Concepts Of Femininity Research Articles

REDEFINING HOME AND HOMELESSNESS IN MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S LILA

The recent decades have brought an intensified reconsideration of home, its concept, values, and importance, investigated not only as an actual physical space but also as a representational space and a place in memory. Contemporary scholarship has increasingly approached the domestic space as socially constructed, representing power negotiation and contestation. Drawing on concepts from cultural and feminist geographers, this paper seeks to interrogate Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila and its understanding of belonging and isolation while questioning the concept of home. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the gendered place of home is renegotiated in this novel that revises concepts of femininity as its protagonist struggles with adapting to a life of domestic dynamic in the heartland of America, which Robinson prefers to call “the middle west”. In other words, this paper establishes the relevance of approaching the novel’s representation of home and homelessness as a spatial study with a gender lens.

SOCIOLINGUISTICS GENDER DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN MEDIA

The article is devoted to the study of gender realization in the English-language media discourse as a means of reflecting the changing trends in the concepts of femininity and masculinity. The study is carried out within the anthropocentric approach. The aim of this article is to highlight the theoretical frame of reference for the works included in this article. We intend to delimit the field of study for gender discourse analysis by highlighting the main theories and concepts that ensure its specificity. Interdisciplinary, which is the distinctive feature of gender discourse analysis, marks the evolution of research in this field that we are trying to capture in our proposed retrospective approach. The review of research that configures the domain of gender discourse analysis illustrates the latter relevance in deciphering the meaning of communication as an important qualitative research method in the field of communication sciences. On the other hand, the work identifies the specificity of gender representation in the language of contemporary gender-oriented magazines. The novelty of the paper is determined by the disclosure of the trends of new femininity and masculinity in media discourse. Additionally the media is commonly seen as a potential means of influence, control, and innovation in society. As a result, few significant social issues are addressed without some consideration of the role of the mass media. Gender issues are no exception, as illustrated by the following statement: The purpose of this article is to provide insights on the role of the media in status of men and women’s potential for socio-cultural change. The results show that the gender aspect in media discourse is manifested at the level of vocabulary, grammar and stylistics.

“I didn’t feel normal”: Young Canadian women’s experiences with polycystic ovary syndrome

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which affects 8 to 13% of reproductive-aged women, is a highly gendered disorder whose symptoms disrupt Western conceptions of femininity. This may be especially debilitating for young women, who are targeted by societal discourses governing how they “should” be. We interviewed 10 young Canadian women, aged 18 to 22, about how PCOS has influenced and/or conflated their conceptions of identity and (ab)normality within the current socio-cultural context. Using reflexive thematic analysis through a critical feminist lens, we present three themes: justifying abnormality, pathologizing the abnormal, and fear of failure in pregnancy. Young women described feeling “weird” and “not normal” as a result of their symptoms and expressed worries about their ability to adhere to gendered expectations. We argue that the blanketing of these desirable states as “normal” has pervasive implications for women’s lives and leaves them feeling defective and/or inadequate, which was further reinforced by implicit, gender-based power dynamics in medical institutions when women sought care. We suggest the need for engagement with discomfort and leveraging PCOS as a unique entryway into an analysis of intersectional issues to capture complexities in lived experience.

The Future is Female! Trans(human) Voices of Cher and Anohni

In this article, I want to present trans(human) Cher and Anohni’s voice qualities. Both singers represent ambiguous and queer forms of femininity that denaturalizes the concept of gender and entangles the listener into a transgressive aesthetic experience. By using the cyborg metaphor proposed by Donna Haraway and the concept of the grain of voice by Roland Barthes, I want to show how a female voice can become a critical form of resistance to the patriarchal and misogynistic conception of femininity.

Kannaki and the Changing Concepts of Femininity

Kannaki and the Changing Concepts of Femininity

Fashioning fat fem(me)ininities

ABSTRACT This article uses interview data to explore how queer fat femme women and gender nonconforming individuals negotiate a dominant cultural fashioning of fat fem(me)ininity as hyperfeminine, fat “in the right places,” white, cisgender, and upper/middle-class. By considering the pressures queer fat femmes experience to embody this culturally intelligible fat fem(me)ininity; the consequences participants experience for deviating from this fem(me)ininity; participants’ feelings of failure in relation to this fat fem(me)ininity; and participants’ articulations of queer fat femme as a space of resistance and community via their own fashionings of fat and queer fem(me)ininities, this article argues that there is a need to broaden narrow cultural conceptions of fat fem(me)ininity. Expanding conceptions of fat fem(me)ininity offers opportunities to recognize and value queer fat femmes’ own (re)fashionings of fat fem(me)ininities.

Meghan Markle's healthy lifestyle in the media: Multiracial exceptionalism and the cult of slimness

This paper examines how media representations of Meghan Markle's healthy lifestyle perpetuate concepts of good femininity rooted in racialized norms. Simone de Beauvoir's concept of ‘cultural myths of femininity’ and Patricia Hill Collins's theory of ‘controlling images’ offer a framework for analyzing how mainstream health and lifestyle media promote and normalize white, bourgeois ideals of femininity. A study of 20 articles published in American and British magazines or on their websites reveals how lifestyle and health media extoll Markle as an example of a healthy and prosperous woman, thereby presenting her as what Ralina Joseph calls an ‘exceptional multiracial’. These articles promote a cult of slimness entrenched in a racist opposition between slender white women and fat Black women. ‘Multiracial exceptionalism’ further exacerbates the implicit racism in these texts.

The Disney ‘Princess Bubble’ as a Cultural Influencer

The Disney ‘Princess Bubble’ as a Cultural Influencer

Representation of Ethnic Women in Upendra Subba's Lāto Pahāda [Dumb Hill

The article aims to examine the images of ethnic women in Upendra Subba's Lāto Pahāda [Dumb Hill], a collection of short stories. The focus of the article is to analyze the portrayal of female characters in the selected five stories from the collection and to explain how they subvert the image of the ideal woman promoted by mainstream Nepali literature. These stories deal with the issues of Limbu people, an ethnic community residing in the eastern hilly region of Nepal. Through them, Subba raises the issues of ethnicity and representation of marginalized people. He explores the pain, suffering and hardship of these people who have been at the margin of the society. The stories, mostly, focus on men who play the primary roles in them; nonetheless, female characters play an important role to make sense of the lifestyle of the Limbu people. Portrayed in the secondary roles as wife, daughter, and mother to the male characters, they maintain equal relation with their male counterparts. They work with self-determination and do not experience male domination in thei lives. To analyze the issues stated above, this paper draws theoretical ideas from third wave feminism which rejects the universalist claim that all women share a set of common experiences. The third wave feminists deny the concept of universal femininity; they clarify that the forms of oppression can be as varied just as resistance to them can have specific local color. The finding of the article suggests that Subba's female characters are depicted in the ethnic background which is nonhierarchical and believes in gender equality. Their portrayal subverts the image of ideal womanhood created and circulated by mainstream Nepali literature.

Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work by Jessica Enoch

Reviewed by: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work by Jessica Enoch Kate Rich Jessica Enoch, Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780809337163 Some interventions are long overdue, and Jessica Enoch knows how to make valuable interventions in the overlooked localities of gendered ideas. In Domestic Occupations, she attunes rhetorical studies to a historiography of where women work. Across the humanities, the spatial turn to recognize the politics of place considers race, gender, and sex.1 Yet, we still lack a lexicon for how places might transform the labor of marginalized people over time. Enoch approaches this task with rhetorical theory to examine how the domestic duties within private spaces, like a home, were rhetorically extended to less traditionally feminine tasks in public spaces. [End Page 240] The book begins with a rich variety of scholarly work in rhetoric, geography, and gender studies to make the case for the gendered and rhetorical history of spaces. For Enoch, “There is no arhetorical space” (9). Throughout the book, her archival work attends “to the material, ideological, pictorial, emotive, discursive, and embodied site of the home and the ways this site’s spatial rhetorics constrained and made possible women’s work outside the domestic arena” (171). These texts are representative of dominant discourses that centered white middle-class women and excluded what she calls other women. She cleverly guides readers through the spatio-rhetorical transformations of the schoolhouse, the laboratory, and the child-care center, making a notable claim in each case. Her first transformation is centered around New England schoolhouses in the nineteenth century. The notable claim that arises in this chapter is the idea that spaces perform gender like humans do. Aligning herself with Judith Butler, she argues, “when a space takes on new gendered meanings, the bodies expected to inhabit it and the identities constructed within it also change” (33). Initially, the home was imagined as offering a feminized place of stability and comfort while the classroom was likened to a masculinist prison wherein students were harshly disciplined. When the harshness of the schoolroom was critiqued and remodeled, the classroom gradually became a space for women once it was reconfigured to be more like the feminine home. The subsequent entry of women into the teaching profession resulted in class mobility for some women while also devaluing the teaching profession as a whole, due to its perception as a form of feminized labor. Domestic scientists towards the end of the nineteenth century serve as the second transformative case study. The notable claim here is that ethos can be revised through spatial rhetoric. Domestic scientists, Enoch argues, revised the home into a site of scientific complexity. While these women, often conservative and white, frequently distanced themselves from the women’s rights movement, Enoch insightfully points out that their cautious rhetorical reconfiguration of the home allowed many women to pursue science education. Through domestic advice manuals and public kitchen demonstrations, homemaking was transformed into a practice that required a laboratory. Enoch acknowledges that this transformation was very white and relied on some normative conceptions of femininity, but it raises an intriguing set of implications. Of all the chapters in the book, this is perhaps the richest in scholarly opportunities. Those invested in how white women engage in rhetorical strategies of whiteness may find this chapter useful. Additionally, scholars in the rhetoric of science, medicine, and technology might see potential to approach their objects of study with spatio-rhetorical analysis. The final case study is devoted to how the wartime child care center was transformed into an acceptable place to offset domestic labor and how it reverted back to an undesirable place at the end of World War II. In this chapter, Enoch makes the notable claim that spatial rhetorics are capable of being emotive. The maternal qualities of the home had to be rhetorically [End Page 241] transferred to the wartime childcare center to get women working during the war. Enoch skillfully asserts that visual rhetorics and the enargeia of childcare employees cuddling with children communicated that the center could operate as a secondary home To convince women to return to...

Dialect speaking working-class women in the media

In this paper, we investigate the research question ‘How are female dialect users from former industrial areas depicted in the media?’ by comparing media representations from two former industrial areas, namely Heerlen/Parkstad in the Netherlands and Østfold in Norway. Both representations are parodic and can be characterised as ‘high performances’ (Johnstone 2011, p. 658), and we argue that these performances are informed by the class-divided, previously industrial societies in Heerlen/Parkstad and Østfold. Our results show that being local seems to conflict with normative conceptions of femininity in these representations.

REPRESENTATION OF FEMINISM IN THE MAIN CHARACTERS OF THE FILMS "MALEFICENT MISTRESS OF EVIL" AND "FROZEN 2"

Abstract: Fairy Tale films do not only show entertainment for the audience but also therepresentation of femininity that can affect the mindset of the viewers. The representation shouldevolve in line with the global feminist movement in order for the audience to have a realisticdescription of the condition of women in the current era. Research is needed to determine whetherthe transition is in line with the development of feminism waves and theories. This study usesfeminist theories and concepts of femininity as a reference. The primary data collection wascompleted using observation and secondary data was taken from the study of literature anddocumentation. Observations were accomplished by watching Maleficent 2, and Frozen 2 films. Thefinal analysis shows that the transition in the representation of femininity in Maleficent 2, andFrozen 2 films indicates equalities and emphasizes the rebellious side of woman.Keywords: Maleficent 2; Frozen 2; Feminism; Femininity, Representation; Equalities

Centrality of family bonds in the experience of middle-aged women.

To analyze meanings attributed to middle-aged women from their experience in their family relationships. Qualitative study of the Convergent Care Research method. Gender was used as an analytical category, developed with a total of thirteen middle-aged women from the coverage area of the Family Health Strategy program in a city in the southwest of Bahia state, through reflection workshops and interviews. Data were analyzed using discourse analysis. They express the affective relationship with children and grandchildren as the greatest highlight of middle age in overlap with the relationship with partners and other bonds, which makes their uniqueness and identification of demands for health care unfeasible. Female middle-aged are marked by conceptions of femininity that emerge from their condition as a woman-mother, from her complete donation. The research points to an urgent need to add gender as a reference for the care of middle-aged women, in order to consider the biopsychic and social interlaces in their life experience and that outline demands for care.

International Women’s Day 2009-2020 on Twitter: Postfeminist or Fourth Wave Feminism?

Public celebrations and discussions about International Women’s Day on social media give an opportunity to investigate how citizens engage with the event and the effect that it may have. This study examines English #InternationalWomensDay tweets from the UK and USA, focusing on differences between tweets from males and females. Whilst males mainly tweeted to appreciate the achievements of all or specified women, aligning with the United Nations perspective, females were more likely to draw upon postfeminist concepts of individual empowerment and femininity, although there were also some fourth wave feminism tweets. Females also called for women to support women and tweeted just to celebrate the day. The results suggest that different waves of feminism coexist within International Women’s Day tweets and the event is a celebration more than a campaign.

A Salute to Our Canadian Kings

It may take an insider to connect why drag kings still fight for recognition. For the past twenty-five years, I have been dedicated to the art of drag kinging. I have been involved in and created multiple productions across the world. I have researched and documented drag kings since 1999. Through the years, I witnessed how drag kings shaped the concept of the word ‘drag’ itself. Drag kings have always deconstructed gender. To quote Crema from the article, we have always “mind fucked”. Drag kings, even when calling themselves male impersonators, twist the concepts of masculinity, femininity, and gender in highly entertaining and academic ways. So why don’t the majority of drag artists know this? I believe it is because most of us have not seen or read that much about drag kings. The media puts us second after drag queens, especially since the growing popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race. As drag continuous to evolve, I want to share how kings built the stages and opened the doors for this gender revolution. It is with great pride that I share with you some history and interviews with fellow Canadian kings who helped transform and bring recognition to this art form.

Feminine Charms and Horrors in J.G. Ballard’s “The Smile” and Iain Sinclair’s Downriver

Feminine Charms and Horrors in J.G. Ballard’s “The Smile” and Iain Sinclair’s Downriver Ann Tso (bio) The sight of [her smile] has unsettled my entire life, but I find it impossible to move my eyes from it. As her face has sagged, her smile has become wider and even more askew. [. . .] As I look at it now across the study it seems to contain a complete understanding of my character, a judgment unknown to me from which I can never escape. —J.G. Ballard’s “The Smile” (1976) It is difficult to ascertain from the epigraph to Ballard’s short story what or who is more unsettling: the Edwardian doll Serena, the one who smiles, or Serena’s owner, the one enamored enough with the smile to tell its story. The owner in question tries to appeal to our sympathy as a first-person narrator; he demonizes Serena by projecting onto her his worst personal qualities—most notably his arrogance and timidity—so that he can pretend she has come alive. Oddly enough, the emasculated narrator finds himself more romantically drawn to Serena as he grows more terrified of her. In making feminine charm the centerpiece of his short story, J.G. Ballard follows in the footsteps of numerous canonical English writers. For instance, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela rejects her kidnapper’s sexual advances so persistently that, in the end, even this villainous man finds himself touched by her virtuousness and feels the need to repent. Charlotte [End Page 154] Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a governess, a working woman with considerably more social power than the ‘mad’ wife from Jamaica locked up in the attic—though the decision to empower the one and disempower the other rests with Mr. Rochester, the patriarch and sole arbiter of power in the house. In these canonical texts, Englishmen often find themselves in a position to decide which kind of femininity is charming and which grotesque, which virtuous and which obscene. But this male egotism was weakened in the wake of World War I, when Western civilization was—in the words of the modernist writer D.H. Lawrence—in “a flux of death” (Markert 551). Although Britain and its European Allies emerged from the Great War victorious, they struggled to maintain their imperial influence abroad. The British Empire, in particular, began to fear the prospect of dissolution partly because of the lukewarm wartime support it had received from its dominions, colonies, and protectorates (specifically from India, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand), some of them already entitled to a high level of self-governance. The empire’s enfeebled control over its foreign subjects undermined the imperial mandate, and, in effect, its proponents on the British Isles were disempowered. Some English writers took to describing this disempowerment as an experience of emasculation or as a post-colonial future, which, if imagined in gendered terms, would entail a radical role reversal: the post-colonial New Man (formerly the egotist) was to play a humbler role in relation to the New Woman, who was to be neither confined to the domestic realm nor expected to show (sexual) modesty in public. Lawrence’s Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for instance, both exemplify feminine horrors that deviate from what remains of a phallocentric sociality. In the second half of the twentieth century, gender fluidity was conceived in this manner as a deconstructive process, one dedicated to breaking down rigid conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Writing between the 1950s and the 1990s, Lawrence Durrell continued to explore the existential crisis into which post-colonial English men and women were plunged. Durrell’s The Black Book presents tepid female archetypes—all specimens of feminine horror—who lead men into scripted love affairs, both sides prompted into sex not by passion but rather by an epochal dis-passion, i.e., the onset of a traumatic psychosis. Then in the 1980s, some female writers chose to “tak[e] female monstrosity away from the hands of patriarchy” (Martin 195) and articulate for themselves an untamable, monstrous, [End Page 155] but seductive femininity, whose “excess and … power … are seen as the solution to counteract the patriarchal model...

Out of Reach: The Ideal Girl in American Girls' Serial Literature by Kate G. Harper

Reviewed by: Out of Reach: The Ideal Girl in American Girls' Serial Literature by Kate G. Harper Agapi Theodorou-Shapiro (bio) Out of Reach: The Ideal Girl in American Girls' Serial Literature, by Kate G. Harper. Routledge, 2020. In the concluding chapter of her book, Out of Reach: The Ideal Girl in American Girls' Serial Literature, Kate G. Harper questions whether the figure of the ideal girl in series literature has progressed into a more "empowering figure for girl readers" (125) over the course of the twentieth century. The short answer is: not really. The longer answer is more complex and requires additional context. In her last chapter, Harper takes us back to Obama's landmark presidential win, calling out the post-gender and postrace discourses that equated Obama's presidency with ultimate progress, a sign that the US had finally "turned its back on oppression and was embracing equality" (121). In 2016, Harper writes, "what had been obvious to some became clear on a national and international stage—racism and sexism had continued to fester beneath the façade of progress" (121). We all have different fantasies about what this country is. But the idea that US history follows a progressive teleology is one of the most dubious. Along the same lines, though one might imagine that the figure of the ideal girl in serial literature has been on a track toward greater diversity and empowerment—and some series have certainly made waves in that more progressive direction—all of the series discussed in this book ultimately reinscribe "a predictable norm of white, middle class, able-bodied, heterosexual young femininity" (125). Harper reaches that [End Page 254] conclusion by tracing the genealogy of the ideal girl trope in several popular girls' series: Dorothy Dale, Nancy Drew, Vicki Barr, Cherry Ames, the Baby-Sitters Club, and Sweet Valley High (5). In the first chapter, "A Girl of Today: Merging Models of Girlhood in Dorothy Dale," Harper introduces the Dorothy Dale series that launched this genre "and paved the way for the serial heroine as ideal girl in American culture" (14). Harper details women's shifting roles at the turn of the century, noting specifically that the Victorian model of "true womanhood" was being complicated by modern tropes of American femininity, a development that alarmed family experts. Additionally, fear-inducing was the discourse surrounding adolescence. Within this framework, adolescents were viewed as lacking reason and in need of firm "discipline and punishment" (17). And of course, parents were especially concerned about girls' sexual behavior. It is hardly surprising, then, that early volumes of the Dorothy Dale series remained beholden to their Victorian predecessors, celebrating obedience and self-sacrifice rather than adventure and independence (14). Harper reads Dorothy Dale within this cultural backdrop and analyzes the relationship between Dorothy and her friend Tavia as a way to chart the development of the ideal girl figure that emerges in the series. Dorothy and Tavia have different physical appearances and socioeconomic backgrounds: blonde-haired, blue-eyed Dorothy is "a well-bred lady," whereas "dark-haired, brown-eyed" Tavia has less economic power, is socially awkward, and often gets into trouble (22). Harper's close reading reveals the ways in which Tavia's character serves as a foil to Dorothy's, thereby further reinforcing Dorothy's ideal status. Ultimately, however, these two characters merge their best qualities in a kind of middle-ground position between the Victorian and modern conceptions of femininity: through their friendship, "Dorothy sheds her shyness and passivity, [and] Tavia reins in her fiery temper and flightiness" (26). Thus emerges the defining qualities of the ideal girl: "brave and intelligent yet appropriately feminine" (26). Another element in setting the stage for future girls' series is establishing a recurring theme of Othering those who do not inhabit the idealized standard of white, financially stable, heterosexual femininity. In Dorothy Dale, this kind of exclusionary behavior functions in two ways. Othered characters are either ignored or they are stereotyped: "the surly maid, the greedy counter clerk," the nonwhite immigrant "seeking to infiltrate American society" (26, 28). The contrast between Dorothy, for example, and Othered characters like Viola Green, a girl [End Page 255] with a...

Dramatopisarki w natarciu — feministyczny charakter najnowszej dramaturgii rosyjskojęzycznej

This article enumerates the most salient features of works by the youngest contemporary Russian-speaking playwrights of Eastern Europe, including Irina Vaskovska, Asya Voloshyna, Natalya Blok, Olga Shilyayeva and Darya Slyusarenko. Conducted from a feminist perspective, the study discusses various ways in which the plays contradict a male-centric vision of the world. Their authors undertake the (re-)definition of the concept of femininity by proposing new perspectives on seemingly well-known topics such as motherhood, family relationships, sexuality, and corporeality. The protagonists of the plays presented in the text oppose the social and moral norms that limit them, make attempts to go beyond those cliches, and fight for the opportunity to be themselves.

Nelly Arcan, une postféministe?

The article proposes to reconsider the place taken by Nelly Arcan’s work in the women’s and feminist thinking in Quebec in the last years. The author discusses the concepts like the passivity of writer’s main characters, her conception of femininity and the fatalism which characterize her female characters. The aim of the article is to shed light in Nelly Arcan’s vision and renewal of the contemporary Quebecer literature. Her intimate, provocative, furious and dark novels bring out the deadlock on the women’s thinking nowadays and challenge the achievements of the claims of the feminist movements.

Sexual Politics Revised: A Feminist Re-Reading of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love

In his work, D. H. Lawrence has paid particular attention to the question of (in)visible alliances between the sexes, where the position of power and dominance often is not fixed but is negotiable and constantly in the process of (re)vision. My paper examines Lawrence’s experimentation with definitions and boundaries of public and private gender roles. Both The Rainbow and Women in Love are a good starting point for this inquiry, since the relationship between the male and female characters are problematized in a conscientious and distinctive fashion. Therefore, it is interesting to study the relationship between the characters and see how femininity and masculinity influence each individual’s gender identity, and as a result their gender performance. Additionally, Lawrence consolidates a feminine significance remarkably similar to the disruption, excess, and pleasure celebrated by poststructuralist French feminists as écriture féminine. These novels represent the disruptive power of feminine signification, both on personal and sociopolitical levels, and end with that power still in play. They get to the heart of the conceptual difficulties of gender differences, gender identity and gender performance. They also take on this feminist imperative to define the intensity and changes necessary in personal and cultural life of the modern age, manifesting and maintaining new and different possibilities for subjectivity. I use Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Judith Butler’s discussions on the concepts of femininity and the feminine subject. I also refer to their gender theories as foundational models to study the conflict and shift between the gender roles in the two-gendered system of cultural norms and ideals in the world of these two novels.