Conventional Femininity Research Articles

Girls gone wild: animality, female teenagers, and disidentification in contemporary European cinema

ABSTRACT Contemporary European cinema insistently depicts female teenagers in association with non-human animals. This article focuses on a group of films in which the teenage protagonists approach animality while closely surrounded by systems of exploitation of animals. The films Axolotl Overkill (Helene Hegemann, 2017), Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016), and Eastern (Piotr Adamski, 2019) feature female teenagers that experience oppression over their bodies. Animality appears both as part of their oppression and as a subversive alternative to negotiate their appointed social role as girls. The analyzed films explore narrative and aesthetic modes of disruption of the division between human/animal, as they articulate constructive encounters and even identification with the human and the non-human. Additionally, these films confront normative constructions of femininity through abject animality. Instead of ‘becoming women’, the protagonists embrace a more fluid transformation. These films propose ways of representing animals without participating in the traditional, spectacularizing gaze that reinforces the hierarchy of dominance of the human over the non-human. In this sense, this article contributes to the aim of animal (film) studies to rethink how visual culture represents the non-human. Lastly, these films appear more broadly as part of a larger tendency in contemporary European cinema inscribing animals in a critique of conventional femininity.

Domesticity at War: Bringing the War Home in Martha Rosler's "House Beautiful" Wartime Photomontages

The uneven, sometimes violent relationship between “here” and “elsewhere” is evoked powerfully in Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home—two linked sets of photomontages that engage the gender and racial politics of domesticity in the US as well as the geopolitics of empire. Troubling mythologies of warfare and documentary realism with dazzling wit and critical fury, these works refer materially and specifically to places and times of war in solidarity with protest movements while also raising questions of historical linkages and political accountability. Suturing their times and spaces into discontinuous contact, the two series bring together seemingly incommensurate elements—exquisite domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities often associated with conventional femininity, and the landscapes and bodies damaged and destroyed by warfare--to produce images of great immediacy and visceral power. Across the long arc of the wars waged by the US from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, Rosler has shown us how the modernist aestheticization of US domesticity in the affluent post-World War II era promised personal empowerment and hopeful futures yet, emerging from warfare itself, only brought about more war.

The Abolition of Sex/Gender Registration in the Age of Gender SelfDetermination: An Interdisciplinary, Queer, Feminist and Human Rights Analysis

It is commonly accepted that gender matters (whether cisgender, transgender/trans*, gender non-binary, genderfluid, gender queer, agender, or other) and many are raising awareness about the fact that gender always seems to matter. That gender matters, and always matters, does not necessarily mean, however, that gender needs to be authenticated or endorsed by the state.
 In fact, based on a feminist and queer reading of human rights, this interdisciplinary article asserts that state-sponsored sex/gender assignment through the practice of sex/gender registration must halt. It argues that mandatory (binary) sex/gender registration disproportionately infringes the emerging right to gender identity autonomy and the right to the legal recognition thereof. Most often, our Western heterosexual cultural system of gender, which posits the existence of two oppositional and complementary gender identities, anchored in so-called natural and binary sex, goes hand in hand with material and discursive forms of violence and entails various forms of unequal power dynamics. Hegemonic in nature, the heterosexual cultural system of gender pervasively regulates many (if not every) aspects of all bodies’ lives and being, including by legal means. The law upholds and certifies that specific gender regime, inter alia, by assigning a sex to individuals at birth (through the registration of a claimed evident, objective, natural element to be found on or in the body by inspection). Policies of mandatory (binary) sex/genderregistration therefore constitute the cornerstone of the legalisation of the heterosexual cultural system of gender, which produces not only the conventional feminine and masculine gender identity (i.e. women and men) but also sex (i.e. females and males).
 This article suggests that, as long as the law refuses to go beyond the compulsory male/female (or even male/female/other) framework, it will be complicit in upholding the undesired consequences of the heterosexual cultural system of gender, which affect all persons of whatever gender or physical features. Therefore, undoing remaining forms of global gender injustice, as well as respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights relating to gender identity, requires the abolishment of sex/gender registration instead of expanding the available gender markers. Indeed, this article finds that current state practices do not pursue a legitimate aim, and even if they do, mandatory sex/gender registration does not pass the proportionality test that is required in the assessment of restrictions of fundamental rights. A human rights analysis of official sex/gender in the age of gender self-determination finds mandatory sex/gender registration to be a disproportionate measure and recommends that states change their current practices. Doing so would be beneficial to cisgender and trans* individuals alike.

“More Champion than the Champions”: Female Masculinity in Lālehzari Music and Filmfarsi

ABSTRACT This paper examines how female Lālehzari performers of the 1950s–70s rejected conventional femininity through their performances of female masculinity in their music and in some of the song-and-dance scenes of the commercial cinema. It argues that by performing eshgh ast, a kind of camp, these artists lampooned the dominant culture’s binary gender system and their fans’ claims over masculinity, ultimately making gender more capacious and women’s performative possibilities more diverse in the Lālehzari music scene. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that these gender outlaws and their audiences developed their own homegrown, urban modernity beyond state discourses of Westernization.

Patsy, mi amor, la melancólica evasión de la feminidad mexicana

Patsy, mi amor (1969) could seem like one more of the many films about young people thatwere shot in Mexico in the sixties or go unnoticed as an auteur extravaganza. A deeper look than the a-go-go irreverence and psychedelia, will find an aesthetic subtlety and an intertextual game that border on the excessive. This article does not intend to unfold that referential range, but rather to analyze one of the less obvious dialogues in the film, although with greater interpretative richness: the one established by the protagonist with the women of her own film tradition. To do this, we will analyze how the construction of the character of Patsy operates as a questioning of the classic saint/prostitute binarism, through a melancholic resistance to conventional femininity and eroticism.

A Cottage Of One’s Own: Making Modern Women Through Word and Image in Interwar Women’s Homemaking Magazines

ABSTRACT A home with all modern conveniences became a reality for an increasing number of people, including aspirational lower middle- and working-class families, in the interwar years. Magazines such as Modern Home and Weldon’s Ladies’ Journal helped forge a burgeoning home consumer culture and were an important factor shaping dreams of home ownership. This article examines the ideal modern home—its pleasures, discontents, and potential meaning for women—as it was constructed in and disseminated through domestic women’s magazines. Conceptualizing periodicals as hybrid, composite texts, it argues that the multiple ways in which they framed, positioned, and reproduced word and image set up tensions and connections, opening a space for more diverse readers to engage with magazines in new ways. The metaphor of the magazine as both a “window” and “mirror” helps show how editors strove to balance appealing visions of modern living with advice that reflected readers’ real circumstances. A focus on the dominant ideal of the modern cottage/suburban home helps unpack the complex relationship between rural and modern, the past and the present, conventional femininity and modern womanhood, and private and national life that operated in the pages of these popular magazines.

Maturing out of ‘binge drinking’: young adult women’s performance of age and gender in times of transition

ABSTRACT Alcohol consumption can be an important marker of transitions. In this article, we focus on the process of becoming an adult drinker, to which ‘maturing out’ of earlier drinking styles is central. Drinking style also plays a part in the construction of gender, and we explore how age and gender interact in young adult women’s accounts of maturing out of binge drinking practices. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with 19 Norwegian women (27–34 years old). The participants performed age and gender through their accounts of drinking, by 1) Creating intimacy through drinking, 2) Monitoring their drinking and 3) Re-contextualising pleasure from drinking. The participants’ performance of age entailed accounting for their drinking largely in terms of conventional femininity. However, by simultaneously emphasising pleasure in their alcohol consumption, the participants retained independence and empowerment even when facing demands to become more conventional (in terms of femininity) as they matured.

The Abolition of Sex/Gender Registration in the Age of Gender Self-Determination: An Interdisciplinary, Queer, Feminist and Human Rights Analysis

<p><br />It is commonly accepted that gender matters (whether cisgender, transgender/trans*, gender non-binary, genderfluid, gender queer, agender, or other) and many are raising awareness about the fact that gender always seems to matter. That gender matters, and always matters, does not necessarily mean, however, that gender needs to be authenticated or endorsed by the state.</p><p>In fact, based on a feminist and queer reading of human rights, this interdisciplinary article asserts that state-sponsored sex/gender assignment through the practice of sex/gender registration must halt. It argues that mandatory (binary) sex/gender registration disproportionately infringes the emerging right to gender identity autonomy and the right to the legal recognition thereof. Most often, our Western heterosexual cultural system of gender, which posits the existence of two oppositional and complementary gender identities, anchored in so-called natural and binary sex, goes hand in hand with material and discursive forms of violence and entails various forms of unequal power dynamics. Hegemonic in nature, the heterosexual cultural system of gender pervasively regulates many (if not every) aspects of all bodies’ lives and being, including by legal means. The law upholds and certifies that specific gender regime, inter alia, by assigning a sex to individuals at birth (through the registration of a claimed evident, objective, natural element to be found on or in the body by inspection). Policies of mandatory (binary) sex/gender registration therefore constitute the cornerstone of the legalisation of the heterosexual cultural system of gender, which produces not only the conventional feminine and masculine gender identity (i.e. women and men) but also sex (i.e. females and males).</p><p>This article suggests that, as long as the law refuses to go beyond the compulsory male/female (or even male/female/other) framework, it will be complicit in upholding the undesired consequences of the heterosexual cultural system of gender, which affect all persons of whatever gender or physical features. Therefore, undoing remaining forms of global gender injustice, as well as respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights relating to gender identity, requires the abolishment of sex/gender registration instead of expanding the available gender markers. Indeed, this article finds that current state practices do not pursue a legitimate aim, and even if they do, mandatory sex/gender registration does not pass the proportionality test that is required in the assessment of restrictions of fundamental rights. A human rights analysis of official sex/gender in the age of gender self-determination finds mandatory sex/gender registration to be a disproportionate measure and recommends that states change their current practices. Doing so would be beneficial to cisgender and trans* individuals alike.</p>

The politics of being a queer leader during the Ferguson uprising

The politics of being a queer leader during the Ferguson uprising

The Mountain Girl from La Vera

The Mountain Girl from La Vera

Incorporeal and Inspected: Aristocratic Female Bodies and the Gaze in the Works of Mrs Henry Wood

ABSTRACT This article posits that sensation novelist Mrs Henry Wood, despite her complex representations of gender and class, articulated a proto-feminist stance through many of her works through the trope of the disembodied aristocratic female. Wood represents the impossible, contradictory spaces that women in general are supposed to occupy by using the high visibility of aristocratic female characters as a magnifying glass for gender norms. Wood sees aristocratic women as doubly trapped by patriarchal structures as these women attempt the paradoxical “public vs. private” and “viewed vs. intangible” demands placed on them by their gender and class statuses. By representing all women, but especially upper-class women, as constantly seen but lacking corporeal forms (especially in comparison to the highly embodied male characters in her texts), Wood stresses the tension between conflicting ideologies of conventional femininity in the Victorian period.

Aesthetic labouring and the female entrepreneur: ‘Entrepreneurship that wouldn’t chip your nails’

Recognising significant interrelations between neoliberal and postfeminist discourses, we advance understandings of constructions of female entrepreneurs by unpacking their visual representation and exploring the role of aesthetic labour. Given the impact of contemporary media, we focus on key images integral to the marketing of Mattel’s Entrepreneur Barbie as a postfeminist cultural icon and investigate how these representations of female entrepreneurship are consumed. First, we highlight the practical demands and emotional risks of the aesthetic labour required to achieve such postfeminist glamour. Second, links between conventional femininity and entrepreneurial success are both celebrated and challenged, highlighting perceived limits to achievement. Finally, we unpack understandings of the relations between entrepreneurialism and aesthetic labour to move beyond assumptions of the instrumental power of the makeover. Our findings thus enrich understandings of the consumption of postfeminist images of entrepreneurs.

Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras by Kathryn Wichelns

Reviewed by: Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras by Kathryn Wichelns Leonardo Buonomo Kathryn Wichelns. Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 178 pp. $99.99 (hardcover). In Henry James's Feminist Afterlives, Kathryn Wichelns provides an original contribution to Henry James scholarship by examining James's complex treatment of gender issues through the figures of three women authors—Annie Fields (1834–1915), Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), and Marguerite Duras (1914–1996)—who variously engaged with him and/or his work. For these women, writes Wichelns, James "is a male author who closely explores women's inner lives, as they negotiate existing ideas about gender and selfhood during the unprecedented transformations brought about by the late nineteenth-century period" (2). Spanning different historical periods, cultural contexts, languages, as well as genres (letters in the case of Fields and Dickinson, drama in the case of Duras), Wichelns argues cogently for a combined feminist and queer reading of James's work. By delving into the social and historical milieu in which each of these women authors operated, Wichelns calls attention to the ways in which their relationships (whether real or vicarious) with James offer us insights into his stance on femininity, masculinity, and societal conventions and norms. In the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, Wichelns notes that her chosen material has received scant attention either because it is not easily accessible (James's letters to Annie Fields) or because its relevance to James studies has been underrated (Dickinson's epistolary references to James's The Europeans and Duras's French-language stage adaptations of James's "The Beast in the Jungle" and The Aspern Papers). While James's epistolary communication with Fields will become more widely available as the publication of The Complete Letters of Henry James progresses (the latest volume covers the years 1883–1884), Duras's Les Papiers d'Aspern and La bête dans la jungle have so far remained untranslated into English. For this reason, Wichelns's extensive quotes from the plays, accompanied by their rendition in English, are a valuable tool for those scholars who cannot read them in the original. [End Page E-11] From a purely methodological standpoint, there appears to be a discrepancy between the chapter devoted to Annie Fields and those that focus on Emily Dickinson and Marguerite Duras. In chapter 2 ("'Those Who Know': Henry James and Annie Adams Fields"), Wichelns looks primarily at the way in which James perceived and addressed Fields in his letters to her, especially after Fields, following the death of her husband (publisher and editor James T. Fields), entered into an intimate, marriage-like relationship with Sarah Orne Jewett. On the other hand, in chapter 3 ("Emily Dickinson's Henry James") and chapters 4 and 5 (dealing, respectively, with Duras's plays La Bête dans la jungle and Les papiers d'Aspern) the focus is on the way in which James was perceived and addressed by Dickinson and Duras. Thus, in chapter 2 we learn a great deal about James's subtly sympathetic acknowledgement of Fields and Jewett's relationship and his bond with both women (but, in particular, with Fields) on the basis of a shared cultural, literary, and social heritage. The emphasis here is on the use, as it were, that James made of his correspondence with Fields, as a private space in which he could explore, and to some extent implicitly sanction, non-normative gender roles and relations. By contrast, the chapters that follow highlight the use James was put to by two women authors who found in his work a vehicle for their critique of conventional femininity and patriarchal power. Regardless of this shift in perspective, throughout the book Wichelns's analysis consistently opens up fresh venues to reassess James's sense of cultural and national identity, as well as his attitude toward women's issues and indeed his own sexuality. For example, in chapter 2 Wichelns offers a stimulating comparison between, on the one hand, both James's sometimes severe pronouncements on transgressive figures, such as Oscar Wilde and George Sand (whose public personas troubled him...

Performative Utterances and Gender Performance in Shakespeare's Richard III

This article aims to analyze the discourse of cursing and gender performance in Shakespeare's Richard III (1592) through Judith Butler's theory of gender as a performative act in conjunction with J. L. Austin's concept of performative utterances, in order to further a cultural understanding of the beliefs surrounding curses in early modern England. I deploy Richard III as a case study to demonstrate that speech-act theory is applicable in a dramatic text, a context that Austin failed to consider when he theorized illocutionary acts. Since the construction of feminine identities in Richard III is based on performance–in early modern England boy actors impersonated female figures vocally and physically, I argue that curses are gendered feminine despite the fact that cursing women transgress the conventional feminine virtue of silence and despite the cultural belief that curses produce agency of which women are conventionally deprived. As such, the discourse of female cursing can be read as a case of minor literature, a mode of enunciation that challenges and eclipses Richard's discourse, and which emanates from the conventional view that the female curse is a performative speech act that is divinely endorsed. It is an effective means of retaliation, leading to the destruction of villainous figures.

Muay Thai: Women, fighting, femininity

Women fighting challenges conventional notions of femininity in many ways. A bleeding nose, bruised eyes and swollen lips embody perhaps masculine success but, for many, constitute failed femininity. Yet women fighters, who are attracting unprecedented media attention, are in novel ways forcing a re-imagination of femininity. This article draws on 17 in-depth semi-structured interviews with professional and amateur female Muay Thai fighters based in Thailand to explore the subversion and reinvention, and also reinforcement, of feminine norms. Theoretically, we advance the debate around fighting and femininity by developing the concept of bio-borders to investigate the presentation, protection and penetration of bodily femininity. We conclude that women fighters inspire a femininity recognising physical and emotional strength alongside conventional feminine norms of beauty, relationality and compliance.

An Ethiopian-Headed Serpent in theCantigas de Santa María: Sin, Sex, and Color in Late Medieval Castile

AbstractAn unconventional portrayal of the serpent of the Temptation in the Florence codex of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, MS B.R. 20) manifests significant developments in the visual and epistemic norms of late medieval Castile. The satanic serpent’s black face and stereotyped African features link to cultural traditions well beyond Iberia, most notably the topos of the “Ethiopian,” which blended the actual and fantastical in deeply symbolic ways. Most crucial to the reading of the motif in the cantiga were the Ethiopian’s long-standing associations with sin and diabolism, rooted in early monastic Christianity but preserved in later medieval monastic and romance literature as well as in visual images found in Iberian contexts. Yet the otherwise conventional femininity of the serpent’s head must have connected still more specifically to medieval stereotypes of black women as hypersexual, distasteful, and dangerous. Iberian awareness of these stereotypes, attested ...

Teacher Evaluations: Corporeal Matters and Un/Wanted Affects

Teacher Evaluations: Corporeal Matters and Un/Wanted Affects

Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature ed. by Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge

Reviewed by: Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature ed. by Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge Julie Codell (bio) Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature edited by Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge; pp. xii + 251. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. $109.95 cloth. This excellent edited collection re-evaluates the art and literature of the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes in the contexts not only of gender but also of intertextuality, reception, empire, and regionalism. Exploring unstable, contested, and fragmented masculinities from the 1860s onward, the authors range among paintings, illustrations, critical reviews, and literature, dissecting artists’ challenges to hegemonic masculinities. While the term “Pre-Raphaelite” is guaranteed to attract readers, the Brotherhood remains largely absent here. The authors focus on second-generation Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes (without clarifying either group’s aesthetic identities). There are three overarching themes: critical reception, internal contradictions in works in which artists or writers struggle with and against conventional masculinities, and the intertextual complexities of representing masculinity across literature and art. Amelia Yeates and Eleanor Fraser Stansbie use reception to measure responses to conflicted masculinities. Yeates examines critics’ pathologizing of Edward Burne-Jones’s androgynous males; she also reads style through a moral and religious “manliness” discourse that was tied to health. Attacking Burne-Jones’s figures as unhealthy, critics questioned the artist’s own mental health. Such pathologizing echoed attacks on early Brotherhood images of females who defied conventional femininity. “Queer” was Henry James’s term for Burne-Jones’s art, but James also found his figures’ androgyny enchanting. Stansbie explores the contexts of two of William Holman Hunt’s three versions of The Light of the World (1851–53, Keble College, Oxford; 1851–56, Manchester Art Gallery; 1900–04, St. Paul’s, London). Stansbie contextualizes these paintings in relation to muscular Christianity and Hunt’s other masculinized depictions of Christ. The hostile reception of the first version’s androgynous, effeminate Christ, whose bejewelled robe seemed dangerously Catholic, was due to its exhibition’s coinciding with anti-Catholic hostility to the re-establishment of the hierarchy of bishops in Britain. The third version, sent to the “white colonies” of New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and Canada, with its manlier Christ, coincided with imperialist discourses. It was displayed in Tasmania alongside skulls of Tasmanian Aborigines and the skeleton of Truganini, mistakenly believed to have been the last Aborigine. In this context, the bejewelled robe seemed “redolent of the richness of colonial mineral spoils” (210). Jay Sloan, Ingrid Hanson, and Rosemary Mitchell closely read texts or images for internal conflicts and oscillations between conventional and alternative masculinities. Examining two “modes” or “poetic ‘incarnations’” of manhood in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early work (11), Sloan questions [End Page 193] earlier feminist assertions that women were mere signs for Pre-Raphaelite artists. Instead, he argues that “an undifferentiated notion of a universalized imperialist ‘male’ gaze obscures the very real differences that existed among Victorian male artists,” whose masculinities were sometimes transgressive (12–13). Attentive to subtle nuances in Rossetti’s “Jenny” (1870), Sloan also discusses Rossetti’s “Pilgrim of Love figure,” who blends human and religious love, as a type of alternative masculinity that runs through many poems. He concludes that Rossetti distanced himself from normative masculinity. He recommends reading Rossetti “intertextually and intermodally, as offering not one, but multiple masculinities which both inform and challenge one another within his work.” Sloan’s revisionism demonstrates that Rossetti blurred the boundaries between masculine and feminine spheres; Sloan thus upends the widely held view that Rossetti endorsed phallocentric “‘male’ power and privilege” (11). Analyzing William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876), Hanson suggests some “cohesive characteristics” of the hegemonic masculinity that Morris resists: “courage, will and self-control, and an opposition to the bestial and the feminine or effeminate” (35). Morris presents a “communal masculinity” (35) that expands and re-examines these characteristics. Curiously, critics saw Morris’s dreamy, moody, and passionate males as manly, healthy, and virile. But Hanson insists that Morris undermines the political stability and imperialism associated with manliness and underscores the performativity of masculinity throughout the poem. He omits the saga’s long sections...

Robust Body and Social Souls: Reassessing Ronald Firbank’s Effeminate Queer Men

This article places Ronald Firbank into context with Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, who promoted a form of muscular homoeroticism that they distinctly distanced from an allegedly degenerate effeminacy. Examining Firbank alongside Carpenter and Ellis provides a new angle from which to examine Firbank’s complex constructions of sex and gender in his novels. Reflecting yet implicitly critiquing Carpenter’s and Ellis’s work, Firbank offers a similar reorientation of queerness but does so by celebrating effeminate men. For Firbank, gender ambiguities do not bring about effeteness or social alienation. His same-sex desiring male characters are effeminate, but they are concurrently strong, productive, and capable of attracting admirers. He presents them as exhibiting robust bodies and social souls. Consequently, Firbank offers a rare, almost unique, positive relationship between effeminacy and a healthy male homoeroticism in the early-twentieth-century British novel, while revitalizing conventional feminine interests as a valuable element of a desirable homosexual identity.

Rebellion and Resistance

There is something rebellious about the work of Girlhood Studies so it is perhaps fitting that “Visual Disruptions” is the theme of this seventeenth issue of Girlhood Studies. The significance of 17 as an age in the life of girls and young women may vary, of course, across cultures, and, indeed, within contemporary popular culture in the West it is not necessarily seen as disruptive, as research on Seventeen magazine highlights. Nonetheless, we can think of the Janis Ian song from the 1970s, “At Seventeen,” and the many songs from The Beatles to the Sex Pistols that refer to girls being 17, and contemplate a state that is far from compliant in relation to conventional femininity. The articles in this themed issue of Girlhood Studies, guest-edited by Danai S. Mupotsa and Elina Oinas, offer a fascinating investigation into the politics of girlhood and visual culture, and the politics of disruption itself. The contributions are also a testament to the close alliance between feminism and visual studies.