue, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US$40.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, and …

Review Of Breaching The Margins: Three Stories Of Aids And Sexuality In The Asian And Island Pacific (Films: Not A Simple Story/Out In Silence; China Dolls; And The Loser), Douglass P. Drozdow

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Andrew Strathern And Pamela J. Stewart's Review Of Donald Tuzin's The Cassowary’S Revenge: The Life And Death Of Masculinity In A New Guinea Society, Andrew Strathern, Pamela J. Stewart

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Contributors: Vol 22 No. 1, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Contributors list of Vol. 22 (1999): Pacific Studies Full Issue 1

Books Received And Book Notices, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Book Listing for the Vol 22, No 1 Edition of the Pacific Studies Journal

[Introduction To] Conceiving Spirits: Birth Rituals And Contested Identities Among Lauje Of Indonesia, Jennifer W. Nourse

Bookshelf

For most of the Lauje' of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, birth spirits are of primary importance. The spirits inhabit a mother's birth fluids and placenta, nurturing fetuses in the womb and children after birth---or bringing sickness and death if rituals are neglected.

Jennifer Nourse describes how Lauje' from both modernized coastal and isolated highland villages attribute to birth spirits competing meanings that hinge on an individual's gender, social class, and religion. At the beginning of her fieldwork, Nourse collaborated with two Lauje' men whose concepts of birth spirits as divided into good and bad, male and female, or local and foreign …

White Shadows In The Darkness: Representations Of Polynesian Women In Early Cinema, Margaret Jolly

Pacific Studies

This article considers representations of Polynesian women in two early Hollywood films: Moana (1926) and Tabu (1931). It ponders the tensions not just between the cinematic visions of Robert Flaherty and F. W. Murnau, but between ethnographic recuperations and romantic celebrations of Polynesian women, in the light of de Lauretis’s contentions (in Technologies of Gender, 1987) that gendered identities are neither fixed nor immutable, but shifting and fluid effects.

Not So Nice Colored Girls: A View Of Tracey Moffatt’S Nice Coloured Girls, Caroline Vercoe

Pacific Studies

Nice Coloured Girls is Tracey Moffatt’s first film. Produced in 1987, this seventeen-minute film describes a tradition that has been passed down from her grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s generation—that of “picking up Captain.” Moffatt explains “since colonisation ‘picking up Captain’ has been a way for Aboriginal women to survive off white men.” Rather than creating new and empowered Aboriginal heroines for the 1990s, Moffatt chooses to site her characters within a colonial continuum. Her tradition begins with postcolonial contact and it is clearly formed by cross-cultural experiences. This essay focuses on the narrative structure of Nice Coloured Girls and discusses the …

Nicholas Modjeska's Review Of Maria Lepowsky's Fruit Of The Motherland: Gender In An Egalitarian Society And Raymond C. Kelly's Constructing Inequality: The Fabrication Of A Hierarchy Of Virtue Among The Etoro, Nicholas Modjeska

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Lisette Josephides's Review Of Maria Lepowsky's Fruit Of The Motherland: Gender In An Egalitarian Society And Raymond C. Kelly's Constructing Inequality: The Fabrication Of A Hierarchy Of Virtue Among The Etoro, Lisette Josephides

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Contributors: Vol 20 No. 3, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Contributors list of Vol. 20 (1997): Pacific Studies Full Issue 3

Peggy Reeves Sanday's Review Of Maria Lepowsky's Fruit Of The Motherland: Gender In An Egalitarian Society And Raymond C. Kelly's Constructing Inequality: The Fabrication Of A Hierarchy Of Virtue Among The Etoro, Peggy Reeves Sanday

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Vol. 20 No. 3 (1997): Pacific Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US$40.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, and …

Vol. 20 No. 3 (1997): Pacific Studies Full Issue, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US$40.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, and …

Marta Rohatynskyj's Review Of Maria Lepowsky's Fruit Of The Motherland: Gender In An Egalitarian Society And Raymond C. Kelly's Constructing Inequality: The Fabrication Of A Hierarchy Of Virtue Among The Etoro, Marta Rohatynskyj

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Books Received And Book Notices, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Book Listing for the Vol 20, No 3 Edition of the Pacific Studies Journal

Marilyn Strathern's Review Of Maria Lepowsky's Fruit Of The Motherland: Gender In An Egalitarian Society And Raymond C. Kelly's Constructing Inequality: The Fabrication Of A Hierarchy Of Virtue Among The Etoro, Marilyn Strathern

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Response: Raymond C. Kelly Rethinking Regimes Of Social Inequality, Raymond C. Kelly

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.