Productivity, Fertility and the Romantic ‘Old Maid’

Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-236
Author(s):  
Susan Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Hannah More ◽  
Ageing Body ◽  
Old Maid

William Hayley's Essay on Old Maids (1785, 1793) bafflingly constructs an image of the old maid from libertine fantasy, learned wit, pro-feminine critique and feminist scholarship. This essay traces some of these strands in later treatments of female sexuality and ageing in writing by Hannah More and Joanna Southcott, suggesting ways in which shifting attitudes to fertility enable new accounts of the female body. It argues that the terms of Hayley's Essay constrain later attempts to shift the debate. Whilst More attempts to escape the representation of the ageing body, the topic of female writing allows a renewed focus on reproduction.

American Nervousness: Motherhood and ‘The Mental Activity of Women’ in the Era of Sexual Anarchy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Coit
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Mental Activity ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
A Site ◽  
Common Association

This chapter revisits a site of foundational feminist scholarship to ask new questions about gender, class, race, health and motherhood. Examining two iconic fin-de-siècle female writers, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Gilman, it highlights an age-old tension in their work, articulated via contemporary eugenics, between the portrayal of the female body and that of the female intellect. It shows that both writers held antiquated views about female agency that sit uncomfortably with their common association with feminism and modernity.

scholarly journals KONSTRUKSI SEKSUALITAS PEREMPUAN DALAM KEINDAHAN DAN KESEDIHAN KARYA YASUNARI KAWABATA

sarasvati ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 100
Author(s):  
Agung Pranoto ◽  
Rini Damayanti
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Sexual Desire ◽  
Sexual Desires ◽  
The Subject

This research examines the construction of female sexuality in the novel the beauty and sorrow of the works of Yasunari Kawabata. This research is qualitative research that does study of novel the beauty and sorrow of the works of Yasunari Kawabrata. The method used is the deskiptif method that is collecting data, clarification of data, manipulate data, and interpret the data in accordance with the theory that was used at the time the research was conducted. In the novel the beauty and sorrow of the works of Yasunari Kawabata, reflecting the construction of female sexuality. The construction of female sexuality that, first, the novel represents the female body through the figures. The representation of the female body in the text of the novel disegmentasikan by displaying the marker women sexy. Second, the representation of female sexual desire in the novel beauty and Sadness is presented through the desire character Otoko and Keiko to transmit sexual desires with her partner. Third, representations of female sexuality in the relation of beauty and sadness, by Yasunari Kawabata was still predominantly on the male as the subject.

scholarly journals In Search of Identity: A Comparative Feminist Exploration of Muslim Female Sexuality in Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and Shahraz’s The Holy Woman

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-95
Author(s):  
Fariha Chaudhary ◽  
Qamar Khushi
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Islamic Feminism ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
Contextual Understanding ◽  
Critical Exploration ◽  
Postcolonial Feminist

A critical exploration of Muslim female sexuality through the feminist analysis of the various female characters in Twilight in Delhi and The Holy Woman, by Ahmad Ali and Qaisra Shahraz respectively, is the central focus of this paper. Theoretical insights have been drawn from Islamic feminism and Postcolonial feminist scholarship for the contextual understanding of female sexuality. Focusing specifically on the issue of female sexuality and marriages, in both of the novels, this paper demonstrates that Muslim women in the postcolonial Pakistan seems to have gained a certain measure of agency as compared to the plight of women in the colonial milieu of Ali’s novel. However, examined closely, as this paper will highlight, women in both of the novels, still in certain ways, remain helpless victims of sexual victimization. This comparative analysis of novels based in two varied settings of colonial and post-colonial Muslim societies reveals that female sexuality remains a stifling point of contention which is predominantly controlled by men.

scholarly journals REZIM SEKSUALITAS DAN AGAMA SKETSA POLITIK TUBUH PEREMPUAN DALAM ISLAM

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-290
Author(s):  
Akhiriyati Sundari
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Industrial Civilization ◽  
Local Traditions

This paper examines the various issues of sexuality in Islamic discourse. The discussion in this study attempts to examine the discourse of female sexuality at the beginning of Prophet's prophethood and then evolves over the development of the age to give birth to various inequalities and injustices against women in the sexual realm. There are at least three issues concerning sexual injustice in women; first, the Islamic tradition in the post-Prophetical Jurisprudence which places women as 'male sexual needs ministers' and 'sexual generations'. Second, the tendency of female body consumerism in modern industrial civilization. Third, local traditions in certain cultures still attach stereotypes to women as 'passengers' of male social glory.

The Vagina Is the Third Ear

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-7
Author(s):  
Miya Masaoka
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
The Third

The vagina resembles the fleshy folds of the ear without the cartilage. Like the Third Eye, the Third Ear connotes a supernatural ability of intuition, perception. Female sexuality is broadened and expanded, as the vagina is reimagined and reclaimed from previous definitions. Performances with vibrating surfaces and internal vaginal microphones sonify and activate the vagina in real time. This sonic reveal of female body parts asserts a political radicality beyond the gallery or concert hall.

Mad Women: Dance, Female Sexuality, and Surveillance in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Emily Holmes Coleman

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Engdahl Coates
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Maternal Body ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Gradual Shift ◽  
Revolutionary Praxis ◽  
Female Embodiment ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Waves

This chapter argues that Emily Holmes Coleman’s novel, The Shutter of Snow, and Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, both politicize and mobilize the dancing female body so as to perform a critique of the nationalist rhetoric circulating between WWI and WWII, which was exploiting the maternal body and subjecting the female body in general to increased surveillance. Reading dance as signifying not only in reference to aesthetic freedom but also as instantiating a revolutionary praxis, the chapter contends that the dancing female bodies within the pages of Woolf and Coleman’s novels perform a feminist politics of refusal and a complex aesthetic unraveling of dualisms that have traditionally and historically contained and restrained women. Implicitly gendering Foucault’s assessment of the gradual shift from a society premised on spectacle to an increasingly modernized society dependent on surveillance, The Shutter of Snow and The Waves discursively choreograph lines of flight and moments of suspension which, though they may not offer easy escapes (liberation or freedom from), visually and rhetorically imagine an unforeseeable future (the freedom to), where previously sanctioned modes of female embodiment might be replaced with on going gestures of becoming.

Un/veiling Women’s Bodies

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer A Selby
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Full Face ◽  
Regulatory Functions

Heated discussion in the media, costly and laborious government commissions, and restrictive legal recommendations in France and Québec, Canada, have recently focused on the undesirability of face-covering veils (burqas and niqabs) in the public sphere. This article charts how these sites have, at the same time, concretized a contrasting idealized presentation of a desirable secular female body. This examination is grounded in recent Secularism Studies scholarship that argues that, like forms of religiosity, secularisms include a range of social and physical dispositions (Warner, 2008; see also Asad, 2003; Calhoun et al., 2011; Fadil, 2011; Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008; Mahmood, 2009). Through consideration of two recent niqab-wearing women’s cases outside of Paris and in Montréal, and with reference to theories of governmentality (Fassin, 2010; Foucault, 1980, 1988; Guénif-Souilamas, 2006) and to Joan Wallach Scott on seduction (2011), I examine the regulatory functions and normalizing delineations of female sexuality within restrictions against full-face hijabs.

scholarly journals “A battle between lust and loathing”: The interplay between masculinity and femininity in Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Marius Crous
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Life Events ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Rural Setting ◽  
Masculine Identity ◽  
White Masculinity ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity

In this essay the emphasis is on the interplay between masculinity and femininity and in particular that of white masculinity versus black femininity, as well as the role played by black female sexuality in the formation of masculine identity in a rural setting in apartheid South Africa. The essay also looks at the representation of the female body and the role of the female body as site of contestation of socio-political assumptions about masculinity and femininity. The text under discussion is Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), which is based on real life events that occurred in the small Free State town of Excelsior in the 1970s.

scholarly journals REZIM SEKSUALITAS DAN AGAMA SKETSA POLITIK TUBUH PEREMPUAN DALAM ISLAM

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-290
Author(s):  
Akhiriyati Sundari
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Industrial Civilization ◽  
Local Traditions

This paper examines the various issues of sexuality in Islamic discourse. The discussion in this study attempts to examine the discourse of female sexuality at the beginning of Prophet's prophethood and then evolves over the development of the age to give birth to various inequalities and injustices against women in the sexual realm. There are at least three issues concerning sexual injustice in women; first, the Islamic tradition in the post-Prophetical Jurisprudence which places women as 'male sexual needs ministers' and 'sexual generations'. Second, the tendency of female body consumerism in modern industrial civilization. Third, local traditions in certain cultures still attach stereotypes to women as 'passengers' of male social glory.

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