Female bodies and dynastic legitimacy in the Nereid Monument at Xanthos

This paper intends to describe in depth the representation of the political role of political parties in strengthening local democracy in West Sumatra after returning to the regional government system that changed the political system of local government in Minangkabau. Through Regional Regulation No. 2 of 2007 concerning the Principles of Regional Government, the political system of local government in West Sumatra is based on the concept of "Basandi Syarak Customary, Syarak Basandi Kitabullah". With this concept, the implementation of regional government implemented in the context of local democracy comes from three elements, one of which is the custom of Bundo Kanduang (female figure) who represents women in the area. Representation and political role of women as part of the administration of regional government, their position is formally within the Regional Musyawwah Agency (BAMUSDA). Bundo kanduang is one of the traditional institutions which is a representation of women in the area. His main task is to preserve the culture and customs of Minangkabau based on Basandi Syarak, Syarak Basandi Kitabullah. Changes in the structure of the local government system in West Sumatra have shifted the representation and role of women who were previously only guardians of the continuity and preservation of customs.

Reviewed by: Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England by Sara Read Olivia Weisser Sara Read. Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England. Genders and Sexualities in History Series. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. xii + 248 pp. Ill. $95.00 (978-1-137-355207). Although its title suggests a narrow focus on menstruation, this book offers a broad discussion of women’s reproductive health in early modern England. This is because prevailing views of the body taught that women lost blood throughout their lives in a range of ways, nearly all of which were linked in some way to menstruation: menarche, defloration, childbirth, and menopause. These “transitional bleedings,” in turn, marked key developments in early modern women’s social [End Page 804] lives: from maid to wife and from wife to matron. Sara Read examines representations and discussions of these physiological and social milestones in a variety of texts from the period, including personal and religious writing, medical treatises, judicial cases, plays, and poetry. The book opens by exploring the lexicon of menstruation in early modern England. Euphemisms included courses, terms, flowers, and months, among others. Read then moves on to examine representations of menarche in literature and medical texts. She mines the spiritual writing of Elizabeth Delaval, for instance, to capture this little-recorded life event. Because women like Delaval were reluctant to write openly about such matters, Read’s discussion offers insightful speculations about menarche and focuses more firmly on Delaval’s adolescence, including her concerns about overeating, oversleeping, and wasting time. Two court cases from the Old Bailey illuminate prevailing assumptions about the link between early menarche and lustiness. In her investigation of how women viewed and understood menstruation itself, Read again carefully analyzes her sources for evidence of a topic that few women wrote about candidly. As a result of women’s reticence, some of the book’s analysis remains conjectural. One of the most direct discussions we have is Queen Anne’s use of the name “Lady Charlotte” to refer to menstruation in her correspondence with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. How did women in this period manage the day-to-day reality of monthly bleeding? Read looks in creative places to answer this question, including a court case and collections of poetry. She also provides an interesting discussion of sanitary provisions and negative assumptions about menstruation recorded in religious texts—for instance, likening a false idol to a menstrual cloth. The remainder of the book looks at a series of bleedings that readers may not, at first glance, consider to be menstrual: “hymenal bleeding” during the first time a woman engages in sexual intercourse, blood loss during and following childbirth, and menopause. Hymenal bleeding was thought to be a key step in women’s maturity, while bleeding during and after childbirth marked another significant transition to motherhood. Finally, menopause could include heavy bleeding and irregular blood loss. Aging was thought to accompany the drying up of the body’s humors, thereby explaining the decline of women’s “flowers” in their later years. Menstruation and the Female Body offers an intriguing look at a range of related themes, including early modern women’s life cycles, reproductive health, and representations of women’s bodies and lives. Nearly all of the sources in the book are modern editions of early modern texts or are cited from secondary literature rather than the original manuscripts. To historians, this may come as a surprise in part because manuscripts can provide different information than modern editions; indeed, editors are most likely to cut the very passages where we would most likely find discussions of commonplace bodily functions like menstruation. The book’s strength lies in the inventive use of a range of writing to piece together prevailing representations of a bodily process that, as Read smartly puts it, was simultaneously mundane and taboo. [End Page 805] Olivia Weisser University of Massachusetts Boston Copyright © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press

This research aims to examine the attitude towards the ways in which the female body is represented, i.e. to determine the extent to which the respondents (women) agree with the statements based on critical observations of feminist and researchers on gender issues on unethical (unacceptable) representation and treatment of woman and the female body in media and marketing. The study involved 509 women, aged between 18 and 55 years. The attitude towards the representation of the female body is operationalized by a scale (RFB scale) of 21 statements, grouped into three dimensions- sexual objectification, promotion of the “ideal” female body and instrumentalization of the female body. The results show that the respondents, although to varying degrees, agree with all the statements that describe the ways in which the female body is presented in the media and in marketing. Although all three dimensions are quite common in the media and in marketing, the respondents see the instrumentalization (abuse) of the female body for commercial purposes as the most pronounced phenomenon. Both on an overall scale and in dimensions, women from urban areas show a higher score than women living in rural areas. There are no statistically significant differences between groups defined by other sociodemographic characteristics (age, marital status, region, type of neighborhood, education). The conclusion is that the respondents support the attitude of feminists and researchers of gender issues that in the media and in marketing there is sexual objectification and promotion of the “ideal” female body, and especially pronounced instrumentalization (abuse) of women and the female body for commercial purposes.

Blood, Identity, and Counter-Discourse:Rabbinic Writings on Menstruation Ishay Rosen-Zvi Charlotte E. Fonrobert . Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000, 326 pp. The project undertaken by Charlotte Fonrobert in this book1 is clearly innovative, breaking fresh ground in the research of rabbinic culture. Her scholarly novelty lies in the specific material that she investigates as well as in the methodological approach to it. The last decade saw the emergence of abundant writing on questions of gender and sexuality in rabbinic literature. Exploiting the contemporary methods employed in the fields of cultural research, women studies, and feminist criticism and assisted by Michel Foucault's writing on sexuality, the works of David Biale,2 Daniel Boyarin,3 Michael Satlow,4 Miriam Peskowitz,5 and others have presented a broad view of the relations between the sexes and the picture of gender that emerge from rabbinic literature. Within this framework, particular attention has been given to marriage and sexual relations, the place of women in the house of study and in the market, adultery and seduction, and so forth. The talmudic concern with the female body, however, has not yet been subject to such a comprehensive examination. Though most of the above-mentioned writers recognize the centrality of the human body in rabbinic literature,6 there has been no detailed study devoted solely to this subject. The opposite holds true of parallel research of Greek and Hellenistic literature, which long ago recognized that medical writings about female anatomy and physiology are a potential source of a cultural history of gender. The works of Aline Rousselle,7 Lesley Dean-Jones,8 Ann Ellis Hanson,9 and others have proved that this research direction is promising and fertile. These investigators introduced Greek and Hellenistic medical writing into the historical discussion of gender. They managed to prove that the Hippocratic [End Page 210] corpus, Aristotle's biological works, Galen's and Soranus's writings, and similar texts that deal with the structure and function of the female and male body are no less instructive about perceptions of sex and sexuality in the Hellenistic world than the analysis of Ovid's works or the nude paintings in Pompeii.10 Following in the footsteps of these investigators, Fonrobert seeks to examine the gynecological and physiological knowledge embodied in the laws of Niddah as a gateway to the talmudic universe of gender. In this endeavor, she complements Tirzah Meacham's critical study of the mishnaic tractate of Niddah,11 which focuses on the philology and realia of the text without analyzing its gendered context and cultural implications. Fonrobert's second novelty lies in her methodology. The works of Judith Hauptman,12 Michael Satlow, Judith Romney Wegner,13 and Tal Ilan14 are thematic, tracing an issue through various sources and strata. As a result, they engage the sources in a selective and necessarily partial manner. Fonrobert, in contrast, focuses on a relatively limited number of texts, but quotes them extensively and analyzes them rigorously and at length. This method proves to be profitable. Her detailed and extensive treatment of the material produces new insights even into texts that have drawn considerable scholarly attention (such as the story of R. Akiva and the menstruating woman in M Niddah 8:3).15 By adopting a textual orientation, Fonrobert goes beyond the analysis of contents to examine the text's language, argumentation, analogies, metaphors, and tone in order to extract their implicit picture of gender. This approach accounts for the accomplishments of this book and the insightful perceptions it offers. The Structure The book has a clear-cut structure, which is instructive of Fonrobert's methodological approach. Besides the introductory and concluding chapters, the main argument—engaging the laws of Niddah in rabbinic literature—is presented in four thematic chapters. These chapters are divided into two groups: the first part (chapters 2 and 3) concerns the object of knowledge—the female body, while the second (chapters 4 and 5) deals with the subjects holding this knowledge. Each of the two parts is structured in a similar fashion, with the opening chapter describing [End Page 211] the masculine hegemony and the succeeding...

Reviewed by: Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century Laura L. Mendelson Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century. Edited by Katharine Kittredge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Pp. 288. $59.50 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). The merits of Lewd and Notorious, and they are numerous, are at the outset hindered by the unfortunate overuse of the "transgressive." In its title and each subtitle of this collection the term "transgressive" is so overplayed that it comes perilously close to rendering whatever import the term once had completely barren. It is not surprising that the collection was born out of a 1994 ASECS panel, as several of the essays seem dated. The employment of the so-called transgressive in cultural history and literature has been the key to rendering eighteenth-century studies "sexy" for what is easily ten years. However, the majority of chapters are insightful and illuminating contributions to women's studies, sexuality and gender studies, and early modern cultural studies more generally. The collection is divided into four parts: (1) "Transgressive Words"; (2) "Transgressive Images"; (3) "Transgressive Acts"; and (4) "Transgressive Fictions." The chapters in each part are devoted to describing how and to what extent particular eighteenth-century women pushed the [End Page 254] limits of socially proscribed texts, characters, and social and sexual behaviors and mores. The chapters in part 1 are concerned with language, particularly, the uses to which it was put in order to both substantiate and divest of meaning Enlightenment systems of gender difference. Part 2 is concerned with eighteenth-century visual representations of women, which ranged from the physically grotesque to the pitiful and repellent. All such images described in these chapters hinge upon socially unacceptable forms of female sexual behavior. Part 3 addresses women's gender performance and the effects of such performance upon social determinations of the severity of these women's "transgressive" acts. Finally, the chapters in part 4 examine the fictional representations of women who "transgress" the boundaries of the gendered social system and how they have been read by eighteenth-century and contemporary audiences. Ambitious as these chapters are, it is always useful to keep an eye on twenty-first-century agendas (or, in this case, twentieth-century ones) and the difficulty literary scholars have when reading eighteenth-century agency through a contemporary lens. Several of the chapters in this collection seem to fall victim to the tendency to read through a proscriptive contemporary lens, while others make unique contributions to eighteenth-century studies of gender and sexuality. As Katharine Kittredge notes in her introduction, "all three of the chapters in Part 1 consider the ways that language could be used to investigate or subvert the dominant gender hierarchy" (9). The section begins with Susan Lanser's "Queer to Queer: The Sapphic Body as Transgressive Text." Deploying contemporary notions of "queer" identity, Lanser posits the origins of eighteenth-century understandings of same-sex desire. Reading texts such as the 1620 pamphlet Hic Mulier: or, the man-woman, Tractus de Hermaphroditus; or, a Treatise of Hermaphrodites (1718), as well as James Parson's 1741 Mechanical & Critical Enquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites, Lanser tracks the markers of so-called Sapphic identity from within (read biological) to outside the female body. Within this shift, Lanser suggests, "lies the socialbirth of the sapphist as a category of identity: a person visibly female, yet whose queerness is also visible in some kind of masculine marker" (34). By extension, she reads this moment as that which disallows the "feminine" female body a Sapphic identity. Lanser looks to fiction to exemplify what she describes as the "queering of the homoerotic female body" (23). She reads The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu (1744), Fielding's The Female Husband (1746), the English version of Giovanni Bianchi's Breve Storia della Vita di Catterina Vizzani Romana (1744), an Ovidian poem entitled the "Sappho-an" (1749), and Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54). Lanser's is by far the most ambitious chapter in the collection, and her goals transcend literary or historical inquiry, as she has set out and has quite successfully located an epistemological shift with multidisciplinary...

Most of the advertisements circulating in the mass media, both electronic and print, show a constructive tendency to direct female sensuality as a way of subordinating women to male power. Likewise, for producers and advertisers, as Baria puts it, the female body never subsides to offer lucrative opportunities. From head to nails, advertisers are highly sensitive to imaging engineering as they utilize interpretations based on the female body to define stereotypical identities. This article explores how the semiotic analysis of advertising looks at the form of commodification of the female body in the Touch version of the AX perfume advertisement that creates sensual images of the female body to capture public interest. This research was conducted by analyzing every part of the Touch perfume ad for Ax's version that aired on her YouTube channel to see all the symbols and markers it contained. Data collection was performed using observational techniques and literature studies. Advertisers make various commodifications of the female body in the Touch version of AX ads through attributes attached to it. This sensuality stems from the attributes attached to a woman's body image, through the clothes she wears, the body expressed, and her language. The camerawork, on the other hand, plays an important role in providing reinforcement in building the concept of sensuality in advertising. On the other hand, the ideology that emerges based on the representation of women in AX's Touch ads is a patriarchal ideology. This ideology itself speaks of the domination of male power over women. This is reflected in the way the female body, through its enforced commodification, becomes the arena of media-performed power struggles.

A debate about Caster Semenya's female sex began shortly after the South African runner won gold in the women’s 800m final at the 2009 Athletic World Championships held in Berlin. Her victory was disputed through questions about her right to compete as a ‘woman’, with the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) announcing she would be required to undergo a gender verification test before her victory could be confirmed. Using the theoretical frame of social constructionism (Berger & Luckmann), poststructuralism (Foucault), gender- and postcolonial theories (Butler; Hall; Spivak) and the methodology of critical discourse analysis (Jaeger), the paper explores the way the possible intersexuality of Caster Semenya was contextualised in mainstream Swiss German-language print media. The analyses will firstly look at the way in which Caster Semenya was constructed as a ʻfallen hero’ and stigmatised as a double-dealer and unacceptable deviant body. The rumours amongst athletes and commentators became news in the media, which focused on descriptions of her habitus, her muscular body and her deep voice. Through theoretical discussion the paper argues that the media response to Caster Semenya exemplifies Butler’s claim that the discursive framework of gender constructs and naturalises sex. A key question is therefore whether the designation of deviant bodies to a ʻfield of deformation’ (Butler) works to pluralise the field of gender, or rather, as Butler suggests, it tends that those bodies might call into questions. The final part of the paper discusses how gender, ethnicity and sexuality combine to constitute the black female sporting body as a spectacle of otherness. It is evident that this otherness is made manifest through the function of those bodies as a site of transgression, as the boundary between male and female, and often as the boundary between culture and nature (Hall). Using the example of the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya, this paper aims to demonstrate how the post/colonial white female body is reproduced by western norms of gender, sexuality, beauty and sporting behaviour, in the sense of a feminine sporting genderperformance. The media controversy will be also read through the lens of the globalisation of certain ideas of normative bodies, sex, ethnicity and gender and the challenge of changing stereotypes through transgression. Keywords: gender- and postcolonial theories, discourse analysis, print media, Caster Semen-ya, deviant body, ethnicity, intersexuality

In recent years, the female figure in history has become increasingly visible — previously obscured, she is now palpable, multidimensional, and undeniably present. This figure has flourished in contemporary fiction, the authors of which have worked to establish her as central to historical narratives in a range of both fictional and factual scenarios. This collection explores the female figure in recent historical fiction: the tremendous success of writers such as Philippa Gregory, Kate Mosse and Sarah Waters is testament to the fact that the female figure is now not only desirable but also marketable. The collection interrogates the growth of the contemporary historical fiction genre by examining the implications of these new narratives for contemporary gender politics. Part I, ‘Historical Women: Revisioning Real Lives’, contains chapters which interrogate recent recastings of real women, such as Anne Boleyn, Clara Schumann and Grace Marks, who have previously been misrepresented in historical discourses. Part II, ‘Imagined Histories: Romancing Fictional Heroines’, concentrates on the gender politics inherent in representations of fictional women and their sexuality. Finally, Part III, ‘Rewriting History: Reasserting the Female’, discusses the implications of such representations, reflecting on these repeated rewritings of history in terms of feminism, postmodernism and metafiction, and developing an understanding of the way in which these female figures are received and interpreted within the context of historical fiction.

Women’s bodies are often sites for exploitation, political propaganda, and the materialization of normative gender ideologies. Given the long historical transcendence and impact of patriarchal systems of thought such as Confucianism, paired with the simultaneous invisible and visible gaze of the male consumer in the market system of contemporary China, how has the female body been represented and repressed in the Chinese context? Employing the perspectives of iconology and Marxist feminism as both tools and theoretical frameworks for studying gender and gendered aesthetics in China after 1949, when a new ideology of gender equality, as well as the perception that women can ‘hold up half the sky’ began to take root in China under the leadership of the state and party. What will be discussed in this paper are the ways in which gendered bodies, the female body in particular, are constructed (engendered with meaning), governed, represented, and objectified in China through literary and artistic creation that have shaped social aesthetic values. A comparison will be made between two different time periods where the representation and repression of Chinese women went through a change from a socialist aesthetic to commodity fetish: how female images were depicted in the political propaganda posters the state and party issued during 1940s to 1980s; and how women have become newly objectified and valued in terms of their individual appearance, thus the objects of beauty, in the post-reform and opening-up.

This article explores the construction and function of the female body in four Gnostic texts: Pistis Sophia, On the Origin of the World, Hypostasis of the Archons, and Apocryphon of John. In these texts’ accounts of the mythological origin of the cosmos, the exposed bodies of Sophia and her daughters are consistently depicted as objects of excessive, often gratuitous sexual violence. Yet in the midst of this violence appears another, equally consistent motif: the Gnostic writers protected their female characters through a variety of narratival techniques, such as transforming the female body into a tree or a strenuous insistence on the violence’s ultimate failure. This article accounts for this curious pairing of violence and protection by evaluating the female body as a symbolic artifact embedded with the values of the patriarchal culture which constructed it, a culture which valued the female body as a reliable, untainted conduit of progeny.

“In the context of parametric design based on visual programming, this study explores an innovative approach combining digitization and localization. It applies a two-way progressive structural topology optimization algorithm to conduct research on innovative urban furniture design in the Wuyi Overseas Chinese Hometown. It utilizes digital media to connect with local cultural characteristics, taking the “qilou” architectural style in the Wuyi Overseas Chinese Hometown as a design prototype. Through the algorithm, the study progresses through initial design preparations, formative design, topology optimization design, and post-processing manufacturing to create urban furniture that embodies both local characteristics and aesthetically pleasing forms, as well as structurally sound and digitally ecological elements. It employs the power of design to address local and regional real-world issues, enhancing the daily experiences of local residents and out-of-town visitors. The design practice validates an innovative design pattern that combines parametric design with local cultural features, providing a novel generative tool and strategy for contemporary innovative furniture design in the Wuyi Overseas Chinese Hometown. Furthermore, it serves as a reference for applying this algorithmic model in other domains.”

Intcncxts, Vol. 3, No. 1,1999 Wanting Word of Woman, Subversive Speech of Simile: Ecriture feminine and the Erotics of Rhetoric Shirley Sharon-Zisser T E L A V I V U N I V E R S I T Y The relationship between language and femininity, and in particular between language and the female body, is akey concern that features prominently, if sometimes differently, in the French femimst theories of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Michele Montrelay. This concern, how¬ ever, does not originate with those French feminist theorists or their con¬ temporaries; nor is it peculiar to female thinkers on language. Rather, the relationship between language, femininity and the female body has preoc¬ cupied (male) thinkers from the very beginnings of amost pervasive tradi¬ tion of reflection upon language in the West: that of rhetoric.As this article shows by means of comparing the notions of asubversive feminine lan¬ guageproposedbyCixousandIrigaray(anddifferently,byMontrelay) withnotionsoflinguisticform(mostprominentlythecategoriesof“fig¬ ure”andof“simile,”inparticularthecatachreticsimile)inthewntingsof Aristotleandofearlymodernmalerhetoricians,therudimentsofCixous notion of ecriture feminine^ Irigaray’s notion of le parler femme and Montrelay’snotionofparoledefemmecanbefoundintheverycanonof rhetoric that these French feminist theorists explicitly set out to defy. The notions of feminine writing set forth by Cixous and Irigaray, as well as, differently, by Montrelay, serve in this article as points of departure for an analysis of the discourse of rhetoric that, while produced within apa¬ triarchal culture and sometimes overtly hostile to women in its articidations and preferences, also betrays an irresistible attraction to the feminine and the maternal. The article shows that the feminine and maternal are in¬ scribedintorhetoricalcategoriessuchasfigure,simileandcatachresisthat are shunned, demeaned or abjected^ by the rhetoricians, but that as abjected categories do not cease to challenge and fascinate the system that produces and abjects them (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 2, 4). During the many centuries when these abjected feminized rhetorical categories were being produced and re-produced within patriarchal socie¬ ties, by male rhetoricians, and as part of amale linguistic imaginary largely predicated on “sameness” and the singularity of the “father” as the center of signifying systems,^ they were conceptually and practically unavailable to women as forms that could confer subject status upon them. During those manycenturiesof“speakingsameness”(Irigaray,ThisSex20S),thespace 3 3 3 4 I N T E R T E X T S made available to women in theories of language was largely that of struc¬ tures such as the division between first and second person pronouns in syn¬ tax that, as Irigaray argues in “When Our Lips Speak Together,” “divid[e] too sharply” between an implicitly male subject and an implicitly female object, thus foreclosing the possibility of inter-subjective amatory ex¬ change {This Sex2\^). One of the important contributions of the feminist theories of language of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Michele Montrelayhasbeentoopenup ,conceptuallyaswellaspractically,linguisticspaces wherefemalesubjectivityandfemaledesirecanbearticulated.Asthisarti¬ cle shows, another important contribution of those feminist theories of language is that they make it possible not only to “invent alanguage” in whichwomen’sdesireandpleasurecouldbearticulatedandthatwouldbe different from that outlined in the male tradition of rhetoric (Irigaray, This Sexr214), but also to rediscover vrithin ±at tradition those forgotten forms inwhichwomen’sdesireandpleasureareinscribedbutwhichthecondi¬ tionsofsocialandconceptualhistoryhadmadeitimpossibleforwomento appropriate. What the reading of the male rhetorical tradition in the light of the requirements that Irigaray, Cixous and Montrelay posit for alan¬ guageofafemalesubjectofdesireandpleasureoffersisnotapossibilityof reconfiguring the male linguistic imaginary but of casting light upon those sitesofthisimaginarywheresuchdesireandpleasurearealreadyinscribed andwhichhadalwaysbeenitssitesofnostalgicfascination.Itistowardsthe rediscoveryofthosesitesoffemininedesireandpleasurewithinrhetoricby means of the theories of Irigaray, Cixous and Montrelay rather than to¬ wards acritique of those theorists’ understanding of the gendering of rhetoricortheirpossiblecomplicityinitsseeminglyunivocalphallocentrismthatthisarticleseekstopointtheway . Montrelay’sUombreetlenomidentifiesfemininityasthesiteofaninfi¬ nite,archaicjouissance(53-55),^oftheOne-ness(53)ofprimalfusion (44).4Thisidentificationgivesrisetoanimportantquestion:ifthecate¬ goryofthe“feminine”isidentifiedasthatof3ljouissancewhichisOne,infi¬ nite and archaic, is it not also, therefore, located in what Montrelay de¬ scribes as the “unexplorable” zone of Shadow [Ombre] (66).> If the “feminine”issituatedwithintheunexplorableShadow,doesitnotalsore¬ sisttheanalysisthatproceedsfi-omtheseparatingscissionsoftheName [Now]—that is, of language—that dissect the archaic One into discrete signifiersandformsofsignification ?Ifthefeminine,likethediscourseofmys¬ ticismwhichIrigarayidentifiesasoneofitseffects,isalliedwithpsychicfor¬ mations “where consciousness is no longer master” (Irigaray, Speculum 191) does it not then inevitably “elude ...linguistic classification” (Montrelay 29) and become “the ruin of representation” (66)? For Lacan, firom whose theory of language the conceptions of lan¬ guage of Irigaray, Cixous and Montrelay derive but also differ, this ques¬ tion would be arhetorical one. In Lacanian terms...

The female body has been in the foreground of nation-building in Iran especially since the 1930s projects of modernization, when unveiling women and adaptation to Western clothing became a crucial factor of bolstering modern Iranian national identity as opposed to a religion-based national identity. After the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic dress code became compulsory and female imagery depicting modesty and piety became a source of national identity. Although the representation of women's bodies in nationalist discourses has been subject of different studies, women's representation in official online outlets is still understudied. This article discusses how women's bodily appearance and representation in official online outlets feed into the nationalist discourses in Iran. Three key cases between 2014 and 2017 are addressed: (i) actress Leila Hatami kissing a man at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival; (ii) the public debate on women's entrance to sports stadiums in 2014–2015; (iii) the public revelation of actress Taraneh Alidoosti's tattooed forearm in 2016. Data were collected from multiple Iranian official online platforms and a critical discourse analysis was undertaken to analyse different forms of discursive articulation regarding women's bodies and national identity. Drawing on feminist literature inspired by the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, the article discusses the ways in which women's bodies are discursively constructed to illustrate a uniform Islamic nationalistic discourse.

Feminism has been deeply concerned with female body either as something to be rejected in the pursuit of intellectual equality or as something to be reclaimed as the very essence of women. Another alternative, associated with feminist postmodernism, seeks to emphasize the importance and inescapability of embodiment rather as a differential and fluid construct than as a fixed given. Different female body representations are inscribed in Latvian women’s prose from 1960s to 2010. As it was common for Soviet literature, also in prose of Latvian women writers of the period body and sexuality, especially the female one, was left beyond the discussion, mostly figuring as the unspoken. If woman’s body was inscribed in texts by Latvian women writers of the Soviet period, then either as an object of man’s desire or in connection with woman’s reproductive function as mother’s body. However, in the end of 1980s with the disappearance of the censorship and the changes in the general cultural atmosphere, in prose of Latvian women writers previously repressed issues of women’s lives started to appear and woman’s body was recovered; a different women’s history was told through inscriptions on female bodies. In contemporary Latvian women’s prose woman’s body appears as essential part of female identity, emphasizing inseparability of body and mind and acknowledging that woman experiences the world also with her body. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n8p397

The article aims to map the representation of female figures in the mass media in the COVID-19 discourses. This study is scoped into a female figure known as Siti Fadilah Supari (SFS). SFS's representation starts from her inauguration as an educated woman who has an authority to speak in the medical field. A descriptive qualitative approach was used; the data source was lingual phenomenon in all of SFS’s articles in the COVID-19 discourses published in Kompas and Republika newspapers on May 26 and 27, 2020. Data were collected using observational method with indirect conversational technique. Then, the data were analyzed using the framework of the Sara Mills’ model of critical discourse analysis. The results showed that the Subject-Object Position reveals that SFS is always in the object position and displayed by other parties. Furthermore, from the Reader Position, it reveals the existence of Republika's partiality to the SFS which is based on the sympathy of the Islamic public, while Kompas describes SFS as a violator of the law. It is concluded that women's representation in the media is not yet sovereign and independent because there is no framing of SFS as a female figure who has the authority of medical science to talk about COVID-19.