Search Results (39)

The Western genre has traditionally been associated with American identity and male-dominated narratives. However, recent decades have seen increasing attention to female protagonists, particularly the European woman as a cultural mediator within the frontier context. This study aims to identify the archetypes of the European woman in the Western genre through a diachronic and comparative analysis of the visual language found in European painting from the late 17th to early 19th centuries and in 20th–21st century cinema. The research methodology combines narrative, visual, and semiotic analysis, with a focus on intermedial and intertextual parallels between visual art and film. The study identifies nine archetypal models corresponding to goddesses of the Greek pantheon and traces their transformation across different aesthetic systems. These archetypes, rooted in artistic traditions such as Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism, and others, reappear in Western films through compositional, symbolic, and iconographic strategies, demonstrating their persistence and ability to transcend temporal, medial, and geographical boundaries. The findings suggest that the woman in the Western genre is not merely a central character, but a visual sign that activates cultural memory and engages with deep archetypal structures embedded in the collective unconscious. Full article

Certain bodily functions are generally associated with distinct sexes and genders. When it comes to intersex individuals, the gendering of certain bodily functions as male or female plays a key role in determining their sexed corporeality and self-determination of gender. The article elucidates how the protagonist Ash in Just Ash (2021) by Sol Santana is oppressed under notions of menstrunormativity due to his menstruating body. It explains how the gendering of a bodily function like menstruation as feminine plays a significant role in the medical interventions on intersex individuals and how the same norms affect intersex individuals’ own perceptions of themselves. Ash, who identifies himself as a boy, is bullied by his peers at school, and his parents impose the female sex and feminine gender identity on him because of his menstruating corporeality, all leading to Ash’s own negative perception of his body. The article also highlights the importance of degendering menstruation to include sex- and gender-diverse individuals. Full article

This article analyzes the French fairy tale “La Belle et la Bête” (“Beauty and the Beast”), the German folk tale “Das singende springende Löweneckerchen” (“The Singing Springing Lark”), and the Spanish folk tale “El lagarto de las siete camisas” (“The Lizard with the Seven Shirts”) from the vantage point of feminist fairy tale studies and posthumanism. In particular, the article discusses the ways in which the female protagonists and their enchanted, beastly husbands become-with-each-other. The relationships between the female protagonists and their husbands are here taken as indicative of a recognition of the necessary, but often complex and disharmonic, allyship between the human and the nonhuman. The tales showcase different degrees of feminist potential and different ways of acknowledging such transcorporeal interrelations. Moreover, while they arguably transmit patriarchal and aristocratic lessons, their potential for challenging anthropocentric thinking emerges in an affirmative reading. Hence, this article seeks to demonstrate the eco-activist potential of the Western fairy tale tradition. Full article

In European imaginings of the Islamic world, women incited intense curiosity and were often depicted by early modern writers as sexualized subjects and curious objects of male desire. However, this Orientalist fascination ignores the very curiosity of these women and their desire to glean knowledge about the world around them. While curiosity became increasingly valued in the early modern period as a means of progress, female curiosity was still often linked to the perils of excess (Neil Kenny). This essay examines this apparent contradiction by focusing on the Muslim protagonist in one of Miguel de Cervantes’s plays that takes place on the Spanish–North African borderlands. In Los baños de Argel (1615), Zahara defends her desire to inquire about the world by portraying herself as a “curious impertinent” (“curiosa impertinente”), a name that clearly recalls the tale of “El curioso impertinente” intercalated in the first part of Don Quixote (1605). Moreover, Zahara harnesses her ability to ask questions to further her goals and ambitions. Ultimately, through a close reading of the female protagonist in this play, I argue that Cervantes considers the ways in which women asserted their own curiosity and represented themselves as agents of inquiry. Full article

This article focuses on a little-studied short story from Jewish American writer Cynthia Ozick, “What Happened to the Baby?” It explores the narrative elaboration of a distinctly feminine trauma—that of a mother in mourning whose grief is not acknowledged in a patriarchal context. My approach uses close readings and psychoanalytical insights to understand the female protagonist’s voiceless rage. The narrator of the framing narrative is a young woman trying to understand a mysterious family trauma—how little Henrietta, the daughter of her uncle Simon and his ex-wife, Essie, died. The starting point of the story is a distorted version of the accident, told to the narrator by her mother, Lily, and according to which it is Essie’s mistreatment that caused the little girl’s death. Through the narrative, the narrator encourages Essie to tell her own side of the story. In the embedded narrative, the mother reveals that it was in fact the father’s negligence that caused the death of their child. Father and mother subsequently develop differing models of mourning. Simon, a linguist, creates a whole new idiom enabling him to keep commemorating the dead child. In contrast, Essie, the mother, is determined to destroy any discourse that might account for her trauma, and to undermine the father’s very public mourning process. The narrator acts as a kind of therapist, allowing Essie’s discourse on loss to emerge after decades of repression. On the masculine/feminine, father/mother binary axis, I will observe, based on the study of this fascinating short story, that the father’s mourning involves mastering language, while the mother experiences loss through the sheer inability to speak up—at least until the narrator, Vivian, empowers her by giving her a voice. Full article

The “haunted house formula” is a central component in every Female Gothic narrative from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Typically, it revolves around a heroine trapped in a gloomy mansion, seeking to escape a male villain. This trope, which covertly explores feminine anxieties such as domestic confinement and familial oppression, recurs multiple times in Shirley Jackson’s “house trilogy” as well, namely The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. However, as noted by many critics, while Female Gothic narratives usually conclude with the protagonist’s successful escape and her marriage to the male hero, in Jackson’s fiction, there is “no way out”. Her protagonists remain confined within the domestic space. This essay explores Jackson’s reappropriation of the haunted house trope as a symbol of the paranoia experienced by women in 1950s suburban America. The analysis begins by outlining the theme in traditional Female Gothic fiction, followed by an account of the sociohistorical context in which Jackson operated, without dismissing the significancy of her personal life experiences as well. Jackson’s “house trilogy” will then be examined, paying particular attention to the ways in which the haunted house formula is subverted to function not as an escape narrative, but as a metaphor for modern women’s inescapable confinement. Full article

Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, is renowned for his unique cinematic style and profound insights into the complexity of human nature. Among the various female characters in his films, the mother figure holds a particularly significant place. This article proposes the concept of “maternal emptiness” to describe the predicament of the mother figures in Hitchcock’s films, where they are often depicted as distorted, dark, and somewhat lacking in maternal essence. Drawing on psychoanalytic and feminist film theories, especially the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Laura Mulvey, this study aims to deconstruct Hitchcockian “maternal emptiness” and explore its deep-rooted causes. Through a systematic examination of the mother figures in Hitchcock’s filmography, this article identifies the following three main categories: the mother roles of blonde women, the mother roles of female protagonists, and the mother roles of male protagonists. Close textual analysis reveals that these mother figures, despite their apparent diversity, share a common plight—a deviation from the maternal essence of love, care, and nourishment. This “maternal emptiness” is further traced back to Hitchcock’s childhood traumas, the patriarchal ideology in the cultural context, and the changing status of motherhood in modern society. By engaging critically with existing Hitchcock scholarship, including the works of Tania Modleski, Paul Gordon, and Slavoj Žižek, this study situates the concept of “maternal emptiness” within the broader discussions of motherhood in cinema. It explores how Hitchcock’s representation of mothers both reflects and challenges contemporary understandings of maternity. Furthermore, this study examines the enduring influence of Hitchcock’s maternal representations on contemporary cinema, analyzing films such as Darren Aronofsky’s “Mother!” (2017) and Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” (2018) to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of “maternal emptiness” in modern film discourse. The study concludes by considering the legacy of Hitchcock’s maternal representations in contemporary cinema, demonstrating the ongoing relevance of the concept of “maternal emptiness” in film analysis and its potential for reimagining maternal subjectivity in cinematic representation. Full article

The topographical turn in literary and cultural studies has shed new light on the deeply symbolic significance of the natural and urban places where stories unfold. This focus on spatiality is particularly evident in the South Asian literature by contemporary women writers, where locations acquire a personality and significantly contribute to the shaping of gender identities. Although most of these narratives portray female protagonists who develop strategies of resistance and sisterhood within traditional domestic spaces, the widely praised transnational novels Brick Lane and The Mistress of Spices show that women can also achieve independence and self-realization in the bustling urban environment. Drawing on cultural geography as well as gender and social studies, this essay argues that the global dimension of the city offers diasporic women the opportunity to forge new empowered selves in the above-mentioned books. First, the article maintains that London and Oakland, CA, where the main characters live, exert a centripetal force on women, thus triggering change and mobility, both in physical and psychical terms. Second, it claims that the two cities are gendered “heterotopias”, i.e., heterogeneous spaces where border-crossing women, like those featured in the two novels at hand, can overcome alienation and develop creativity, resilience, and self-confidence. In conclusion, urban spaces serve as “safe houses” for immigrant women, where they can cure their emotional and physical diseases and become figures of adaptive hybridity. Full article

This article will critically appraise the extent to which new developments in the fields of reproductive technology are shown to impact female bodily autonomy and reproductive choice in Eva Hoffman’s novel The Secret. The Secret pushes its readers towards the more pressing and urgent questions arising from ongoing developments within the field of NRT and human cloning in a neoliberal climate. The novel cautions that, ultimately, the individual right to reproductive choice is never completely free; an awareness of external influences and a consideration of possible repercussions is integral to responsible decision-making in the context of NRT and cloning. However, the novel moves towards a possible reconceptualization of NRTs as part of the evolutionary progress of humankind. In returning to the body and biopolitical figurations, this article sees the novel’s protagonist, Iris, and her emergent cyborg identity as a manifestation of Haraway’s monstrous cyborg replete with possibility. Full article

With its suspenseful atmosphere, mysterious and murderous male protagonist, and magical objects, it is hardly surprising that Charles Perrault’s conte bleu ‘La Barbe bleue’ (1697) was the inspiration for numerous Gothic tales in the nineteenth century. Some of these adaptations placed Gothic devices such as the representation of the terror experienced by Bluebeard’s latest wife within the broader nineteenth-century cultural discourse on female deviance, and its relations with masculine authority and dominance. By removing from the tale Perrault’s warning against female curiosity and imprudence and focusing on the wife’s feelings of fear and terror, these adaptations amplify the intrinsic Gothicism of the Bluebeard story, thus providing the female protagonist with a psychological depth that includes, as I demonstrate in this study, a display of a variety of abnormal behaviours. In these Gothic adaptations, the terror experienced by Bluebeard’s wife serves as a springboard for the representation of psychological and nervous disorders commonly diagnosed in the nineteenth century such as hysteria, monomania, female depravity, and masochism. Showing the interculturality and intermediality of these themes, this essay analyses rewritings of Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ from nineteenth-century Britain, France, and the United States, including Gothic bluebooks, poems, dramas, and short stories. Full article

In this essay, we intend to demonstrate how the cities of Havana and Cádiz became mutable literary subjects that accompany the female characters of the narratives of female writers of the past decades from Havana (Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Ena Lucía Portela, and Mylene Fernández Pintado) and Cádiz (Ana Rossetti and Pilar Paz Pasamar). The ironic and delusional visions of a ruined life due to the special period, economic crisis, and political xenophobia in Cádiz will be illustrated by Cuban-Spanish mapping of the analyzed authors’ works. Our hypothesis stems from the idea that there is a clear relation between the representation of the city and political, cultural, and patriarchal transgression that is quoted in these texts (Bataille), which relates to the experience of scarcity/poverty lived on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Our bibliographic search has focused on the literary expression of the experience of these cities from the point of view of female writers and protagonists. We concluded with a universal understanding of the experience of the space marked by literature and the gaze of women. Full article

This essay examines French filmmaker Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) and Vagabond (1985) for their critical invocation of the persistent and patriarchal association of women with plants. Both women and plants are thought within the metaphysical tradition to have a deficient or negative relation to freedom. Varda’s films, however, link the liberation of women in postwar France to the liberation of vegetal being; her female protagonists pursue their liberation by accessing the vegetal freedom that subtends human freedom. In Le Bonheur, Varda uses visual irony to critique the processes of idealization that turn both women and flowers into signifiers of ideal beauty in thrall to the enchantments of happiness. In Vagabond, the enigmatic female drifter at the center of the film enacts a plant-like refusal of self-preservation. In both films, female liberation takes vegetal shape, as their protagonists embody a vegetal silence or vegetal indifference in defiance of the patriarchal situations they encounter. Full article

Gender violence is a major public health issue. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of sexist attitudes that could be associated with said violence, and to identify some sociodemographic variables that predict sexism. A cross-sectional observational study was conducted with 723 adolescents between the ages of 14 to 19. Their explicit sexist attitudes were measured with the EVAMVE and EARG scales, and their implicit attitudes were measured with a series of assessment items regarding the behavior of the protagonists of a video and a story in which a young couple interacts. Explicit and implicit sexist attitudes were detected in adolescents of both sexes. Qualitatively, the assessment of the behavior of the female protagonist is striking. Regarding the sexism predictors, it was found that male adolescents, those born outside of Spain, those who were studying in a public school, those whose parents did not have university studies, and those who consumed the most pornography presented attitudes that were significantly more sexist. These results suggest that it is necessary to strengthen education in equality and prevention of gender violence in adolescents, and to develop affective-sexual education programs. Full article

Tonglen is a Tibetan Buddhist practice that aims at developing the practitioner’s bodhicitta. In this article, I argue that it not only finds expression in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple through the protagonist Celie, but adds more complexity to the womanist philosophy for which Walker has been ensconced in positions of influence. More specifically, Celie follows an implied Buddhist practice of tonglen; in the process of “taking in and sending out”, her bodhicitta has been generated and cultivated. Underlying her tonglen practice is Buddhist womanism demonstrating how African American women can survive the social oppression and injustice by way of acknowledging their own terrible afflictions, empathizing with those enduring intense suffering, male and female, extending their loving kindness, comprehending the absence of intrinsic entity and the principle of dependent origination, etc. In addition, the article suggests that the fight for the survival of the oppressed is a type of Buddhist practice in Walker’s Buddhist womanism. Full article

Vaccination hesitancy is a barrier to India’s efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Considerable resources have been spent to promote COVID-19 vaccination, but evaluations of such efforts are sparse. Our objective was to determine how vaccine videos that manipulate message appeal (collectivistic versus individualistic), tone (humorous versus serious), and source (male versus female protagonist) toward vaccines and vaccination. We developed eight videos that manipulated the type of appeal (collectivistic or individualistic), tone of the message (humor or serious), and gender of the vaccine promoter (male or female) in a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment. Participants (N = 2349) were randomly assigned to watch one of eight videos in an online experiment. Beliefs about vaccines and those about vaccination were obtained before and after viewing the video. Manipulation checks demonstrated that each of the three independent variables was manipulated successfully. After exposure to the video, beliefs about vaccines became more negative, while beliefs about vaccination became more positive. Humor reduced negative beliefs about vaccines. Collectivism and protagonist gender did not affect beliefs about vaccines or vaccination. Those able to remember the protagonist’s gender (a measure of attention) were likely to develop favorable beliefs if they had also seen the humorous videos. These findings suggest that people distinguish beliefs about vaccines, which deteriorated after exposure to the videos, from beliefs about vaccination, which improved. We recommend using humor when appropriate and focusing on the outcomes of vaccination, rather than on the vaccines themselves. Full article