Domestic Confinement Research Articles

Consecuencias de una crisis sanitaria. Botiquín de ideas para comprender el coronavirus y su tecno-pandemia informacional.

El coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, causante de la enfermedad COVID-19, ha generado una crisis sanitaria sin precedentes, la primera pandemia universal de la historia. Este fenómeno poco a poco está siendo explicado por la Ciencia. Pero no basta con explicar, también es preciso comprender. El objetivo principal perseguido aquí, desde la perspectiva metodológica de la Hermenéutica filosófica, es la comprensión de la crisis pandémica. Se analiza la metamorfosis que esta crisis está produciendo en las nociones de “realidad” y “subjetividad” y su repercusión en la Comunicación. Dos son los vectores destacados que vehiculan los resultados de esta reflexión: 1) la pandemia y la nueva normalidad hacen de la excepción la regla; 2) ello ha sido posible porque lo que inicialmente fue una mutación biológica se ha convertido en serie de conflictivas innovaciones disruptivas, que los gobiernos están controlando mediante medidas tecnopolíticas de disciplina social como el confinamiento doméstico. Así el coronavirus muta en tecno-virus informacional que se trasmite a través de los mass media y las redes sociales, infectando los cerebros humanos y provocando nuevos modos de pensar, actuar y vivir. A la pandemia se le solapa una infopandemia, cuyos daños mentales previsiblemente superarán los orgánicos. Se concluye entonces que no es la crisis sanitaria vírica la que está transformando la normalidad de la vida en la calle, sino las acciones tecno-políticas tomadas para afrontarla, aun cuando el reproche se lo lleve un coronavirus previamente tecno-personificado. Seguramente superaremos la pandemia, pero a costa quizá de que la info-pandemia definitivamente nos haya superado.

Work-Life Balance Issues Encountered by Working Women in Higher Education Sector

Education, Exposure, Awareness, and, Changes in the lifestyle has been successful in bringing women out of the four walls of domestic confinement into the world of earning, confidence, and self-reliance. Achievements of women in every field are noticeable bringing laurels to womanhood. Along with this that goes unnoticeable are the challenges faced by these women all through their working life. This is a big obstacle for women to function daily and also prove and progress in their careers. This paper studies the level of challenges faced by women teachers in maintaining Work-Life balance with special reference to State Universities of Karnataka. Responses from the sample are used to test the hypotheses that there is an association between Challenges faced and work-life balance. Challenges have been studied under three domains such as Individual factors, Family Factors, and Organizational Factors. For this purpose, 422 Women teachers of State Universities of Karnataka were selected for the study. The study showed that respondents had an overall moderate level of challenges. Results also revealed that there is an association between the challenges and work-life balance. The outcome of the study will help in understanding the challenges faced and its relationship with work-life balance.

The Sick Heroine in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The yellow Wallpaper

This study attempts to put Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s The yellow wallpaper in the context of contemporary theory of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s psycho-feminist scholarship The Madwoman in the Attic: The Women Writers and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (2000). The two critics focus on the image of the imprisoned mad women in the attic like Bertha Mason, the mentally ill wife of Mr. Edward Rochester, in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). The image of the sick woman forced into domestic confinement of colors, shapes and wallpapers in an entire seclusion continued right into the twentieth century into the literary product of some of the women writers. According to Gilbert and Gubar, some of those women Victorian writers tried to give voice to those women descending into sickness and mental diseases throughout their endeavor to oppress their awareness of the inner creative power which comes as a part of their desire to accept the limited social role they are trapped in.

Breaking the Formula in Mother--Daughter Relationship with Reference to Geetanjali Shree's Mai

The novel depicts how Sunaina grows up in a North Indian middle-class family under the tender care of her mother. The daughter belatedly recognizes her mother’s role in creating a fertile space of freedom in which she could cultivate herself despite the stifling patriarchal environment into which she was born. Sunaina also reevaluates her mother’s silence as a subtle effort to protect her against the stringencies of the society. Thus, the text exposes the rigid system that frames women within domestic confines but in doing so, advocates for borderline sites where women manifest themselves. Outlining the tradition and custom Mai stands for how the stereotype of womenhood is gradually changed through these three generation women.

Movimento e estagnação em Controle, de Natalia Borges Polesso

Resumo Este artigo tem o objetivo de analisar as relações entre movimento e estagnação nas construções dos espaços e da homossexualidade feminina no romance Controle, de Natalia Borges Polesso (2019a). Argumenta-se que a narrativa traça um paralelo entre a repressão da sexualidade não normativa da protagonista e sua condição médica marcada pela epilepsia e pela depressão, levando a personagem à reclusão na esfera doméstica. Embora esse paralelo possa incutir o risco de calcar a homossexualidade como patologia, a complexidade do enredo de Polesso mostra que a insegurança e o isolamento social da protagonista são superados pelo desejo homossexual, que é retratado como uma força que impulsiona o movimento da personagem. Por último, nota-se que o romance de Polesso retrabalha certos estereótipos presentes na literatura lésbica, como a exclusão social, o mito do amor trágico e o deslocamento como premissa para concretizar o encontro erótico, conforme apontam os estudos de Virgínia Maria Vasconcelos Leal.

Olive Kitteridge (Lisa Cholodenko, 2014), quality television and difficult women: female discontent in the age of binge-viewing

ABSTRACTLisa Cholodenko’s 2014 series Olive Kitteridge remains something of an outlier in the recent wave of female-led quality TV drama. Its outlier status is not only because of its unlikely protagonist – a difficult and at times unlikeable older woman, nor is it simply a result of the confined temporal throw of its four episode structure. One of the key things that sets Olive Kitteridge apart from both other female-led series with “difficult women” protagonists and from other recent quality TV dramas is that its narrative concern with disappointment and other forms of negative affect is tied to the ways the series occupies and articulates television (viewing) time. This essay argues that Olive Kitteridge constructs a sense of domestic confinement and dissatisfaction that spills from narrative into form and address. Olive Kitteridge does not simply offer a different form of difficult and disappointed woman in its central protagonist to that more commonly found in the recent wave of female-led quality television. It also unsettles the consumption of female disappointment in and as quality television drama.

URBAN MODERNITY AND THE POLITICS OF HEIMAT: GABRIELE TERGIT'S KÄSEBIER EROBERT DEN KURFÜRSTENDAMM

ABSTRACTThis essay explores an irony running through Gabriele Tergit's Berlin novel Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (1931): Heimat kitsch serves as a marketing brand for property speculation that is destroying Heimat in the sense of homes and familiar city localities. The novel conveys different ways of feeling at home in a great city, whether at work, or in cafés, parks, and streets full of personal memories and cultural associations. The politics of Heimat is a major theme as Jewish citizens increasingly face threats of exclusion from the German Heimat. Instead of domestic confinement as in traditional Heimat discourse, economic and educational emancipation gave women in the Weimar Republic access to civil society, but new tensions in the emotional economy of relations between the sexes and across generations bring new anxieties as well as new freedoms.

English

This paper discussed the Barotseland claim for statehood from the republic of Zambia with respect to the Barotseland Agreement (1964) signed between the Northern Rhodesian government and the Barotse Royal Establishment (BRE) in April 1964. In discussing the Barotseland question, using a qualitative approach, this paper considered the sentiments that fuel the reasons for seeking separate statehood by Barotseland pro-separatists. An analysis based on the criteria of 1933 Montevideo Convention on Statehood was made, and considerations were also made on the viability of these claims (for statehood) with respect to the possible ramifications of the grant of statehood. Self-determination of people is guaranteed and is a principle or right supported by the United Nations (UN) Charter within the rights of groups seeking self-determination. Ergo, statehood is a matter that requires the satisfaction of the criteria necessary for its pursuit. However, as this paper contended, the status of statehood is usually placed outside the domestic confines of where the claim is being made, and into the international realm. It is therefore imperative to consider these questions within the framework of Public International Law and Politics because ultimately, in a highly-globalized world, statehood or recognition of an entity as a state cannot be conferred without the involvement and resolutions of the international community through the auspices of the United Nations - in which case statehood is concretized as this gives a state legal personality. For comparative and illustrative purposes, the paper drew on some famous statehood questions from different parts of the world. This paper concludes that the Barotseland calls for statehood do not satisfy the 1933 Montevideo Convention and that the feasibility of a separate Barotseland is far from possible. Key words: Barotseland, independence, secession, self-determination, sovereignty, statehood, state recognition, Zambia.

Lilith on the Moors: The Brontë Sisters' Runaway Women

Lilith on the Moors:The Brontë Sisters' Runaway Women Nora Gilbert (bio) A husband sitting with a shell-shocked expression on his face, an open letter in his hand; two young girls kneeling together in innocent, just-interrupted play; a woman lying prostrate on the floor before them, her arms outstretched, her hands clasped tightly, her head buried in shame and misery. No visual representation of the "fallen woman" narrative is more vividly cautionary than the first panel of Augustus Egg's iconic triptych from 1858, Past and Present (fig. 1). It is this narrative that has monopolized Victorianist discussions of female transgression for the past few decades—discussions that, for all their variance, share the conviction that the Victorians' particular rendering of the fallen woman figure ("not the brazen courtesan of Restoration tradition, nor a casually promiscuous Molly Sea-grim, but a figure of remorse, yearning for forgiveness and compassion") can be read as "symptomatic of some shared, fundamental concern of the time, one of the structural underpinnings for that generation" (Roston 91).1 In the article that follows, I would like to contextualize the conservative, punitive fallen woman trope that has garnered so much critical attention for so long within a more complicated, potentially more liberatory framework, one that includes not only those female characters who rebel against social norms and are condemned to life (or death) in the gutter but also those female characters who rebel against social norms and are set free. I would like, that is, to explore the alternative category of what I will call the "runaway woman" narrative. The term runaway is employed quite often in nineteenth-century British literature, most commonly in reference to a child who has run away from home, an inmate who has run away from prison or an insane asylum, or a slave who has run away from captivity. While we can certainly point to female characters of this literature who are fugitives in each of these ways (young Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss [1860]; Anne Catherick in The Woman in White [1859–60]; the eponymous heroine of "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" [1848], etc.), we also, importantly, encounter a strikingly large number of adult, unincarcerated, unenslaved female characters who defiantly flee from some form of domestic confinement or enclosure. Though my list here is by no means exhaustive, some well-known examples of such runaway women in Victorian fiction include both Edith and Florence Dombey of Dombey and Son (1846–48), Becky Sharp of Vanity Fair (1847–48), [End Page 273] Esther of Mary Barton (1848), Little Em'ly of David Copperfield (1849–50), Lady Dedlock of Bleak House (1852–53), Louisa Gradgrind of Hard Times (1854), Isabel Carlyle of East Lynne (1860–61), Lucy Audley of Lady Audley's Secret (1861–62), Magdalen Vanstone of No Name (1862–63), Laura Standish of Phineas Finn (1867–68), Ruby Ruggles of The Way We Live Now (1874–75), Mirah Lapidoth of Daniel Deronda (1876), Eustacia Vye of The Return of the Native (1878), Lyndall of The Story of an African Farm (1883), Sue Bridehead of Jude the Obscure (1894–95), Herminia Barton of The Woman Who Did (1895), and Beth Caldwell of The Beth Book (1897). Some of these women break out of the confines of their respective homes in search of sex, some in search of employment, some to get to safety, some to wreak revenge. Equally varied, too, are the fates that befall them: while many do suffer in the social, emotional, and physical ways that are so often outlined in Victorianist criticism, many others are ready, willing, and able to move on with their lives. The fallen woman plot is, in other words, only one possible endpoint of the more capacious runaway woman plot. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Augustus Leopold Egg, Past and Present, No. 1 (1858). By permission of the Tate, London. I have chosen in this essay to focus on the novels of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë both because those novels give us some of the most culturally resonant examples of runaway women in Victorian fiction and because they seem to be...

Socialities of Indignation: Denouncing Party Politics in Karachi

In May 2007, in the aftermath of city-wide urban unrest mediated by live news television, Karachi residents clamored noisily, using rumors, blogs, and SMS texting to overtly denounce the violence and intimidation ploys of political parties. Their discourse took a particular form: it described the violent tactics of organized politics as repulsive, suggested the moral respectability of avoiding such party politics, and, most important, articulated the impetus to domestic confinement—being compelled to stay at home—as a shared experience. Rather than conflate the discursive content of non-participation with depoliticization, it is important to acknowledge the contingent sociality of recognizing and articulating domestic confinement as a shared experience through the indignant denunciation of political institutions. Such tactics invoke an emergent public that recuperates and politicizes the ordinary in an explicitly moral register.

"My name was Isabella Linton": Coverture, Domestic Violence, and Mrs. Heathcliff's Narrative in Wuthering Heights

While critics have scrutinized Emily Brontë's use of the framed narrative in Wuthering Heights (1847), raising questions about the reliability of the central narrators, Lockwood and Nelly Dean, scant attention has been paid to Isabella Heathcliff as the third narrator. Though readers have overlooked the importance of Isabella's narrative, Brontë highlights her narrative by including it as the only intact letter in the entire novel and devotes almost an entire chapter to her narrative. Isabella's narrative surfaces in a letter to Nelly Dean, offering a highly unorthodox portrait for the mid-Victorian period of the domestic abuse of a young bride from the gentry class. Isabella's letter, which comprises most of chapter 13, also becomes a critical tool to ferret out the reliability of Heathcliff's account in chapter 14 of their marriage. By analyzing the conflicting accounts of their marriage, this essay demonstrates that Heathcliff 's argument acts as a carefully crafted legal rationale, based upon the laws of coverture, to defend and sanction the domestic confinement of his wife. While the laws of coverture deprived women of a legal and economic voice, Brontë endows Isabella with a complex and at times ironic voice. Brontë paints a powerful portrait of the radical transformation of Isabella from the pampered and infantile Miss Linton to the hardened Mrs. Heathcliff, ending with her as the intrepid, fugitive wife, Isabella Heathcliff. Brontë demonstrates through Isabella's story that as long as the laws of coverture are intact, companionate marriage is at risk of being exploited and compromised.

Beyond Harem Walls: Redefining Women's Space in Works by Assia Djebar, Malek Alloula and Fatima Mernissi

AbstractOrientalist and colonial representations of harems have resulted in the association of North African women with domestic confinement. North African authors such as Assia Djebar (1980), Malek Alloula (1981) and Fatima Mernissi (1994), however, suggest that this view is biased. While focusing largely on Fatima Mernissi's memoir, Dreams of Trespass, this article builds on these authors' exploration of the various ways in which women of the Maghreb are portrayed, in order to provide a clearer understanding of the dynamics of women's space in the context of colonial North Africa.

Between Muslim Women and the Muslimwoman

Between Muslim Women and the Muslimwoman Margot Badran (bio) When she fuses the words Muslim and woman to create the Muslimwoman, miriam cooke abruptly brings to attention the practice of collapsing two components of identity—religion and gender— into a “singular identity.” The Muslim-woman is a composite identity constructed, not by Muslim women but by others, mainly neo-Orientalist Westerners and Islamists or proponents of political Islam. The Muslimwoman of their construction is veiled (typically wearing the hijab, a head cover, or infrequently, the niqab, which hides the face), compliant (with authorities in family and society), and protected (by men). If others created the Muslimwoman, it is Muslim women who must be The Muslimwoman. They must play the part. Herein lies the trouble— and the potential. Speaking of the Muslimwoman encapsulated in an image, cooke summons the word cage. Nineteenth-century Egyptian poet Aisha al-Taimuriyya used this very word in speaking of how Muslim women of the middle and upper strata of society were incarcerated in their houses. By the mid-twentieth century, women [End Page 101] throughout Muslim societies in Africa and Asia had freed themselves from imposed domestic confinement. Muslim women are now ubiquitous in the public arena, where they put their skills and knowledge in virtually all known fields to good use. Neither the physical cage nor the metaphoric cage has suited women. Muslim women, as cooke notes, are using, refusing, and refiguring the descriptive/prescriptive model of the Muslimwoman that has been handed them. Like many others, cooke looks to 9/11 as a pivotal—she calls it an “axial”—moment for the Muslimwoman. It was mainly and most dramatically so in the West. The post–9/11 world looked different beyond the West, where most Muslims continued as before, operating with and being recognized by their multiple identities or a flow between identities—the way most of us do anywhere as we get on with our lives. If largely unnoticed in the West, the Muslimwoman had a life prior to 9/11. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Islamists had launched their version of the Muslimwoman in Muslim Africa and Asia. By the 1990s, Muslim women were seriously challenging Islamists’ fabrication of the Muslimwoman. Now, ironically, the (neo-Orientalist) West is doing the work of the Islamists in relaunching the Muslimwoman at precisely the moment when the West is intent upon containing Islamists. Could such Western embrace of the Muslimwoman be the gendered equivalent of a penchant for backing repressive (patriarchal) regimes? Display of Muslim identity, in a born-again, politicized version, occurred in some places as early as the 1970s, such as Egypt, and more widely following the 1979 Islamist revolution in Iran. Emboldened by the Iranian success, Islamists in many Muslim countries pitted themselves against the “seculars,” whom they smeared, unleashing intra-Muslim strife. Islamists reconstituted a conservative model of the Muslim woman, now marked by the hijab (not the niqab, which prevailed among the middle and upper strata in Muslim countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries1), at a time when women throughout the Muslim world had gained many rights—or as they noted, had recovered many of their Islamicly granted rights—thereby seriously eroding the traditional patriarchal order and the version of Islam that held it up. Islamists sought to rally women around them and to make such women mark themselves publicly as political allies by hoisting the flag of hijab. Women who declined to take up the veil and who refused to bend to the patriarchal agenda (at a certain moment, Islamists were even calling for women to retreat to the home—an economic impossibility for the majority of women and their families) were upbraided and sometimes even branded non-Muslims. “Secular women” (those who did not publicly proclaim their Islamic affiliation) rejected the Islamist model of the Muslimwoman. By then, a second feminist wave was [End Page 102] ascendant in much of the Muslim world. Its proponents refused to respond to the Islamists but simply forged ahead with their own gender work. In the late 1980s and especially the 1990s, religiously committed Muslim women, often called “religious women” (those who publicly displayed their Islamic identity...

Matinee Mania, or the Regendering of Nineteenth-Century Audiences in New York City

Abstract New York by 1850 was the leading U.S. city in population, trade, industry, and culture. Its many public musical offerings took place in the evenings, requiring women to have escorts for safety and respectability, and limiting their attendance opportunities. Beginning in 1847 with the New York Philharmonic9s opening of daytime rehearsals to women, matinee performances gradually proliferated, extending women9s access to opera, concert, and musical theater and transforming audiences from male to mainly female by century9s end. The process increased women9s access to public spaces for music, changed theaters from male clubs to women-friendly venues, and furthered the education of women as amateur musicians and of those newly empowered to become professionals. Freedom to attend musical events became part of the growing consumer culture, which also brought women out of the home. These profound changes took place in the context of the first American women9s movement, 1848––1920. While of far less significance than the vote or control of their own resources, matinees brought women out of domestic confinement to freer access to the public life of the city. That in turn encouraged women to imagine, and some to achieve, public lives.

Mare and Foal Bonding and Problems

A number of specific behavioral responses have been identified in mares and foals as the presumed behavioral interactive sequences supporting bonding. With the exception of the severely physically compromised foal, most failures of the mare foal bond appear to result from inadequate behavior of the mare. Six distinct forms of maternal behavior problems include ambivalence of the mare toward her foal, fear of the foal, nursing only avoidance of the foal, extreme protectiveness of the foal that becomes problematic in domestic confinement, savage attack (true rejection), and stealing or adoption of an alien foal. Management of maternal behavior problem cases in which the pair cannot be salvaged include foster (or nurse mares) and hand-rearing methods. Also presented are current practical resources related to managing certain types of inadequate maternal behavior and for rearing the orphaned foal.

Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada's Second World War (review)

Reviewed by: Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada's Second World War Michael D. Stevenson Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada's Second World War. Jeffrey A. Keshen. Vancouver: UBC Press2004. Pp. x, 389, illus. $45.00 In Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers, Jeff Keshen provides a groundbreaking examination of the impact of the Second World War on Canadian society by challenging the prevailing popular conception that the events of 1939-1945 constituted Canada's "good war." While Keshen carefully documents Canada's remarkable economic and military contributions to the Allied cause, he convincingly demonstrates that the traditional picture of the Canadian war effort has been 'sanitized and simplified" to largely ignore the war's serious negative social ramifications. Keshen divides his book into two parts. In the first, he emphasizes Canada's "patriotic" response to the war, a response that justifiably forms the basis of the "good war" viewpoint. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who volunteered for active military duty, the grassroots response of Canadians to the war was impressive. Spurred by government propaganda campaigns, Canadians donated $90 million to the Red Cross, purchased $12.5 billion worth of Victory Bonds, and salvaged more than 350,000 tons of recyclable materials. Canadian workers also participated fully in the burgeoning wartime economy largely supervised by federal agencies such as the Department of Munitions and Supply. Although this unprecedented economic growth exacerbated existing rural-urban and inter-provincial disparities, Keshen demonstrates that the Canadian government nonetheless presided over an administrative apparatus that regimented the activities of Canadian workers, controlled prices and wages, and laid the foundation of the postwar welfare state. [End Page 365] Keshen then devotes the majority of his text to the "problematic" aspects of the war effort by examining the negative impact of the war on many sectors of the Canadian population. In the economic field, Keshen focuses on the urban housing crisis and the thriving black market to demonstrate the financial hardships the war spawned. Government attempts to build an adequate supply of dwellings through Wartime Housing Incorporated proved to be woefully inadequate, and unscrupulous landlords took full advantage of the excess demand for lodging by gouging tenants, despite the imposition of rent controls. Stringent restrictions on the production of non-essential goods and the rationing of civilian supplies also created a thriving black market in gasoline, clothing, and food, despite the efforts of the Wartime Prices and Trade Board to prevent profiteering. Keshen also documents the negative impact of the war on Canadian morals. Wartime privations encouraged the use of alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs, and Canada's social fabric was stretched further by a significant increase in rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and venereal disease. Public concerns about the moral impact of the war manifested themselves in increased - and often unjustified - attention being paid to the activities of Canada's youth. Keshen provides a comprehensive overview of the resettling of thousands of British children in Canada, the rise in juvenile delinquency rates, and the implementation of progressive initiatives such as organized recreational facilities and reforms to the juvenile justice system. On no segment of society did the war have as great an impact as it did on Canada's women. Keshen devotes much attention to the "chaotic and at times contradictory" results of the full-fledged participation of Canadian women in the civilian and military arenas. Between 1939 and 1944, the number of working women increased by more than 50 per cent, with the number of women employed in the non-textile manufacturing sector alone increasing from 6,000 to more than 261,000. This influx of women into the labour market, however, upset many traditionalists who sought to maintain women within their traditional domestic confines. Many working women also struggled to obtain adequate child care and resisted government and business initiatives to undercut their new-found economic freedom by forcing them to relinquish their jobs to returning male veterans. The influx of nearly 45,000 women into the three military service branches posed an even greater challenge to the traditional, gendered order of Canadian society. Servicewomen were indeed subjected to more stringent moral constraints than their male counterparts and many active duty...

Performance, anxiety

Performance, anxiety

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women, Great Men and Others

mother?. --Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering In the beginning Margaret Cameron's place in the history of photography was secured by her portraits of great men. Her portraits of poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Taylor lifted her out of the domestic confines of chicken-coop studios and amateur theatricals. Her portraits of artists George Frederick Watts and William Holman Hunt allowed her penchant for soft focus, ethereal lighting and smudgy printing to be read as aesthetic gravitas rather than amateurish error. Her portraits of scientists John Herschel and Charles Darwin tempered her general reputation for kookiness and immoderate devotion to Art. Even though her great niece Virginia Woolf published a more varied selection of Cameron's images entitled Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women in 1926, it has long seemed abundantly clear that the fair were something else--stagey, as old-fashioned as a frilly Valentine, beautiful, yes, but also more than a little embarrassing. Times have certainly changed, as have Cameron's critical fortunes. From a Victorian footnote to the history of modernism, she has become the Mother of all art photography. Her moody Madonnas, medieval damsels in distress, fleshy babies and sulky cupids are seen as the objects of another form of subjectivity, the maternality of her vision, its insistent overlaying of embracing sight and tender touch, the rebuttal to a purely optical, phallocentric gaze. The revisionist wave began with Mike Weaver, whose 1984 monograph entitled Margaret Cameron, 1815-1879 was followed by Whisper of the Muse: The Overstone Album and Other Photographs by Margaret Cameron in 1986. Weaver's sensitive reading of the strong strain of Christian piety and analogical thinking that informed Cameron's practice was accompanied by a sharp attack on those who persisted in seeing Cameron's work through the lens of her legendary eccentricity. deserve our indignation, he fumed. It is a cheap calu mny against a completely centered woman. [1] From there it seemed only a short leap to the argument that such a centered woman could produce nothing less than woman-centered art. Carol Mayor ecstatically rewrote Cameron's Madonnas as figures of female difference, proclaiming I love Cameron's fallen Madonnas. They are altered images of Mother, scratched with sexuality and printed with flesh. [2] Carol Armstrong weighed in with a more measured and nuanced but no less impassioned reading of Cameron's maternalization of photography and its processes, photography, as Armstrong would have it, under the sway of the Mother, rather than the law of the Father. [3] In 1998 Sylvia Wolf curated Margaret Cameron's Women, focusing with near exclusivity on the Victorian maidens that visited or worked for Aunt Julia at Freshwater, her estate on the Isle of Wight, and were drafted into service to play Mary Juliet or Ophelia before her camera. [4] (True, the magnificently bearded Taylor appears in a few images, but we are encouraged to see him as just another prop.) In his exhibition review Andy Grundberg declared Cameron's so arresting as to make her cast of heroic Victorian males ...seem irrelevant. [5] Armstrong, in turn, dryly lauded the photographic gynarchy produced by the feminine idiosyncrasy of Cameron's work and working methods, seeing the exhibition, to some degree, as a confirmation of her own take on Cameron. [6] Of course, not everyone is happy about these current developments. Janet Malcolm was typically judicious, suggesting that while the performative aspects of Cameron's fancy subject pictures inspired by literary themes and allegorical subjects might be more appealing to postmodernist than modernist sensibilities, something was potentially lost in the feminist narrowing of curatorial attention to the women and the (by implication, equally feminist) censorship of the comical from the repertory of Cameron anecdotes. …

Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric

fellow rhetorician recently gave me a nineteenth-century print entitled and Aspasia. In beautiful detail, French artist J. L. Gerome (best-known for transfusing his journeys to the East with an exotic and erotic charm) presents Aspasia reclining seductively on Alcibiades, her hand cupping his breast, her head suspiciously near his stomach and wide-spread legs, while Alcibiades looks away from her and reaches out to grasp Socrates' hand. Thus Aspasia comes down to us as an odalisque, while Alcibiades, the object of her attention, comes to us wreathed in laurel.' For the past 2500 years in Western culture, the ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life (domestic confinement).2 Little wonder, then, that women have been closed out of the rhetorical tradition, a tradition of vocal, virile, public-and therefore privileged-men. Women's enclosed bodies provide lacunae in the patriarchal territory of rhetorical practices and displays, a gendered landscape, with no female rhetoricians clearly in sight. But just as recent feminist scholarship has begun to recover and recuperate women's contributions in the broad history of culturemaking-in philosophy, literature, language, writing, societal structure, Christianity, history, education, reading, psychology, and gender-so too have feminist historians of rhetoric begun to re-map rhetorical history.' In her Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric, Patricia Bizzell accounts for various disruptions that could realign and regender the rhetorical terrain and anticipates the consequences of refiguring the role of women on that terrain.4 And in Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric, Barbara

The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China

Vol. 10, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1989 THE EPISTOLARY WORLD OF FEMALE TALENT IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CHINA Ellen Widmer1 When we attempt to reconstruct the social context within which women wrote poetry or painted in late imperial China, it is convenient to reach for the eighteenth-century novel, Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber, or Story of the Stone), which describes a family poetry society, the so-called Crab-Flower Club (Haitang shishe). Because most of the members of this club were women, their activities provide a useful model of the circumstances under which one important category of women's poetry emerged. Dream of the Red Chamber presents a group of well educated , upper class women, most of whom belonged to a single extended family. Club meetings were festive domestic events, which took place primarily during the heyday of the Jia family in its garden, the Daguan yuan. A contrasting model of literary and artistic composition by women can be derived from the life and work of Yuan Mei (1716-98). Like their fictional counterparts in Dream of the Red Chamber, the women of Yuan's circle came mostly from gentry families and had good educations. They were less likely to be related, they did not live together, and certain of their activities took place at the home of their patron and teacher, Yuan Mei. In both cases, women produced poetry for a circle of personal acquaintances and did not reach out to a wider reading public.2 The poetry circle of the novel conformed to proper Confucian standards for gentle female conduct, since it operated within domestic confines. By contrast, Yuan's circle seemed more scandalous, inasmuch as its female members met outside the home and mingled socially with male talents. Another view of the circumstances under which women might read, write or paint is made available by the writings of a group of creative 1 I am indebted to the following individuals for suggestions on this essay: Patrick Hanan, Irving Lo, Susan Naquin, Marsha Weidner, and Judith Zeitlin. Kou Dezhang and Ou Jiefang Lee helped with translation. The original version of this essay was presented at the symposium , "Views from the Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists 1300-1912" held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, October 1988. 2 On Yuan Mei, see Waley 1957, also Hummel 1967:955-957. Late Imperial China 10, No. 2 (December 1989): 1-43 T by the Society for Qing Studies Ellen Widmer Portrait of Shang Jinglan, by Ren Xiong (1820-57), from Wang Ling, ed., Yu Yue xianxian xiang zhuan zan (Commemorative Portraits and Biographies of Former Worthies of the Yue [Zhejiang] Region), 1856. Reproduced courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library. For more on Ren, see Howard Rogers and Sherman E. Lee, Masterworks of Ming and Qing Painting from the Forbidden City. Lansdale, Pennsylvania: International Arts Council, 1988, pp. 203-4. The Epistolary World ofFemale Talent in Seventeenth-Century China3 gentry women who lived in Jiangnan a century before Yuan Mei's time, during the Ming-Qing transition. These women formed a loose literary network, exchanged correspondence and encouraged one another's endeavors. They had male friends and patrons who regarded them with a mixture of admiration, paternalism and unease. Their relationships show the importance of solidarity among women themselves, rather than associations centered on men, in developing female talent. As teachers and disciples , as audience and critics for each other's work, these women reached out to each other across geographical and social barriers, linking domestic circles with literati salons, and the world of secluded wives with those of courtesans, merchants and professional artists. Modern Letters To understand the landscape of female talent among this network of seventeenth-century women, we must first pay attention to the three anthologies of literati letters known as Modern Letters. These letters are the major source through which the voices of the women studied here are heard. As a series of volumes selected and published by men who knew many of them, Modern Letters is a text which reveals both female artistic culture and male responses to it. This series was published in three installments (1663, 1667, and 1668) under the general editorship...