scholarly journals Illicit Motherhood: Recrafting Postcolonial Feminist Resistance in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Dibyadyuti Roy
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Literary Output ◽  
Postcolonial Feminist

Cultural constructions of passive motherhood, especially within domestic spaces, gained currency in India and Ireland due to their shared colonial history, as well as the influence of anti-colonial masculinist nationalism on the social imaginary of these two nations. However, beginning from the latter half of the nineteenth century, postcolonial literary voices have not only challenged the traditional gendering of public and private spaces but also interrogated docile constructions of womanhood, particularly essentialized representations of maternity. Domestic spaces have been critical narrative motifs in these postcolonial texts through simultaneously embodying patriarchal domination but also as sites where feminist resistance can be actualized by “transgress(ing) traditional views of … the home, as a static immobile place of oppression”. This paper, through a comparative analysis of maternal characters in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven, argues that socially disapproved/illicit relationships in these two representative postcolonial Irish and Indian narratives function as matricentric feminist tactics that subvert limiting notions of both domestic spaces and gendered liminal postcolonial subjectivities. I highlight that within the context of male-centered colonial and nationalist literature, the trope of maternity configures the domestic-space as the “rightful place” for the existence of the feminine entity. Thus, when postcolonial feminist fiction reverses this tradition through constructing the “home and the female-body” as sites of possible resistance, it is a counter against dual oppression: both colonialism and patriarchy. My intervention further underscores the need for sustained conversations between the literary output of India and Ireland, within Postcolonial Literary Studies, with a particular acknowledgement for space and gender as pivotal categories in the “cultural analysis of empire”.

Body and Gender within the Stratifications of the Social Imaginary

Hypatia ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-118
Author(s):  
Alice Pechriggl
Keyword(s):  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

Early Debates

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Llano
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Conduct Manuals ◽  
The Public ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The Social ◽  
Undeserving Poor

This chapter provides an account of how organilleros elicited public anger because their activity did not fit into any of the social aid categories that had been in place since the late eighteenth century. Social aid in Spain relied on a clear-cut distinction between deserving and undeserving poor in order to rationalize the distribution of limited resources and reduce mendicancy on the streets. Organilleros could not, strictly speaking, be considered idle, since they played music, but their activity required no specific skills and was regarded with suspicion as a surrogate form of begging. The in-betweenness of the organillero caused further anger as it challenged attempts to establish a neat distinction between public and private spaces. On one hand, organillo music penetrated the domestic space, which conduct manuals of the nineteenth century configured as female; on the other, it brought women into the public space, which those manuals configured as male.

Ageing and gender

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-68
Author(s):  
Chris Gilleard ◽  
Paul Higgs
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Financial Assets ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Bonding Capital

This chapter begins by considering the distinction between sex and gender. The latter constitutes the source of the social division between men and women considered as social beings. It serves as both a reflection of division and inequality and a source of difference and identity. The chapter then explores the framing of this division in terms of patriarchy and the inequalities that are organised by and structured within the relations of work and of social reproduction. It focuses next upon the consequences of such a division, first in terms of both financial assets and resources and then in terms of social relational capital, drawing upon Putnam’s distinction between bridging and bonding capital. It then considers other sources of difference that become more salient in later life, in terms of health illness and longevity. The chapter ends with the role of gender in representing later life, and the role of later life in representing gender. It concludes by distinguishing between gender as a structure shaping third age culture, and gender as a constituent in the social imaginary of the fourth age.

scholarly journals Liquid culture, the art of life and dancing with Tracey Emin: A feminist art historian/cultural analyst’s perspective on Bauman’s missing cultural hermeneutics

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 156 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-26
Author(s):  
Griselda Pollock
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
British Society ◽  
Feminist Art ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Social Violence ◽  
Liquid Modernity ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

In this article I chart an indirect if not oblique path through my own theoretical formation as a social and feminist art historian, informed by Marxist cultural studies but deeply engaged with issues of difference and gender, to the response Zygmunt Bauman made to a book I gave him that I had reason to believe would resonate with his work. It did not. Indeed, my kind of theoretically informed visual and cultural analysis was indecipherable despite the influence of his writing after 1989 on my work. Gender was not a topic for Bauman. Feminist theory remained an impenetrable territory. Art (as opposed to culture) was not to be theorized. Yet, in his later work on liquid modernity, Bauman incorporated the idea that we are all now artists of life. Here I recognized an oblique and unjustified if not misdirected dismissal of the working-class British artist Tracey Emin. My article concludes with my reading of her video work, Why I Never Became a Dancer, which poignantly and defiantly exposes the social violence and violations of class, race and gender in British society which she experienced. I seek to demonstrate how Bauman’s acute, but often academically devalued, attentiveness to the vernacular and quotidian forms of cultural experience and its ability to register and reveal changing social forms and forces should have enabled him to see Emin’s work as equally acute and culturally significant.

History Unhoused

Living Cargo ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Blevins
Keyword(s):  
Colonial History ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Past ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
The Social ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Public Cultures ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Opening Up

The introduction of Living Cargo presents the book as a project of unhousing the past; about opening up archives and drawing history out; and about the opening out that occurs when history goes public. It is also about the social, political, and ethical demands such openings make on public and private lives; and about the publics and counterpublics that are produced when history is on the move. When history is unhoused, when it travels narratively, visually, performatively its movements help bind people together, as surely as its institutional enclosure helps keep them apart. In other words, this book is about the black public cultures of postcolonial Britain; the particular historical resonances that join together many disparate communities in the UK under and beyond the banner of the nation; and the transnational circuits of exchange economic, social, political, affective that takes British colonial history for a ride.

Body and Gender within the Stratifications of the Social Imaginary

Hypatia ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-118
Author(s):  
Alice Pechriggl ◽  
Gertrude Postl
Keyword(s):  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

“It’s Like a Guy Never Lived Here!”: Reading the Gendered Domestic Spaces of Friends

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (8) ◽  
pp. 758-774 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Jade Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Space Forms ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Stable Part ◽  
And Gender

This article argues that the postfeminist gender politics of Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) are played out via a series of manipulations and reversals of space and mise-en-scène. Arguing that clearly gendered domestic space forms a stable part of the sitcom’s equilibrium, it analyses instances where the mise-en-scène boldly calls attention to men’s and women’s spaces, puts the gendering of space into flux, and highlights the burden of domestic labor. It reveals through close textual analysis how space in Friends is used to offer the playful promise of freedom from restrictive gender roles, but ultimately maintains a conservative status quo of both space and gender. It also makes a case for paying close attention to the aesthetics of the traditional sitcom to appreciate the expressivity of production design offered in such texts which, although (deliberately) unspectacular, is by no means unremarkable.

Body and Gender within the Stratifications of the Social Imaginary

Hypatia ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-118
Author(s):  
Alice Pechriggl ◽  
Gertrude Postl
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The Social ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Gender Specific

Using the notion of a transfiguration of sexed bodies, this text deals with the stratifications of the gender-specific imaginary. Starting from the figurative—thus creative—force of the psyche-soma, its interaction with the configurations of a collective body will be developed from the perspectives of social philosophy and philosophy of history. At the center of my discussion is the interdependence between the individual psyche-soma, the socialized individual, and a collective bodily imaginary, on the one hand, and the strata of a gender imaginary on the other. The ontological metaphor (meaning the metaphor that brings about social modes of being) as well as the dimension of political action will be highlighted as playing a crucial role for these processes.

scholarly journals Production of Gender: A Study on Performativity in Female-To-Male Transsexuals

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 255
Author(s):  
Tanu Priya ◽  
Dhishna Panniko
Keyword(s):  
Social Role ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
Presentation Of Self ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Individual

Gender identity is critical to every individual; it is self-defined and yet affected by culture and society at large. Gender identities are formed through public and private spaces. Of the two traditions of thinking (essentialist and constructionist) about sex and gender, constructionist formulations are based on performance theory. It believes that sex and gender are viewed as not residing in the individual but are found in “those interactions that are socially constructed as gendered as opposed to essentialist tradition. Within performative theory, gender is a process rather than something naturally possessed. This study explores the process of formation of gender or social role in female-to-male (FTM) transsexual.  It will do so by exploring the factors that add to the formation of a gender role as seen through sartorial style, mannerisms, body language, and other aspects that influence one’s presentation of self. It includes the process of construction of FTM transsexual’s corporeality through performative attributes in order to approximate masculinity and come in accord with the social role of a man. The themes that are discussed in the analysis emerged after a careful reading of FTM autobiographical narratives. The instances are extracted from FTM autobiographical narratives; Becoming a Visible Man, The Testosterone Files, Both Sides now and the publication of these narratives range from 2005-2006.

scholarly journals The Research of the Gender Component in Word Formation and the Structuring of Phraseological Units of Contemporary English

2021 ◽  
pp. 60-67
Author(s):  
I. V. Kozubai ◽  
◽  
A. Yu. Khadzhy ◽  
U. R. Shemet ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mental Abilities ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Asymmetry ◽  
Descriptive Method

In the context of the scientific paradigm-changing in social science linguistic studies of different language levels occupy a special place. The article deals with the linguistic phenomena from an anthropocentric point of view. The need to determine the self-identity of a human being, his social conditionality and the social construction of the article is manifested in the formation and application of gender terminology. Using the methods of linguistic and cultural analysis, observation and generalization, and the descriptive method, the authors of the article highlight the features of the representation of the gender component. Much attention is paid to the description of new (word-forming) means of gender representation, in particular the affix method, the word-forming model he-friend / she-friend, gender-labelled and gender-unlabelled model. Regarding the identification of the gender component in phraseological units, gender asymmetry is emphasised – the dominance of representations of idioms of masculine professions and those that emphasize the physical and mental abilities of men.

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