Search Results (33)

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

Immediately after the Second World War, Jean-Paul Sartre offered a history of literature as part of his project to launch a new era of literary activity guided by his concept of littérature engagée or committed literature. This article examines Sartre’s approach to the construction of literary history, highlighting his use of periodisation, a thematics of shifting relationships between writers and readers, and frequent deployment of gendered rhetoric to support his arguments. It shows that Sartre repeatedly used gendered tropes that worked to associate women, females and/or femininity with characteristics generally devalued in European and other Western societies, such as passivity, ignorance and indecision. It is argued that the touchstone to which Sartre continually referred in formulating his literary history was Julien Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs (Treason of the Intellectuals). The argument to be developed takes broad inspiration from the work of Hayden White on the analysis of historical texts, and follows his injunction that historians and readers of history need to become more conscious of how histories are made. Full article

With Great House (2010), Nicole Krauss offers a choral novel that interweaves the lives of several characters loosely connected by a huge, wooden desk that one of them relentlessly chases around the world. A possible symbol of the memory of the Second World War Jewish genocide transmitted to younger generations, the desk powerfully materializes transmission in its potentially traumatic, obsessional, and violent dimensions. This essay deals with the way first- and second-generation women, in the novel, develop ingenious, creative but also uncompromising responses to the inescapable duty of remembrance. While the dominating male characters freeze memory in timeless, petrified representations, these female writers expose its terrible necessity while hiding nothing of the damages memory causes to witnesses and descendants. They claim a right of inventory and use the desk as an echo-chamber reflecting both the suffering voices of children and the dark presence of defaulting fathers and failing mothers, thus allowing for a new generation to be born with a more bearable heritage. 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

A group of Syriac Christian believers existed during the fourth century called the Bnay Qyōmo (with their female counterparts known as the Bnoth Qyōmo): the Sons and Daughters of the Covenant. There has been considerable controversy about the nature of this archaic Syrian monastic movement or, as it is known to some scholars, the Syriac “Proto-Monastic Tradition”. The controversy has not only been about the name, but also the origin, habits, and ascetic way of life of the Bnay Qyōmo. The intention of the present article is not to elaborate on the various terminology used to describe the Bnay Qyōmo or the nature of their vows and expected duties as introduced by Aphrahat and other Syrian Fathers, for these have been studied by many scholars. Rather, the intention of this article is to review some of the material discussing this group by key Syriac Fathers to present a fresh reading of the historical record to better apprize the order’s regulations and its social and ecclesiastical roles within the Syriac-speaking Church during the fourth and fifth centuries AD. The main Syriac writers who dealt with this topic were Aphrahat, known as “the Persian Sage” (ca. 260–345), and Rabūla, Bishop of Edessa (flor. 420s). Whilst the order appears to have declined by about the eighth century, understanding the roles of the Bnay Qyōmo during the earlier period (the focus of this writing) is crucial for explaining the development of the Syriac Tradition. Full article

In this essay, I discuss the art of Missionary Mary Proctor, a contemporary folk artist from Tallahassee, Florida, in the context of the literary aesthetics of the renowned twentieth-century anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. In comparing these Southern-born African American women artists, I argue that both are rooted in an aesthetic praxis deriving from their shared womanist ethics. My goal in this inquiry is to highlight the faith-based aesthetic traditions of African American women and reveal the manner in which discourses of freedom intertwine with literary and visual aesthetics and faith-based practices in African American folk art and literature. To that end, I analyze the prevalence of themes of liberation within the spiritual discourses of Southern African American women artists such as Missionary Mary Proctor and theorize the manner in which a landscape of Black female liberation is envisioned within their works. Full article

There are many debates concerning the existence and possibility of Christian philosophy, as well as Jewish and Islamic philosophy. Starting from the debates in France in the 1930s, some philosophers, such as Bréhier, have argued that Christian philosophy, especially in the patristic era, did not operate through reason, as philosophy requires, for religion is a system full of dogmas, interpretations based on strict approaches and alleged facts. However, patristic philosophers, especially some pro-philosophy apologetic writers, suggested that pagan philosophy, which is assumed to operate through reason, took its doctrines from Christianity and distorted them. Thus, for them, Christianity was the true philosophy. If one takes the patristic philosophers’ view and considers Christianity a philosophy through their writings, one should acknowledge that, at the basis of their views, lies the meaning of φιλοσοφία, that is, the love of wisdom. Our consideration of early Christian philosophy as a way of life is best understood through the lens of the Church mothers since they are portrayed as the best examples among Christians. In this study, we aim to discuss patristic philosophy as the basic form of philosophizing and then go on to specify prominent female Christian philosophers from the Mediterranean Region, the crucible for many long-lasting civilizations, and finally examine the ways they were philosophizing. Our method of research is mainly based on document and content analysis since it is qualitative research in the philosophical literature. Based on the findings of this research, we demonstrate the core endeavor of philosophy as the love of wisdom through the ideas of two of the prominent women in early Christian philosophy. 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

In early modern Italy, lyric poets of spiritual verse experimented with engaging and depicting the divine Word in novel ways. They aestheticized bodies, including that of Christ, and they imagined eroticized encounters between themselves and the Word made flesh. This article examines the sensual spiritual poetry of three early modern Italian women who, between 1530 and 1630, dedicated themselves to crafting and reinvigorating the poetic word and to expressing and (re)presenting the divine Word. Exploring the introspective and subjective spiritual lyrics of Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Laura Battiferri (1523–1589), and Francesca Turini Bufalini (1553–1641) in the context of the Italian literary Renaissance and Counter-Reformation, it aims to highlight and to elucidate the conflation of the sacred and the erotic in their verse. In so doing, this article reveals how these early modern female poets deployed the sensual strategically in their verse to elevate the erotic and how they raised the Italian religious lyric to new literary heights by spiritualizing the dominant poetic idiom. Full article

As more young girls write stories online thanks to the increased amount of publishing platforms, their fiction becomes a means to explore if they are offsetting prescribed practices of patriarchy in their gender constructions. Often, young women interrogate gender and recontextualize their experiences by writing fanfictions. In the age of transmedia storytelling, various online fan communities are rich data sources, as transnational female fans prolifically write fiction featuring icons from music and movies belonging to another country. We examined how young Indian girls frame gender roles and power dynamics in their fanfictions of BTS, the South Korean boyband, on Wattpad. To know if conventional gender frames are upheld or challenged in fanfiction stories revolving around non-Indian celebrities, we performed a textual analysis on forty-four BTS fanfictions. We found that in these fanfictions, existing gendered tropes used to depict masculinity and femininity are mostly normalized, with minor alterations reflecting a power imbalance typical in Indian patriarchal households. A subversion of tropes was found in framing men as emotionally expressive, arguably drawing from the soft masculinity projected in the home country of BTS–South Korea. Grounding these findings in self-categorization theory implores us to situate the construction of gendered identities within the socio-cultural conventions of fanfiction writers. Full article

Ora Shem-Ur’s detective series starring Ali Honigsberg established her as one of the early female pioneers in the new wave of Israeli detective fiction writers. In line with the current trend in post-feminist criticism towards analyzing the place of women within popular culture by looking at fiction as an agent of social change, this article suggests that the series not only addresses gendered topics but also other tensions and social exploitations of power within Israeli society. Shem-Ur thus provides a fascinating portrait of Israeli society in the 1990s, reflecting the way in which female detective fiction developed from light reading material into a social mirror presenting and addressing social changes and shifts in gender conception. Reading the series through a post-feminist lens, the article seeks to demonstrate how its themes of the relations between men, women, and power, and of economic corruption and politics, shed light on contemporaneous Israeli social issues. Full article

The literary topic of Siamese twins is not unfamiliar. American literary history tells us of the genealogy from Mark Twain’s pseudo-antebellum story The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), Karen Tei Yamashita’s postmodern metafiction “Siamese Twins and Mongoloids: Cultural Appropriation and the Deconstruction of Stereotype via the Absurdity of Metaphor” (1999), down to Shelley Jackson’s James Tiptree, Jr. award winner Half-Life (2006). Rereading these works, we are easily invited to notice the political unconscious hidden deep within each plot: Twain’s selection of the Italian Siamese twins based upon Chang and Eng Bunker, antebellum stars of the Barnum Museum, cannot help but recall the ideal of the post-Civil War world uniting the North and the South; Yamashita’s figure of the conjoined twins Heco and Okada derives from Hikozo Hamada, an antebellum Japanese who made every effort to empower the bond between Japan and the United States, and John Okada, the Japanese American writer well known for his masterpiece No No Boy (1957); and Jackson’s characterization of the female conjoined twins Nora and Blanche Olney represents a new civil rights movement in the post-Cold War age in the near future, establishing a close friendship between the humans and the post-humans. This literary and cultural context should convince us that Yamashita’s short story “Siamese Twins and Mongoloids” serves as a kind of singularity point between realist twins and magic realist twins. Influenced by Twain’s twins, Yamashita paves the way for the re-figuration of the conjoined twins not only as tragi-comical freaks in the Gilded Age but also as representative men of magic realist America in our Multiculturalist Age. A Close reading of this metafiction composed in a way reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Bruce Sterling will enable us to rediscover not only the role conjoined twins played in cultural history, but also the reason why Yamashita had to feature them once again in her novel I Hotel (2010) whose plot centers around the Asian American civil rights movement between the 1960s and the 1970s. Accordingly, an Asian American magic realist perspective will clarify the way Yamashita positioned the figure of Siamese Twins as representing legal and political double standards, and the way the catachresis of Siamese Twins came to be naturalized, questioned and dismissed in American literary history from the 19th century through the 21st century. Full article

Since her debut in Paris in 1925 and meteoric rise to stardom, views of Josephine Baker have been dominated by the white artists and audiences who constructed her as an exotic “Other”. This article revisits the phenomenon of “La Bakaire” from the perspective of a Black female artist who witnessed her performance first-hand and participated in the same Jazz Age projects of fashioning New Negro womanhood and formulating Black Deco aesthetics. When Gwendolyn Bennett saw Baker perform, she recognized her as a familiar model of selfhood, fellow artist, and member of a diasporic Black cultural community. In her article “Let’s Go: In Gay Paree”, July 1926 Opportunity cover, and “Ebony Flute” column, she utilizes call and response patterns to transform racialized sexual objectification into collective affirmation of Black female beauty and artistry. The picture that emerges from Bennett’s art and writing is one of communal practices and interartistic expression, in which Baker joins a host of now-forgotten chorus girls, vaudeville actors, jazz singers, musicians, visual artists, and writers participating in a modern renaissance of Black expressive culture. Full article

Recent discoveries of reversible N6-methyladenosine (m6A) methylation on messenger RNA (mRNA) and mapping of m6A methylomes in many species have revealed potential regulatory functions of this RNA modification by m6A players—writers, readers, and erasers. Here, we first profile transcriptome-wide m6A in female and male Anopheles sinensis and reveal that m6A is also a highly conserved modification of mRNA in mosquitoes. Distinct from mammals and yeast but similar to Arabidopsis thaliana, m6A in An. sinensis is enriched not only around the stop codon and within 3′-untranslated regions but also around the start codon and 5′-UTR. Gene ontology analysis indicates the unique distribution pattern of m6A in An. sinensis is associated with mosquito sex-specific pathways such as tRNA wobble uridine modification and phospholipid-binding in females, and peptidoglycan catabolic process, exosome and signal recognition particle, endoplasmic reticulum targeting, and RNA helicase activity in males. The positive correlation between m6A deposition and mRNA abundance indicates that m6A can play a role in regulating gene expression in mosquitoes. Furthermore, many spermatogenesis-associated genes, especially those related to mature sperm flagellum formation, are positively modulated by m6A methylation. A transcriptional regulatory network of m6A in An. sinensis is first profiled in the present study, especially in spermatogenesis, which may provide a new clue for the control of this disease-transmitting vector. Full article