scholarly journals In Search of the Babayi: A cartography of a Distinct Filipina Theoethics

2019 ◽  
pp. 199-218
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Multidimensional Approach ◽  
Filipino Women ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Filipino Woman

This paper on methodology is an attempt to find a distinct Filipino theology and ethics by retrieving the sense of the babayi (woman). The babayi comes from the ancient Asiatic script called the baybayin. Inspired by the courage and resiliency of the Filipina woman in the face of tragedy and war, the goal is to map out a theo-ethics that is uniquely reflective of the Filipino woman within the broader feminist and liberation ethics. As a method, it critiques the prevailing framing of Western feminism common among Filipino women writers. Following intersectionality, a paradigm that analyzes oppression as the crossroad of racism and poverty, this method locates the Filipina in the multiaxial framing of history, the struggle of poverty and discrimination, displacement, religion and dialogue, and ecology. This multidimensional approach considers the long history of oppression experienced by our people, reflects inherent Filipino values and provides a method for understanding the Filipina and her allies today.

Imprisonment, freedom, and literary opacity in the work of Nawal El Saadawi and Assia Djebar

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-187
Author(s):  
Jane Hiddleston
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Direct Form ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
Colonial Oppression ◽  
The Right

In her astute study of contemporary Arab women writers, Anastasia Valassopoulos begins by noting the pitfalls of much existing criticism of writers such as El Saadawi and Djebar in the West. Citing Amal Amireh’s article on the fraught history of the reception of El Saadawi in Egypt and in Europe, Valassopoulos comments that Arab women’s literature tends to be seen as ‘documentary’, and this obscures the ‘core issue of representation’ as it is explored and challenged by women writers. In the face of this omission, the present article explores a selection of works by El Saadawi and Djebar from an aesthetic perspective. El Saadawi and Djebar use literary writing as a means to escape the constraints placed upon them by patriarchy, as well as by colonialism, and uphold creativity and poetry as a possible release from imprisonment. This article also uses Glissant’s and Bhabha’s concepts of literary opacity and the right to narrate as a partial framework for a reading of the relation between writing, freedom and aesthetic form in the works of El Saadawi and Djebar. El Saadawi and Djebar purposefully deploy a form of self-effacement, both in their autobiographical representations and in their portraits of female characters, also akin to Trinh Minh-ha’s strategy in Woman, Native, Other. Minh-ha’s dissemination of the writing voice, and the affirmation of collective solidarity between multiple but internally fragmentary feminist positions, serves, then, as a further theoretical backdrop for El Saadawi’s and Djebar’s use of opacity and the right to narrate as tools in an active feminist resistance to sexist and racist discourses. Both El Saadawi and Djebar use their writing to conceive women’s liberation from various forms of imprisonment, and they figure women’s fractured, convoluted and at times opaque self-expression as a direct form of resistance to both patriarchal and colonial oppression.

scholarly journals A Feminist Reading of Filipino Women Poets

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennie V. Jocson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
Filipino Women ◽  
Filipino Woman

This paper draws on ideas from a shared identity of Filipino women writers. While a shift in 21st Century feminist reading, mainly the slant that to think about woman is also to think about gender, has become available for interrogation and re-inscription, the study on Filipino woman as a construct and a subject of self-representation of contemporary Filipino poetry remains scarce. Drawing at how women and their experiences were represented in select poems written by 4 contemporary women poets, this paper explored common patterns of women imaging using textual and thematic analysis, alongside French feminism expounded by the arguments of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. The findings revealed that women poets’ rhetoric, awakening, resistance, and call to action had redefined women experience as a collective whole. Collective as they seem, the poems established a strong articulation of a feminist stance, which is a resistance against subversion and marginality. The paper is of relevance both to feminist scholars and others with practical interests in women poetry as it will enable them to better understand Filipino women experience and its representation in verse.

Luxury Communist Jesus

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Sandford
Keyword(s):  
Work Ethic ◽  
Protestant Work Ethic ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Protestant Work Ethic

This article begins by outlining contemporary anti-work politics, which form the basis of Sandford’s reading. After providing a brief history of anti-work politics, Sandford examines recent scholarly treatments of Jesus’ relationship to work. An examination of a number of texts across the gospel traditions leads Sandford to argue that Jesus can be read as a ‘luxury communist’ whose behaviour flies in the face of the Protestant work ethic. Ultimately, Sandford foregrounds those texts in which Jesus discourages his followers from working, and undermines work as an ‘end in itself’, contextualising these statements in relation to other gospel texts about asceticism and the redistribution of wealth.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

Can an Adulteress Save Jesus? the Pericope Adulterae, Feminist Interpretation, and the Limits of Narrative Agency

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Knust
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Feminist Interpretation ◽  
Narrative Agency ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

The pericope adulterae (John 7:53–8:11) is often interpreted as an inherently feminist story, one that validates women’s humanity in the face of a patriarchal order determined to reduce sexual sinners and women more generally to the status of object. Reading this story within a framework of queer narratology, however, leads to a different point of view, one that challenges the consequences of seeking rescue from a god and a text that are both quite willing to forge male homosocial bonds at a woman’s expense. As the history of this story also shows, texts and their meanings remain unsettled and therefore open to further unpredictable and contingent elaboration. Pondering my own feminist commitments, I attempt to imagine a world and a story where a woman is a person and Jesus is in need of rescue. Perhaps such a world is possible. Or perhaps it is not.

Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900-1300

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth van Houts
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Married Couple ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Married Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This book contains an analysis of the experience of married life by men and women in Christian medieval Europe c. 900–1300. The focus will be on the social and emotional life of the married couple rather than on the institutional history of marriage. The book consists of three parts: the first part (Getting Married) is devoted to the process of getting married and wedding celebrations, the second part (Married Life) discusses the married life of lay couples and clergy, their sexuality, and any remarriage, while the third part (Alternative Living) explores concubinage and polygyny as well as the single life in contrast to monogamous sexual unions. Four main themes are central to the book. First, the tension between patriarchal family strategies and the individual family member’s freedom of choice to marry and, if so, to what partner; second, the role played by the married priesthood in their quest to have individual agency and self-determination accepted in their own lives in the face of the growing imposition of clerical celibacy; third, the role played by women in helping society accept some degree of gender equality and self-determination to marry and in shaping the norms for married life incorporating these principles; fourth, the role played by emotion in the establishment of marriage and in married life at a time when sexual and spiritual love feature prominently in medieval literature.

Homer's Daughters

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Christa Wolf ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of ◽  
Homeric Reception ◽  
First World

This collection of essays examines the various ways in which the Homeric epics have been responded to, reworked, and rewritten by women writers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beginning in 1914 with the First World War, it charts this understudied strand of the history of Homeric reception over the subsequent century up to the present day, analysing the extraordinary responses to both the Odyssey and the Iliad by women from around the world. The backgrounds of these authors and the genres they employ—memoir, poetry, children’s literature, rap, novels—testify not only to the plasticity of Homeric epic, but also to the widening social classes to whom Homer appeals, and it is unsurprising to see the myriad ways in which women writers across the globe have played their part in the story of Homer’s afterlife. From surrealism to successive waves of feminism to creative futures, Homer’s footprint can be seen in a multitude of different literary and political movements, and the essays in this volume bring an array of critical approaches to bear on the work of authors ranging from H.D. and Simone Weil to Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Tempest. Students and scholars of classics—as well as those in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature, and women’s writing—will find much to interest them, while the volume’s concluding reflections by Emily Wilson on her new translation of the Odyssey are an apt reminder to all of just how open a text can be, and of how great a difference can be made by a woman’s voice.

Renaissance Mass Murder

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Bowd
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Wars ◽  
Human Tragedy

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence—histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects—which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers, justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis the book reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of the battlefield. This book also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.

Epilogue: On the Current and Future State of Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Megill
Keyword(s):  
Historical Writing ◽  
Conceptual Difficulty ◽  
Universal History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Initial Decision ◽  
Future State ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

This epilogue argues that historians ought to be able to produce a universal history, one that would ‘cover’ the past of humankind ‘as a whole’. However, aside from the always increasing difficulty of mastering the factual material that such an undertaking requires, there exists another difficulty: the coherence of universal history always presupposes an initial decision not to write about the human past in all its multiplicity, but to focus on one aspect of that past. Nevertheless, the lure of universal history will persist, even in the face of its practical and conceptual difficulty. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a future ideological convergence among humans that would enable them to accept, as authoritative, one history of humankind.

A Fierce Green Fire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marybeth Lorbiecki
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
Environmental Literature ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Ripple Effects ◽  
Ecological Vision ◽  
As Species ◽  
Wilderness Areas ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

For anyone interested in wildlife, birds, wilderness areas, parks, ecology, conservation, environmental literature, and ethics, the name Aldo Leopold is sure to pop up. Since first publication, Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire has remained the classic short, inspiring biography of Leopold--the perfect companion to reading his ever popular A Sand County Almanac. Winning numerous awards, this comprehensive account of his life story is dynamic and readable, written in the context of the history of American conservation and illustrated with historic photographs. Marybeth Lorbiecki has now enriched A Fierce Green Fire in a way no other biography on Leopold has, adding numerous chapters on the ripple effects of his ideas, books, ecological vision, land ethic, and Shack, as well as of the ecological contributions of his children, graduate students, contemporary scholars, and organizations--and the wilderness lands he helped preserve. Lorbiecki weaves these stories and factual information into the biography in a compelling way that keeps both lay and academic readers engaged. In the introduction to this edition, Lorbiecki makes it clear how much better our lives are because Leopold lived and why today we so radically need what he left us to bring about paradigm shifts in our ethical, economic, and cultural thinking. Instead of losing relevance, Leopold's legacy has gained ever more necessity and traction in the face of contemporary national and world challenges, such as species loss and climate change. Even the phenological studies he started at as a hobby are proving valuable, showing the climatic shifts that have occurred at the Shack lands since the 1930s, recognized by the plants and animals.

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