scholarly journals The Rhetoric of Silence in Contemporary Autopathography: Susan Gubar and Eve Ensler on Gynecological Cancer

Res Rhetorica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Marta Fernández-Morales
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Gynecological Cancer ◽  
Living With Cancer ◽  
Eve Ensler

Despite Mary Deshazer’s affirmation that “living with cancer has become the topic of our times” (2005, 1), some cancers are still covered by a blanket of secrecy. This paper discusses Susan Gubar’s and Eve Ensler’s autopathographies about gynecological cancer in relation to silence. It explores their discussion of the possibility of finding words for their illness and their reflection about the unspeakability of the sick female body, concluding that they construct silence as undesirable and ineffective.

scholarly journals Más allá de los cuerpos dóciles. El teatro de Eve Ensler como proyecto ‘boaliano’

2012 ◽  
pp. 131-161
Author(s):  
Marta Fernández Morales
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Theatre Of The Oppressed ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
Vagina Monologues ◽  
And Control ◽  
Eve Ensler

In an interview that was published in 2001, U.S-born playwright Eve Ensler stated that her mission as an author and performer was to raise the consciousness of her audience about atrocity and injustice. Most of her plays, including the well-known and often staged The Vagina Monologues (1998), are devoted to the denunciation of atrocity and injustice as they are inscribed on the female body. In Ensler’s production, women and girls are placed at the narrative and dramaturgical centre, and their bodies become the source of anger and rage, but also of self-knowledge, rebellion, pleasure, and sisterhood. Within a potentially Boalian framework which intends to transform the audience, encouraging it to assume the role of an agent, Ensler articulates proposals that give voice to the female body as sexed cultural matter, in the line of The Good Body (2001), Fur Is Back (2007), and I Am an Emotional Creature (2010). My objective here will be to try and prove that Ensler’s theatrical praxis has a place within Augusto Boal’s (1931- 2009) universe of the Theatre of the Oppressed, and that her work is also developed around the aim of overcoming the Foucaultian concept of a ‘docile body’, urging girls and women to empower themselves precisely from a locus that the dominant culture has tried to objectify and control through its discursive practices: their body.

Living in a Changed Female Body After Gynecological Cancer

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ragnhild J. Tveit Sekse ◽  
Eva Gjengedal ◽  
Målfrid Råheim
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Gynecological Cancer

Men’s Hunger, Food Consumption, and Preferences for Female Body Types

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 495-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Guéguen
Keyword(s):  
Food Consumption ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Slender Body ◽  
Mediation Effect ◽  
Point Scale ◽  
Body Type ◽  
Experimental Conditions

Nelson and Morrison (2005 , study 3) reported that men who feel hungry preferred heavier women. The present study replicates these results by using real photographs of women and examines the mediation effect of hunger scores. Men were solicited while entering or leaving a restaurant and asked to report their hunger on a 10-point scale. Afterwards, they were presented with three photographs of a woman in a bikini: One with a slim body type, one with a slender body type, and one with a slightly chubby body. The participants were asked to indicate their preference. Results showed that the participants entering the restaurant preferred the chubby body type more while satiated men preferred the thinner or slender body types. It was also found that the relation between experimental conditions and the choices of the body type was mediated by men’s hunger scores.

‘Good enough for a spot of lippy anyway’: Rape and the Body Politic in My Brother Tom

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-373
Author(s):  
Louise Wilks
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Violation ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Rape Narratives

The representation of rape continues to be one of the most highly charged issues in contemporary cinema, and whilst many discussions of this topic focus on Hollywood movies, sexual violation is also a pervasive topic in British cinema. This article examines the portrayal of a female's rape in the British feature My Brother Tom (2001), a powerful and often troubling text in which the sexual violation of the teenage female protagonist functions as a catalyst for the events that comprise the plot, as is often the case in rape narratives. The article provides an overview of some of the key feminist academic discussions and debates that cinematic depictions of rape have prompted, before closely analysing My Brother Tom's rape scene in relation to such discourses. The article argues that the rape scene is neither explicit nor sensationalised, and that by having the camera focus on Jessica's bewildered reactions, it positions the audience with her, and powerfully but discreetly portrays the grave nature of sexual abuse. The article then moves on to examine the portrayal of sexual violation in My Brother Tom as a whole, considering the cultural inscriptions etched on the female body within its account of rape, before concluding with a discussion of the film's depiction of Jessica's ensuing methods of bodily self-inscription as she attempts to disassociate her body from its sexual violation.

‘I saw a knock-out’: Fatness, (In)visibility, and Desire in Shallow Hal

Somatechnics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Wykes
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Fat Body ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Knock Out ◽  
Dominant Meaning ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Fat Bodies ◽  
Sexual Body

When the Farrelly brothers' movie Shallow Hal (2001) was released, one reviewer suggested that the film ‘might have been more honest if [it] had simply made Hal have a thing about fat women’ ( Kerr 2002 : 44). In this paper, I argue that Kerr hits the mark but misses the point. While the film's treatment of fat is undoubtedly problematic, I propose a ‘queer’ reading of the film, borrowing the idea of ‘double coding’ to show a text about desire for fat (female) bodies. I am not, however, seeking to position Shallow Hal as a fat-positive text; rather, I use it as a starting point to explore the legibility of the fat female body as a sexual body. In contemporary mainstream Western culture, fat is regarded as the antithesis of desire. This meaning is so deeply ingrained that representations of fat women as sexual are typically framed as a joke because desire for fat bodies is unimaginable; this is the logic by which Shallow Hal operates. The dominant meaning of fatness precludes recognition of the fat body as a sexual body. What is at issue is therefore not simply the lack of certain images, but a question of intelligibility: if the meaning of fat is antithetical to desire, how can the desire for – and of – fat bodies be intelligible as desire? This question goes beyond the realm of representation and into the embodied experience of fat sexuality.

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