The Female Grotesque

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Russo
Keyword(s):  
Female Grotesque

The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity

1995 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-185
Author(s):  
Celia Marshik
Keyword(s):  
Female Grotesque

Class and Feminine Excess: The Strange Case of Anna Nicole Smith

2005 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A Brown
Keyword(s):  
Public Perception ◽  
Cultural Control ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
White Trash ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Body ◽  
Female Grotesque ◽  
Cultural Standards ◽  
The Media ◽  
Legal Battle

Cultural concerns about race, class and beauty often intersect with mass-mediated depictions of the female body. Drawing on Foucault's theories about disciplining the public body, this article examines the changing public perception of Anna Nicole Smith from an ideal beauty to a white trash stereotype. This analysis argues that Smith's very public weight gains, her outrageous behaviour and her legal battle for her late husband's fortune is presented in the media as an example of inappropriate conduct for a white beauty ideal and thus is repositioned as white trash culture. Central to this repositioning is the constant tabloid depiction of Smith as an ‘out of control’ grotesque. This article argues that contrary to the optimistic understanding of female grotesques as effective agents of cultural criticism and social change, Smith represents the female grotesque as an agent of cultural control that instructs middle-class women on how to avoid committing classed, racial and gendered transgressions. The article concludes that the case of Anna Nicole Smith functions as a cautionary tale that reinforces cultural standards of normalization.

Algerian Women and the Invention of Literary Mourning

2020 ◽  
pp. 118-135
Author(s):  
David Fieni
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
Female Grotesque ◽  
Institutional Expectations ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theories ◽  
Mourning And Melancholia

This chapter revisits the gendering of loss in discourses of decadence through an exploration of four texts by Algerian authors. Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-Jasad (Memory of the Body), Yamina Méchakra’s La Grotte éclatée (The Blasted Cave), Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Algerian White), and Hélène Cixous’s Si près (So Close) each produce spontaneous, singular forms of female solidarity in the face of institutional expectations relating to language, religion, and the state that overdetermine the value of women’s social work of remembering and forgetting. The chapter explores these four texts in light of psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia and also a certain injunction of postcolonial theory that would impose permanent melancholia on postcolonial writing and thought. These texts experiment with inventive modes of literary mourning, from the “female grotesque” (Mary Russo) to a range of syntactic elaborations, which propose a different cure for postcolonial melancholia and open the possibility of a “melancholia of the public sphere” (Judith Butler).

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