Technical revelations and material encounters: female corporeality in the work of Peggy Ahwesh

Screen ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 500-506
Author(s):  
E. Cleghorn
Keyword(s):  
Female Corporeality

This Land Was Made for … : (Re)Appearing Black/Brown Female Corporeality, Life, and Death

Hypatia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 190-203
Author(s):  
Esme G. Murdock
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The North ◽  
American Landscape ◽  
Female Corporeality ◽  
Brown Bodies

Lands and bodies are often conceptualized as exhaustible objects and property within settler-colonial and neoliberal ideologies. These conceptualizations lead to underdevelopment of understandings of lands and bodies that fall outside of these ascriptions, and also attempt to actively obscure the pervasive ways in which settler colonialism violently reinscribes itself on the North American landscape through the murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women's bodies. In this article, I will argue that the continual murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women in North America facilitate the successful functioning of ongoing settler-colonial systems and projects. This violence creates and reinforces the functionality of Black/Brown bodies as the territory upon which settler identity and futurity gains traction, indeed, requires.

“Motherhood Is Beautiful”: Maternalism in the West German New Women's Movement between Eroticization and Ecological Protest

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 811-834
Author(s):  
Yanara Schmacks
Keyword(s):  
Women's Movement ◽  
New Left ◽  
The West ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Female Corporeality ◽  
Nazi Past

AbstractThis article traces changing conceptions of maternalism in the West German New Women's Movement from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. I argue that there were two moments in which the concept of motherhood was heatedly discussed and transformed. First, from the mid-1970s onward and within the broader cultural currents of “New Inwardness” (Neue Innerlichkeit) and “New Sensuality” (Neue Sinnlichkeit)—both of which permeated the New Left—motherhood became sensualized, eroticized, and sexualized. Second, these trends were intensified and at the same time drawn into new directions after the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe. For while the focus on female corporeality was consolidated, a growing ecofeminist strand successfully reimagined motherhood as tightly bound to nature and life itself. Serving also as a means to deal with the Nazi past, this late 1980s conception of motherhood was marked by a more pessimistic, even apocalyptic outlook.

scholarly journals “Can We Get a Clean Up On Aisle 2?”: How Film Critics Mopped Up the Transgressions of Jenny McCarthy’s Dirty Love

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Ann Swain
Keyword(s):  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Safe Distance ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Sexually Explicit ◽  
Female Corporeality ◽  
Grotesque Body

Purposefully tasteless, the 'gross-out' comedy is notorious for its lowbrow predilections for toilet humor, salacious sight gags and sexually explicit jokes. Considered by critics to be the lowest form of entertainment, films of this sort are at best affectionately tolerated while at worst they are coolly dismissed. But no gross-out comedy in recent years has been maligned as mordantly as DIRTY LOVE (John Asher, 2005). This ribald, Rabelaisian romp was penned and produced by its star, Playboy model-turned-comedian Jenny McCarthy. This low budget lightweight was not only a monumental box office blunder, but it also consistently garnered poor ratings across the board. It even won a whopping four Golden Raspberries (“Razzies”) the year of its release. Yet for a film that so few people saw (and enjoyed), it let loose a startling deluge of hostility. The reviews, though scant, all harbored a perceptible, unrivaled rancor. Roger Ebert harangues in The Chicago Sun for example, “DIRTY LOVE wasn’t written or directed, it was committed.” But the film’s merit is beside the point—Ebert betrays the crux of his contention when he adds, “it's painful to see a pretty girl, who seems nice enough, humiliating herself on the screen. I feel sorry for her.”  Ebert is just one of many critics to insinuate that the film’s failure is ultimately a failure to keep a safe distance between Jenny McCarthy’s erotically charged centerfold body and her comically charged grotesque body. This paper will examine the popular reviews of DIRTY LOVE and identify the rhetorical strategies, from disgust to pity, condescension, and belittlement that critics have used to contain and disinfect McCarthy’s disruption. In probing the film’s reception then, this paper will lay bare the underlying anxieties that persist about women in comedy, and the mutability of female corporeality more generally’s power to unsettle does not rescue it from the gutter, but in re-positing it as a unique and spirited attempt to illuminate underlying taboos, this paper hopes to acknowledge, reconsider and reassess the film’s radical underpinnings.

scholarly journals THE QUESTION OF FEMALE BODY IN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY IN THE LATE 20TH CENTURY

Articult ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 91-96
Author(s):  
Svetlana V. Petrushikhina ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Architectural Theory ◽  
Architectural Discourse ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
Female Corporeality ◽  
Semantic Dimension

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of female body in the foreign theory of architecture in the 1980‑s–90‑s. The works of D. Agrest, E. Grosz, D. Bloomer and D. Fausch are examined in the present paper. There are two perspectives on the problem of female corporeality: poststructuralist and phenomenological. Jennifer Bloomer and Diane Agrest adopt a poststructuralist critical strategy in which the notion of the feminine is considered as the “Other” of the logocentric architectural discourse. Elisabeth Gross notes that women have always been displaced from the realm of architecture. This is indicated not only by the absence of female architects, but also by the fact that the inherent attributes of female corporeality have been completely disregarded. Diane Agrest suggests that these attributes were appropriated by male architects. The phenomenological perspective on the female corporeality is reflected in Deborah Fausch's concept of “feminist architecture”. “Feminist architecture” brings back the value of concrete, sensual bodily experience in the perception of architecture. The subject's perceptual experience through the body allows the semantic dimension to unfold in the building.

Female Corporeality, Magic, and Gender in the Babylonian Talmud

2008 ◽  
Vol 15 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 199-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Murray
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Babylonian Talmud ◽  
Natural Action ◽  
The Third ◽  
Female Corporeality ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Continuum ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractFor the rabbis, female corporeality – and the control of the female body through rules and regulations – was the locus for (decidedly male) rabbinic piety, and a means for the rabbis to workout what constituted ideal maleness. In their constructions of what constituted "male" and "female," the rabbis created a hierarchy in which males – in particular rabbinic males – were at the top of the hierarchy, and females were at the bottom. The focus of this article is the rabbinic taxonomy of human beings as found in the Babylonian Talmud, a multi-layered and edited corpus of Jewish literature dating from the third to the sixth or seventh centuries CE, redacted in its final form in Babylonia. Using what I call a "taxonomical continuum" as a heuristic tool, I explore how the rabbis employed the label of magic in their discourse as a means of expressing gender. I suggest that "male," which for the rabbis was the form of the ideal human being, was at one end of the continuum. The further from the "male" pole a person was placed along the continuum, the less perfect and less ideal – and the more "female" – was that person. I argue that magic was employed as a mechanism for expressing rabbinic perceptions of gender, since the term "magic" has both positive and negative connotations in the Babylonian Talmud. The valence of the term depended on where the individual who performed the supra-natural action in question was found along the rabbinic taxonomic continuum.

scholarly journals Femine Body in the Mass Culture of Iran: between Nudity and Marginalization

Corpus Mundi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-124
Author(s):  
Maksym W. Kyrchanoff
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Islamic Revolution ◽  
Female Corporeality ◽  
The 19Th Century

The author analyses the problems of visualisation and marginalisation of female corporeality in developments of Iranian political and cultural identity from the early modernisation project of the 19th century and the radical modernisation of the 1920s – 1970s to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which changed significantly the vectors and trajectories of the visualisation of the female body in public spaces and the discourse of Iranian culture. The author believes that Iran / Persia in the 19th century belonged to the number of Muslim countries that were under stable European influences. Russia and Great Britain became the main sources of cultural changes. Cultural exchange with these countries stimulated changes in Persian identity. The author analyses the features of corporeality in the visual art of Iran from the Qajars to the Islamic revolution and its mutations during the process of radical Islamisation of the social life inspired by it. The author believes that the early modern project of the Qajars was the first attempt to visualise female corporeality and map in the centre of cultural coordinates which in fact simulated European discourse. The identity project of the Pahlavi period became an attempt to transform and adopt Western concepts to the Iranian national canon. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 marginalised the visual and visible forms of female corporeality, presented earlier in public and cultural spaces. The project of Islamisation inspired subordination of the female body, marginalising attempts to visualise in ways Western intellectuals did it. Modern feminine corporeality in Iranian culture develops as a dichotomy of official religious identity and its secular alternative, represented by the “high” cultural segments of the consumer society. The author analyses how and why Western strategies of visualisation of female corporeality coexist with its religious rejection. It is assumed that the Iranian mass culture assimilated Western practices of visualising femininity, although the official cultural discourse continues to reproduce the canon of the body imagined as predominantly religious construct.

scholarly journals Female Corporeality and the Sublimation of Pain: A Study of The Pakistani Bride by Bapsi Sidhwa

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (II) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Shamsa Malik ◽  
Nadia Anwar
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Empowerment ◽  
Standpoint Theory ◽  
The Self ◽  
Female Empowerment ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Bapsi Sidhwa ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
Female Corporeality ◽  
Postcolonial Feminist

This study explores in detail the crisis of female corporeality and how the self sublimates the resultant pain into psychological empowerment. Pakistani women have long been viewed as having no space for themselves. They could not master their choices or muster up courage to fight for the fulfillment of their desires. Similarly, the female characters in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel The Pakistani Bride (1990) appear to be oppressed and marginalized entities, dependent on men for their socio-economic needs. Yet, this research argues that their corporeal pain transforms into a psycho-emotional haven providing them a space of their own to think and make their own decisions. This specific strand has been a neglected area of research in the Sub-continental context. The research design used in this study is qualitative while the textual analysis is used as a method to analyze the data. The research pursues feminist literary standpoint theory posited by bell hooks (2004) in the postcolonial feminist context, while the Foucauldian (1979) concept of “Panopticism” (p. 195) and “Docile Body” (p. 135) are threaded to highlight the concept of complete physical and mental surveillance of the autonomous body/person in order to investigate the shift of gender/power roles from male hegemony to female empowerment.

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