Rhetoric at the Margins: a pedagogical note on Sallust’s Historiae 2.92 M.

The inhuman practices of honour crimes have constantly been rattling multicultural fabric of the Indian society for ages. These practices have often sparked an ongoing debate between the gender theorists and the cultural theorists, especially in the field of academia. This debate not only concerns the analytical supremacy of either of the two theoretical frameworks, but also raises some important issues which often remain under-explored, particularly in the court of law. The question of gender is one such crucial area of analysis as far as the honour crimes are concerned. Gender, as a concept has also evolved since the 19th century, largely because of the different waves of the feminist movement worldwide. The development of the notion of gender has been significant, from primarily being affixed to an individual’s biological characteristics, as touted by the theorists such as Talcott Parsons and Emile Durkheim, to being perceived as a social construction, largely by the ethnomethodologists. The Hon’ble Supreme Court of India has time and again addressed the question of gender while deciding the cases involving honour crimes, increasingly over the past two decades. In this research, by adopting a comparative and doctrinal framework, we will analyse five of the landmark cases involving honour crimes, decided by the court in the last twenty years. Primarily by comparatively analysing the language of the judgments and the choice of words in those, we will try to determine the developmental trend of Supreme Court’s addressal of gender issues involved in these crimes in the light of the Parsonian and the ethnomethodological theories of gender. Our main argument is that, the court needs to urgently address issues of gender with regards to the male victims of honour crimes, as a mainstream one, rather than constantly marginalising them. In our opinion, this goal can be achieved gradually by adopting an ethnomethodological perspective of gender. Our primary findings indicate that despite its slow-paced attitude, the Supreme Court of India is gradually moving from a Parsonian concept of ‘gender binaries’ to a comprehensive ethnomethodological notion of ‘gender as a social construct’.

Contributors’ Notes

Reviewed by: Poétesses et escrivaines en Occitanie médiévale: La trace, la voix, le genre by Frédérique Le Nan Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner Le Nan, Frédérique. Poétesses et escrivaines en Occitanie médiévale: La trace, la voix, le genre. Collection Interférences. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021. 270 pages. ISBN 978-2-75-8037-4. €25. Frédérique Le Nan's study focuses on the small but remarkable group of women poets who participated in the troubadour tradition. She approaches them directly through their extant corpus but, most especially, indirectly by way of their passage through time, as she follows their traces: first, in medieval manuscripts; then, beginning with Jehan de Nostredame in the sixteenth century, through a series of historical references to some of the women's names and fictionalized lives; and finally in the scholarly assessments of their numbers and works by nineteenth and twentieth century philologists, literary historians, and medievalists whose published research and anthologies provide the foundation for Le Nan's analysis of their voices under the banner of gender studies. Inextricably entwined in le genre, questions of language and gender arise immediately in the book's title, which seems to avoid the expected trobairitz, the feminine and invariable form that corresponds to troubadour (trobaire / trobador), commonly used when Anglophone scholars refer to the women troubadours. Instead, Le Nan doubles down on the French feminine forms for poet and writer, each one carrying a different history of usage and reception. Poétesse has a long chronology behind it but is considered "vieilli" by the Robert, while Larousse agrees with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) that poète is now the preferred term. In English, poetess resonates pejoratively to modern ears and writeress is definitely beyond the pale (the most recent example in the OED dates from 1855). But admittedly the gender neutral remains unavailable in French. When escrivaines follows on poétesses, Le Nan combines both an older form and a newly invented one, old-fashioned initial es replacing the modern accented é and the final feminine e reflecting a contemporary trend, as in auteure. The term proclaims Le Nan's feminist stance, though its use in this context (a medieval escrivain is the scribe who writes, not the author who invents) seems to side-step the musical character of [End Page 63] the women poets' works—with the possible exception of Azalais d'Altier's salut d'amour—as well as one of the chestnuts of the critical tradition: did troubadours (and trobairitz by extension) compose as well as perform orally, or at what point were their songs written down by composers themselves and then recorded in the chansonniers by editors and anthologizers? In the text, Le Nan uses trobairitz along with other appropriate terms, but her diffidence in the title may have been occasioned by Pierre Bec's claim, which she repeats several times, that the word was never used in the Middle Ages to designate the women poets, appearing only once in the romance Flamenca to describe the verbal cleverness of two women servants. That claim has been debunked by Elizabeth W. Poe in a meticulously researched article, "Cantairitz e Trobairitz: A Forgotten Attestation of Old Provençal 'Trobairitz.'" The term appears several times in Terramagnino da Pisa's grammatical treatise Doctrina d'Acort (between 1282–1296) and clearly refers to the women troubadours. Moreover, "this non-native speaker whose acquaintance with Provençal was sketchy and bookish, would have been reluctant to invent examples that he had never seen before" (207), which leads Poe to conclude that he must have seen earlier uses of the feminine form. She also points out that both Oskar Schultz-Gora's 1888 anthology of the trobairitz and Joseph Anglade's Histoire sommaire de la littérature méridionale du Moyen-Âge (1921) made the term available for modern readers. A brief introduction outlines the emergence of women troubadours as a textual ensemble and defines gender studies to include the intersectionality of social and political dimensions. Le Nan then divides her study into five chapters, clearly organized and announced by a series of subtitles that guide the reader from...

Historically orientated women’s and gender studies have recently become a firmly established field of research in the social science sector of Japanese studies. This corresponds to the generally strong position that gender studies have acquired in the human and social sciences today. Women’s and gender studies have proliferated in academic circles, since the question of gender is today viewed as both a socially and a culturally constructed phenomenon. Suddenly, all kinds of scholars, including those who either because of their age or because of their attitude formerly did not show any interest in the claims of feminist women’s studies during and after the 1970s, are borrowing heavily from the problems and methods generally pursued by gender studies for their own research. Thus feminist women’s studies have to a certain extent been replaced by gender studies, even though the latter is looked at with scepticism by the representatives of the so-called “old” women’s liberation movement. Feministically orientated women’s studies usually have their roots in the political call for liberating women and for overcoming the traditional patriarchal structure of academic life. These scholars are now confronted with the fact that their topics of research are being occupied by various other academic disciplines. Thus, these topics are gradually losing their political relevance (Mies 1997:60–61).

About the Contributors

In recent years gender studies have proliferated. Three significant types can be found in current biblical studies: feminist studies, queer studies, and masculinity studies. All share the belief that gender matters. It shapes the world in which these ancient texts were written, the language, imagery, and rhetoric used by the texts’ authors, and readers’ interpretation of these texts over the centuries and up to the present day. Feminist, and now also womanist, readings continue to be concerned with male dominance as often expressed or assumed in biblical texts. (Masculinity scholarship similarly shows how certain characteristics were held up as markers of ‘real men’.) Recent additional interests for feminists are reception history—the ‘cultural afterlives’ of biblical women in art, film, literature, music, advertising, and religious and political discourse—and ‘ecofeminism’. Queer theorists posit that hegemonic heterosexist binaries of gender and sexuality are culturally constructed rather than natural, transhistorical, or universal. ‘Genderqueer’ criticism in these forms is a political act, and an imperative!

Reviewed by: Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society ed. by Bronwen Neil and Lynda Garland Charis Messis Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society. Edited by Bronwen Neil and Lynda Garland. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2013. Pp. xiv, 218. $119.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-4779-5.) Just because a book has “gender” in the title does not mean that it actually does deal with it. Other than a specific topic, “gender” is a theoretical methodology, a way of looking at things and posing questions. Simply writing about women, men, or eunuchs does not necessarily entail that one is doing “gender studies.” Those topics can equally be approached through traditional scholarly methods that may be brought to bear on any aspect of Byzantine history. If gender scholarship is limited to the repetition of certain commonplace formulas or to banal observations about sexual inequality and does not truly bring “the lens of gender to the study of history,” the results may be interesting, to be sure, but do not deepen our understanding of gender in a society. Two basic observations may be made regarding the book under review. First, in spite of the quality of most of the contributions, the volume takes an approach that, with few exceptions, is far from belonging to gender history and that ultimately leads to the conclusion that there was no gendered discourse in Byzantium, not because it truly did not exist but because the contributors are not looking for it where it did. Second, this type of collection of papers is shaped primarily by the [End Page 148] choice of contributors and their prior interests, and not by an editorial logic that would prioritize theoretical relevance and thematic coherence. Two contributions (Paul Brown and Bronwyn Neil) deal with Western views of Byzantine men and women. The first relates to the military presence of Byzantium in Italy (eighth to eleventh centuries) and the second relates to the image of the empress Eirene (797–802) in various literary texts, primarily Western. In both cases the authors conclude that gender plays a secondary role in the political and cultural confrontation between the Byzantines and the Latins and that the main issue at hand was, in the first case, a denunciation of the “treachery and cunning” of the Byzantines and, in the second case, Eirene’s Iconophile policies (whether viewed positively or negatively). The chapter by Diana Gilliland Wright takes the inverse approach by looking at Byzantine views of Western women, namely Sophia of Montferrat and Cleofe Malatesta who came to Byzantium to marry the sons of Manuel II Palaiologos and tries to understand why they were treated so differently. A series of chapters on aspects of the lives of women in Byzantium constitutes the core of the book. Lynda Garland presents family strategies of investment in monasticism, by examining, through the Typika, the transformation of monasteries into alternative family households, especially on the initiative of aristocratic women. Amelia R. Brown presents the “highlights” of the education of women throughout the whole of Byzantine history. Sarah Gador-Whyte studies the masculine and feminine qualities that hymnographers attribute to the Virgin during the sixth and seventh centuries. Liz James presents the genealogical tree of many women of the family of Constantine the Great, their role in the creation and cultivation of political alliances, and the way in which their representation changed with every fluctuation in political circumstances. For his part, Shaun Tougher discusses men and eunuchs in Byzantium and underlines the importance of beards in defining manhood after the seventh century. Tougher regards the general preference for beards as “a sign of the increasing Hellenisation and Christianisation of the empire and also a sign of a desire to enhance masculinity, perhaps in response to a sense of political and military crisis” (p. 161). The volume closes with the contribution of Damian Casey that is also the most interesting when it comes to the actual issue of gender. In this very stimulating paper, Casey examines various Christian readings of gender, the body, and sexuality, underlining the ambivalence of those terms and the complex relationship that they had with spiritual authority. In conclusion, with the exception of some contributions that pose the issue...

The Female Body in Medicine and Literature features essays that explore literary texts in relation to the history of gynaecology and women’s surgery. Gender studies and feminist approaches to literature have become busy and enlightening fields of enquiry in recent times, yet there remains no single work that fully analyses the impact of women’s surgery on literary production or, conversely, ways in which literary trends have shaped the course of gynaecology and other branches of women’s medicine. This book will demonstrate how fiction and medicine have a long-established tradition of looking towards each other for inspiration and elucidation in questions of gender. Medical textbooks and pamphlets have consistently cited fictional plots and characterisations as a way of communicating complex or ‘sensitive’ ideas. Essays explore historical accounts of clinical procedures, the relationship between gynaecology and psychology, and cultural conceptions of motherhood, fertility, and the female organisation through a broad range of texts including Henry More’s Pre-Existency of the Soul (1659), Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1855), and Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues (1998). The Female Body in Medicine and Literature raises important theoretical questions on the relationship between popular culture, literature, and the growth of women’s medicine and will be required reading for scholars in gender studies, literary studies and the history of medicine. This collection explores the complex intersections between literature and the medical treatment of women between 1600 and 2000. Employing a range of methodologies, it furthers our understanding of the development of women’s medicine and comments on its wider cultural ramifications. Although there has been an increase in critical studies of women’s medicine in recent years, this collection is a key contributor to that field because it draws together essays on a wide range of new topics from varying disciplines. It features, for instance, studies of motherhood, fertility, clinical procedure, and the relationship between gynaecology and psychology. Besides offering essays on subjects that have received a lack of critical attention, the essays presented here are truly interdisciplinary; they explore the complex links between gynaecology, art, language, and philosophy, and underscore how popular art forms have served an important function in the formation of ‘women’s science’ prior to the twenty-first century. This book also demonstrates how a number of high-profile controversies were taken up and reworked by novelists, philosophers, and historians. Focusing on the vexed and convoluted story of women’s medicine, this volume offers new ways of thinking about gender, science, and the Western imagination.

Anglophone theoretical reflections on gender often assume the generalizability of their claims without first asking whether "gender" as a term exists, or exists in the same way, in other languages. Some of the resistance to the entry of "gender" as a term into non-Anglophone contexts emerges from a resistance to English or, indeed, from within the syntax of a language in which questions of gender are settled through verb inflections or implied reference. A larger form of resistance, of course, has to do with fears that the category will itself release forms of sexual freedom and challenges to existing hierarchies within the second language. The well-organized political attack on gender and gender studies now occurring throughout the world has many sources, and that is not the focus of this essay. This essay maintains that there can be no theory of gender without translation and that Anglophone monolingualism too often assumes that English forms a sufficient basis for theoretical claims about gender. Further, because the contemporary usage of gender emerges from a coinage introduced by sexologists and reappropriated by feminists, it proves to be a term that is bound up with grammatical innovation and syntactical challenges from the start. Without an understanding of translation—its practice and its limits—there can be no gender studies within a global framework. Finally, the process of becoming gendered, or changing genders, requires translation in order to communicate the new terms for recognizing new modalities of gender. Thus, translation is a constitutive part of any theory of gender that seeks to be multilingual and that accepts the historically dynamic character of languages. This framework can help facilitate a way of recognizing different genders, and different accounts of gender identity (essentialist, constructivist, processual, interactive, intersectional) as requiring both translation and its limits. Without translation and historical coinage, there is no way to understand the dynamic and changing category of gender and the resistances it now encounters.

Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives

Reviewed by: George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays ed. by Jean Arnold and Lila Marz Harper William Lee Hughes (bio) George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Jean Arnold and Lila Marz Harper; pp. xiv + 330. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $109.99, $84.00 ebook. The straightforward title of George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays suggests two implicit questions: why should we read George Eliot today? And how should we read George Eliot today? Readers of Victorian Studies may balk at the question of whether or not we should read Eliot now. Of course we should read Eliot. However, Eliot's place in the canon of Victorian studies was not always assured, and we would do well to remind ourselves that Eliot's popularity in English departments has a history. Included in the introduction to this volume is a short history of Eliot's reception alongside a "Mid-Twentieth-Century Memoir" entitled "George Eliot, Then and Now" by Thomas Pinney (4). This brief history of Eliot's reception notes that, with the advent of aestheticism, late-Victorian readers "bypassed Eliot's earlier realism," and the World Wars then led to criticism of the "conventional Victorian morality" that readers found in Eliot (4). Pinney's memoir, written especially for this collection, describes his experience with an Eliot who was "quite out of fashion" until her revival in the mid-twentieth century: "George Eliot? Who? She was not even an also-ran" (5). Indeed, it took the work of countless scholars to secure Eliot's place in Victorian studies. The collection's answer to the second implied question is, of course, that we should read Eliot with an eye toward interdisciplinarity. The book accordingly is divided into five interdisciplinary sections, on periodical studies and the history of the book, Eliot's research methodology, Eliot and Victorian science, animals and environmental studies, and gender studies and feminism. Each section does two things. At least one essay reasserts Eliot's importance to the study of the Victorian period while at least one other essay connects Eliot to a problem or issue that twenty-first-century readers are struggling with right now in the humanities. As a bicentennial collection that celebrates Eliot's two-hundredth birthday, George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays aims to reestablish the centrality of Eliot to Victorian studies while simultaneously gesturing toward her value for a wide range of disciplines in the humanities. The essays on periodical studies and the history of the book offer new perspectives on Eliot in the context of print culture and make connections to contemporary media studies. Wendy S. Williams argues that Eliot cultivated her public image as a great artist especially through her poetry, which she included in her novels as epigraphs or "mottoes" alongside epigraphs of other great poets (46). Alexis Easley connects Eliot's engagement with the New Journalism in Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot (1872) and our current social media context in which "writers use tweets, postings, and recirculated content to establish their own celebrity identities—and where readers consume literature both as tit-bits and as full-length texts" (36). Together, these essays help us to think about Eliot as a kind of social media personality in addition to, or perhaps as an alternative to, a great author of the British canon. While many of us are familiar with Eliot's quarry for Middlemarch (1871–72), we may be less familiar with her methods of conducting research and organizing information for other novels. As Andrew Thompson demonstrates, Eliot wrote Romola (1862–63) in the context of the professionalization of the discipline of history, which put Eliot under enormous pressure to "get things right" (65). In detailing Eliot's [End Page 140] meticulous research on fifteenth-century Rome, Thompson argues that the novel must be read in terms of nineteenth-century historicism and the historical novel. Romola is not only a novel; it is also a work of scholarship. Similarly, Eliot's use of Christian and Hebrew mythology is well known, but, as Molly Youngkin shows, Eliot's engagement with Egyptian mythology has been overlooked. Egyptian mythology appears in all of Eliot's major novels...

George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and the Fiction by Elizabeth Grubgeld, pp. 308, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994, $49.50 Like wits in a Restoration comedy, the friends of George Moore honored his person with a rodomontade of abusive epithets: Moore was a codWsh crossed by a satyr, the gray mullet, a boiled ghost, an overripe gooseberry, the white slug, a large distinguished carp, an aborted egg, a very prosperous Mellon’s Food baby, and a cat-mummy from the Egyptian Department of the British Museum. In her important new book on Moore, Elizabeth Grubgeld collates these insults, but characteristically she takes them quite seriously as the starting point for a penetrating analysis of the Edwardian social climate of caricature out of which they come, with its competitive display of wit and what Beerbohm called its lust for bedeviling the unfortunate human body. Previously, there has sometimes been a certain ad hominem strain in Moore criticism, not surprising among his contemporaries, who were often trying to give as good as they’d gotten, but peculiar when found among contemporary scholars, What this book by Grubgeld oVers instead is a learned, theoretically astute, comprehensive, and sympathetic look at the writings of George Moore. The author of a study like George Moore and the Autogenous Self has clearly set aside a signiWcant part of her lifetime for its preparation. To put the study of George Moore on a serious footing, and to show others the peculiar appropriateness of Moore’s work to the questions that animate literary criticism today, Grubgeld has at least mentioned, and often analyzed, thirty-eight diVerent publications by Moore. And her scholarly habits are impeccable: she keeps in mind the chronology of Moore’s life, the changes over time in his conception of Wction, the diVerences between one edition and the next, the letters of Moore to others, the letters others exchanged about Moore, and the history of discussion about each book she herself treats. That is just to list the general categories of Mooriana. In addition , she has some ongoing theoretical interests, which lead her to engage with recent research in genre studies in general, autobiography in particular, letters in one quite original chapter, and, to a smaller extent, gender studies. Her special slant is to treat the characters in novels as their own autobiographers, and the narrator of the autobiographies as if he were a character in a novel, and thus a function of plot, scene, chronology, and narrative voice. What is left out of account? She is not much interested in the history of reception, or, with the exception of her chapter on Parnell and His Island, in most of the matters that excite cultural materialists. This is not, obviously, a criticism of her book, which entertains a startling variety of theoretical claims without losing its way or giving up its independence of judgment. BOOK REVIEWS 186 Grubgeld’s abiding interest is in what Michel Foucault called “the author function .” For some time before this article, literary scholars had been repeating Roland Barthes’s argument about the “death of the author”: once a writer entered into making a text, the language he inscribed took on a life of its own, most distinctly a life not the author’s, and many meanings of its own, none of them the author’s. Foucault put the question in an entirely new light: what are the uses, he asked, to which we put the concept of the author? What is its function especially in ancient literature, where we shelve and publish things under the name of Callimachus or Diodorus? These names mean to us no more than certain grammatical features, genre tendencies, periods and places of activity; about the men, we know nothing. In short, the “author function” becomes a way of naming our conception of the way a group of writings happens to cohere. What Grubgeld lights upon is the fact that GM, as friends called him, did not just write individual consumption commodities, one novel after another, good or bad, to be ascribed to “George Moore,” the name on the title page. He studiously elaborated a complex and developing identity for public consumption...

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe about Gender and Global Politics

Gender provides one of the most frequently recurring theoretical frameworks taught in undergraduate English programmes. It commonly characterises literary theory survey modules, underpins Women’s Studies, Queer Studies and Masculinity Studies, and informs and directs countless period and thematic modules. Indeed, it is hard to think of an English module that would not, at some point, come into contact with questions of gender, whether in discussing Shakespeare, class, poetry, Chaucer or contemporary film. Beyond the undergraduate level, masters and doctoral theses with the study of gender as their organising principle abound, encompassing numerous interdisciplinary concerns and opening up fresh fields of enquiry. Theories of gender permeate the contemporary English classroom.KeywordsGender StudyEnglish StudyGender TheoryEnglish Language TeachingQueer TheoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Introductory NoteIt is a great honor to introduce myself as the new Co-Editor of the American Journal of Islam and Society. Developing the future of this journal is a considerable intellectual trust that I can only envisage as a collective effort to be undertaken with the journal’s excellent editorial team. Under Dr. Ovamir Anjum’s editorial leadership in the last few years, the journal established a very successful trajectory, combining high academic quality and timelytreatment of topics of interest to diverse communities of readers.In this introductory note, I would like to begin by expressing my commitment to the vision behind the recent name change from the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences to the American Journal of Islam and Society. The new name captures the multidisciplinarity of the journal’s current content. This multidisciplinarity is reflected too in the editorial team’svaried areas of expertise, to which I bring my primary academic interest in Qur’anic and tafsīr studies; my work and experiences in developing Islamic Studies as a subject in its own right in Britain, which led to my involvement in founding and launching the British Association for Islamic Studies (BRAIS); and my more recent work on Islam and Muslims in Britain. Somecommon threads run across these different academic interests and activities, but one mode in which they have significantly intersected for me is through questions of gender, both conceptually and institutionally. It is this last aspect of my work that I am keen to draw upon as Co-Editor of the journal.Building on the achievements of the current editorial team, I see publishing research on Islam, gender, and sexuality to be an important and strategic area of growth. Scholarship on related topics has exponentially expanded both in quantity and quality. However, a great deal of current research is clustered around narrowly defined approaches and goals, themapping of which remains a future task. Suffice it to say here that central to my vision is to see the journal become a platform for rigorous gender-focused research which critically pursues as well as challenges the intellectual agendas and societal concerns on which the study of gender and Islam has turned until today.This intellectual dimension I see as concomitant with structural changes that allow broader and less siloed representation of women academics in the study of Islam and Muslims. One of my main goals is to work with the editorial team to formulate editorial policies and strategies which lend support to early-career female researchers and facilitate intellectual mentoring through reviewing processes.Finally, I would like to thank all those who have supported the journal throughout the years and helped build it up into a strong publication. I look forward to working with you and to receiving manuscript submissions from scholars across the multitude of fields which study Islam and Muslims. Shuruq Naguib, Co-Editor, American Journal of Islam and SocietyLecturer, Department of Philosophy, Politics, and ReligionLancaster University, Lancaster, UK