Female Embodiment Research Articles

Graphic Bodies: Picturing Feminised Pathology, Narrating Resistance

This article studies three graphic memoirs by women, Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen, Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles and Leah Hayes’ Not Funny Ha-Ha, to explore the use of the graphic form in the narrating of an experience of illness. I argue here that these writers engage the graphic form to visualise female embodiment as always already pathologised, even prior to the onset of illness. By making explicit the medical and socio-cultural scrutiny of female bodily practices, these texts interrogate the unequal structural relationship between the sign of gender female and the healthy/sick binary set up by mainstream illness narratives. This article also proposes that these graphic memoirs of illness by women perform a resistant femininity in narrative by refusing a linear progression from diagnosis to cure. The texts instead make visible their myriad sources, in the form of incoherent speech, unedited data, photographs and letters among others, thus refusing unity and coherence in the narrating self.

Flesh-images, body shame and affective ambiguities in celebrity gossip magazines

ABSTRACTIn the last decade celebrity gossip magazines targeted at a female audience have emerged in Sweden. With inquisitive attention paid to the detailed, fleshy exposure of female celebrities’ bodies and body parts, they portray what Weber refers to as body-based shame. This article argues that these flesh-images partake in an aesthetic feminine body discourse where the perfect and the imperfect are intrinsically linked with the ordinary and extraordinary paradox surrounding the celebrity persona. Flesh-images rely on their intertextuality. They indicate a loss of value, presenting female celebrities as ordinary by means of corporeal failure. While the exposure of body faults could point to the unattainable ideals of feminine bodily standards, they do so at the cost of reinforcing the implicit recognition of desire, shame and disgust familiar to female experience and looking relations. Hence, within a culture increasingly driven by a technology of extreme extroversion, flesh-images aimed at a female audience make sense through the logic of the revelation discourse that frames celebrity culture, and through the deeply ambivalent affects surrounding female embodiment.

"Cripping the Mermaid: A Borderlands Approach to Feminist Disability Studies in Valerie Martin's 'Sea Lovers'"

"Cripping the Mermaid:A Borderlands Approach to Feminist Disability Studies in Valerie Martin's 'Sea Lovers'" Skye Anicca (bio) The borderland is at the heart of mermaid mythology; the various gulfs generated between sea and land shape character arcs, drive conflict, and engender complicated resolutions. In the most widespread mermaid narratives, an aesthetically pleasing sea woman attempts to exchange her fins for legs in order to find love (wholeness) on land. Her admission into terrestrial life bears a heavy price. In most versions, she must sacrifice some essential part of herself, usually her voice. In the early Danish tale, her changed form "will mean continuous agony" as each step "will feel as if she is treading on a blade sharp enough to make her bleed" (Kingshill 16). The crossing, too, presents obstacles: that in her quest for her beloved, the mermaid's beauty will not overcome her inability to speak; that her secret body might be revealed; and that she herself will be sensationalized in the public gaze. Other elements facilitate her cross-border movement—her exceptional mobility in water saves the prince who will become her beloved, and her female embodiment facilitates her easy acceptance by society, a nameless body emerging from the sea. Her hyper-femininity and relative dis/ability, therefore, both enable and complicate her experience of crossing. The narrative conflict is thus rooted in representations of bodies coded by borders and entrenched in hierarchies of privilege tied to gender and ability. In this regard, the mermaid figure, whose reach extends well beyond [End Page 379] her Little Mermaid fame, is a particularly intriguing site of analysis to deepen the understanding of feminist disability studies. Furthermore, the mermaid's inextricable link to a number of borderlands—environmental, generic, disciplinary—points to a more expansive role for border studies in framing feminist disability analyses. The blurring of disciplinary borders is fundamental to feminist disability studies. Rosemarie Garland Thomson describes this field as one that "integrates" disability into feminist theory in order to "augment the terms and confront the ways we understand human diversity, the materiality of the body, multiculturalism, and the social formations that interpret bodily differences" ("Integrating" 3). This broad objective calls for new ways of reading and viewing in order to "crip" the spaces of feminist inquiry, thereby "transforming," according to Robert McRuer, "a system of compulsory able-bodiedness" in pursuit of "imagining bodies and desires otherwise" (32). Neither strictly dealing with embodied experiences of sex-gender or impairment-disability, nor entirely absorbed or abstracted into gender or disability theories, feminist disability studies consequently declares itself a theoretical-material borderland. As Todd Ramlow notes in "Bodies in the Borderlands," "forging alliances across seemingly monolithic and mutually exclusionary fields/markers of difference [is] made possible by the direct experience and broader implications of life in/as the borderlands" (175). Since feminist disability scholarship is fundamentally rooted in the borderlands, it follows that activating a more comprehensive, deliberate relationship with border theory can enhance the field through a combined attention to liminality, hybridity, narrative, and identity.1 Drawing deeply from her experience growing up on the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border, Chicana scholar-activist Gloria Anzaldúa describes the borderlands as [T]he lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the [End Page 380] squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the "normal." (25) In the preface to the first edition of Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa notes that while her work concerns the U.S. Southwest, the concept of borderlands applies widely and transcends the strictly literal. Therefore, Anzaldúa spatially locates the borderlands, while concurrently transcending geography...

‘You have all those emotions inside that you cannot show because of what they will cause’: Disclosing the absence of one's uterus and vagina

This article examines young women's experiences of telling others that they have no uterus and no, or a so-called small, vagina – a condition labelled ‘congenital absence of uterus and vagina’, which falls within the larger category of ‘atypical’ sex development. Our aim is to investigate how affective dissonances such as fear and frustration are expressed in young women's narratives about letting others know about their ‘atypical’ sex development, and how these women narrate desired steps to recognition. By drawing on feminist writings on the performativity of affects or emotions, we examine what affective dissonances accomplish within three identified narratives: how affective dissonances may contribute to the women's positioning of themselves vis-à-vis other individuals and how affective dissonances can imply a strengthening and/or questioning of norms about female embodiment and heterosexuality. This allows us to tease out how routes for questioning of these norms become available through the three narratives that together form a storyline of coming out about a congenital absence of a uterus and vagina in the Swedish context. Furthermore, by demonstrating how others' responses shape the women – their understandings of their own bodies, their envisaged future disclosures and their relations – our analysis highlights the multifaceted intersubjective and in other ways relational, affective and temporal dimensions of coming out about one's 'atypical' sex development.

Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

Bleeding through, drawing out: The circumscribing of Jewish women’s bodies in Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn

Abstract Leela Corman’s 2012 graphic novel Unterzakhn is a historical work that depicts the difficult lives of the Feinberg family, Jewish immigrants living in the tenements of New York at the turn on the twentieth century. Focusing on the lives of the Feinberg women, Corman positions their particular bodily vulnerabilities as central for understanding Jewish female embodiment more generally, especially in the context of immigration and integration. In this article, I examine two different but interrelated ways that Corman utilizes the comics form to explore vulnerability in terms of bodily identity formation: in her various methods of ‘visualizing silence’, she shows how bodily and familial trauma become imprinted and muted in the body; and through her careful deployment of drawing Jewish stereotypes, she illustrates the effects of the ‘marked’ body within the majority culture. In Unterzakhn, these artistic strategies display the highly complex internal and external dynamics of bodily life.

Parrhesia, Phaedra, and The Polis: Anticipating Psychoanalytic Free Association as Democratic Practice

This essay explores the mostly unexamined analogy of psychoanalytic free association to democratic free speech. The author turns back to a time when free speech was a matter of considerable discussion: the classical period of the Athenian constitution and its experiment with parrhesia. Ordinarily translated into English as “free speech,” parrhesia is startlingly relevant to psychoanalysis. The Athenian stage—in particular, Hippolytus (Euripides, 5th century BCE)—illustrates this point. Euripides’s tragic tale anticipates Freud’s inquiries, exploring the fundamental link between free speech and female embodiment. The author suggests that psychoanalysis should claim its own conception of a polis as a mediated and ethical space between private and public spheres, between body and mind, and between speaking and listening communities.

The Infertile Womb of God: Ableism in Feminist Doctrine of God

The Infertile Womb of God: Ableism in Feminist Doctrine of God Lisa D. Powell Since its burgeoning in the 1970s and 80s, Christian feminist theology has deployed a variety of metaphors and symbols to wrest conceptions of God from the oppressive structures and formulations dominating Christian thinking and worship. A significant focus of much of this early work was on the exclusive use of masculine imagery and language for God. Feminist theologians sought fresh symbols inclusive of women's experience. Quickly the work expanded not only to question patriarchy in theology and Christian worship, but also to expose currents of white supremacy in theology and theological institutions. In recent decades, responding to queer theory, post‐colonial theory, and ecology, feminist theology discovers still more symbols to express the relationship between God, humanity, and the cosmos in ways that do not perpetuate kyriarchy but undermine those systems of power and oppression. One such challenge to rethink Christian systems comes from disability theory, which exposes the ableist assumptions in theology that consecrate a norm constructed against differently abled persons; Christian disability theology envisions new symbols for God that rebuff conceptions of power modeled after a militarized ableist culture and fosters an understanding of power appropriate to a religion in which God is disfigured on the cross, in which God is even disabled. Disability theorists also probe feminist thought to expose the ableism in its celebration of independence and the idealization of a certain form of female embodiment, which reinforces the idea of a “normal” female body. Even as feminism challenges society's objectification of women and its standards of beauty, disabled women find they do not embody the feminist ideal. Susan Wendell critiques the exaltation in feminism of a woman's control of her body. She quotes Adrienne Rich, who writes in Of Women Born: “In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal ground of our intelligence.” Rich emphasizes our control of our bodies and asserts a universal unity among women based in a shared physiology. Rich's volume, and many texts influenced by it, contains this glorification of woman's ability to control her body, particularly when speaking about conception and birth, maintaining that women are universally connected in their corporeal fertility. Wendell writes “Until feminists criticize our own body ideals and confront the weak, suffering, and uncontrollable body in our theorizing and practice, women with disabilities and illness are likely to feel that we are embarrassments to feminism.” Rosmarie Garland‐Thompson makes a similar charge, instead noting the idealization of self‐sufficiency: “One of the most pervasive feminist assumptions that undermines some disabled women's struggle is the liberal ideology of autonomy and independence that fuels the broader impulse toward female empowerment.” Doreen Freeman brings these critiques to thealogy and feminist theology, arguing that disabled women “embody all that the blossoming feminist does not want to be,” as they often “reinforce the stereotypes as ‘passive, dependent, needy’ recipients of care.” She asks if thealogians can celebrate the body as an image of the divine if it is a “deformed, leaky, sometimes smelly, constantly fatigued, psychotic, [and/or] dysfunctional body.” She charges that in its emphasis on “wholeness of mind, body and spirit,” feminist theology centers on “goals of competence, wisdom and well being, [and] the flourishing of the woman's physical cycle,” which then marginalizes disabled women. In the process, the disabled woman is “negated, isolated and alienated.” Disability theory has yet to lay bare the implicit ableism in some accounts of the doctrine of God in feminist theology, namely the image of God as mother in the face of infertility. This essay exposes how Christian feminist theology glorified female fertility, grounding reconstruction of the doctrine of God in this notion of a shared physiological capacity for childbearing, thus negating the infertile woman, rendering her an invisible outsider. However, recent feminist theology exhibits a shift in the way Christian theologians depict God as mother. This essay traces this change in the use of mother imagery in the doctrine of...

Hurt So Bad: The Crisis of Female Embodiment in William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes

The Crisis of Female Embodiment in William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes W illiam Faulkner’s second novel Mosquitoes (1927) has long oc­ cupied a vexed position within critical accounts of his career.1 Set in and around New Orleans, where Faulkner lived and wrote for about six months in 1925, the novel takes a cross section of French Quarter artists, writers, and their hangers-on and strands them on four-day yachting party with little more than their own conversation to keep them occupied. Ihe heady atmosphere that results has proven too reified or just too dull for most readers. Dismissed as “a bad early novel” by Malcolm Cowley in his seminal The Portable Faulkner (ix), Mosquitoes has since main­ tained what is arguably the worst reputation of any Faulkner text. Indeed, as demonstrated in the title of Meryl Altmans essay, “Ihe Bug That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Sex, Art, Faulkners Worst Novel, and the Critics,” the books badness has become part of its identity, and it is now customary to acknowl­ edge this reputation in advance of making any arguments for why Mosquitoes is worthy of further scrutiny. Such arguments have never been abundant by Faulknerian standards, but much like its titular insects, the novel has proven either too provocative or too irritating to ignore. Ilse Dusoir Lind registered its unsettling effect in the early eighties when she observed that ‘Mosquitoes remains unknown in most respects, its coherence as a novel still not having been conceded, its place in Faulkner’s development still not having been determined” (l).* 2 That critics have found it both difficult and necessary to “place” Mosquitoes owes some­ thing to its status as the novel Faulkner wrote and published directly before Flags in the Dust (completed in 1927, published in abridged form as Sartoris ‘This essay has benefitted greatly from the keen insights and support of several readers, writing part­ ners, and friends. I am especially grateful to Chip Arnold, Kelvin Black, Rachel Cole, Karen Gross, Keigo Kiyohara, Michael Mirabile, Michael Zeitlin, and Rishona Zimring. I would also like to thank Carolyn Porter for helping me get started with this project years ago and the committee for the Graves Award in the Hu­ manities for helping me bring it to completion. “Critical interest in Mosquitoes increased in the years following Lind’s essay, reaching its height in the 1990s. Building upon earlier work, this compact but serious body ofcriticism has done much to establish the novel’s richness, ifnot its coherence, particularly where it touches upon the intersections of aesthetics, gen­ der, and sexuality (see especially Frann Michel, Karen Ramsay Johnson, Judith Bryant Wittenberg, Altman, Lisa Rado, Susan V. Donaldson, Candace Waid, and Minrose C. Gwin), as well as race and neocolonialism (John N. Duvall and John T. Matthews). 27 28 Kristin Fujie The Crisis ofFemale Embodiment in Mosquitoes in 1929) and The Sound and the Fury (1929), the two works most frequently cited as crucial turning points in the authors development and gateways to his major work. Considered within this context, Faulkners bad novel demands at­ tention simply by virtue of its status as the “last novel before the beginning of the Yoknapatawpha phase” (Carothers 66), and yet this proximity to greatness is precisely what has puzzled its critics. For what it has tended to throw into relief is the profound discontinuity between Mosquitoes and what immediately follows, not just in terms of quality, but also with respect to story, character, voice, technique, and setting—a radical difference at the level of substance and style that has led to the novel’s reputation not only as the “worst,” but also the “most ‘un-Faulknerian’ of his full-length works” (Arnold, Annotations). In this essay, I will argue that Mosquitoes is more Faulknerian than we have supposed, and that recognizing its place in the author’s development requires that we rethink how we read not only the novel, but also the pivotal “moment” of Faulkner’s career, when, as Andre Bleikasten famously put it, Faulkner be­ came “Faulkner” (3). Studies of the oeuvre have tended to place Mosquitoes by displacing it, whether by locating the text on the near side ofa “jump” or “leap...

Audre Lorde’s Zami , Erotic Embodied Memory, and the Affirmation of Difference

Audre Lorde’s Zami, Erotic Embodied Memory, and the Affirmation of Difference Anh Hua (bio) introduction In this article I provide a close analysis of Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, examining how Lorde writes individual and collective memories, erotic and traumatic memories, and homeland memories as they relate to self-invention and self-narration.1 Using the theories of the philosopher Edward Casey, I propose that Lorde depicts two forms of embodied memory in this text: erotic embodied memory and traumatic embodied memory. While Lorde does share a few incidents of traumatic memories to break the silence—the painful memories of her family experiencing everyday and systemic racism in her childhood, the loss and death of her friend Genevieve, along with experiences of sexual assault during her girlhood—Lorde is more interested in elaborating on the empowerment of erotic memories for herself and for other women. Erotic embodied memories are found in narratives and rituals of food preparation, in Lorde’s recall of intimate relationships with her multiple female lovers, as well as in her sensual mythical invention of homeland Africa as symbolized by Afrekete. I note that by discovering her sexual awakening and same-sex desire through narrative or storytelling, Lorde is able to arrive at self-authorization and self-affirmation, writing her subjectivity and personal history through the embodied erotic. Lorde’s life narrative shows us that the erotic can be deeply connected to a woman’s writing, creativity, spirituality, and potentiality. In emphasizing the memories of the embodied erotic through life narration, Lorde reminds us of the importance of reclaiming and practicing what I call “the ethics of pleasurable feminism,” that is, the reclamation of female embodiment, female pleasure, and female sensuality as an activist sacred site to counter the patriarchal, racialized, and heteronormative oppressions that so many women experience in our daily lives. Throughout the memoir memory narratives serve as a way to deal with the [End Page 113] tension between Lorde’s wish to cherish the Afro-Caribbean creolized legacy and cultural memories she inherits from her mother and foremothers, and her need to break away from cultural and social traditions and expectations in order to write her own subjectivity and history toward a narrative space of freedom and self-autonomy. Lorde’s text, in working through this tension, is a manifestation of both individual and collective or cultural memories and of self-invention. Writing from a wounded individual and collective history, the black feminist writer Audre Lorde (1934–1992), who died in 1992 after a fourteen-year struggle with breast cancer, recognizes experiential knowledge as a result of what Zora Neale Hurston calls the “infinity of conscious pain.”2 Part autobiography, poetry, narrative, myth, and revisionist history, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name chronicles much of Lorde’s life, from her childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the 1950s as a black diasporic lesbian poet and writer in the United States. Zami is not simply an autobiography but a biomythography, in which myth and fiction function to frame past, present, and future selves. Here I am interested in analyzing how Lorde conceptualizes narratives of memories, whether homeland memories, childhood memories, erotic memories of her female intimate relations, traumatic memories of sexual assault, or mythical memories of spiritual song and symbolic Africa. I argue that the resistant narratives of remembrance, specifically the embodied erotic memories, become an important place for Lorde to narrate self-invention and subjectivity and to rewrite personal and cultural histories. While previous scholarship on Audre Lorde’s writing in general and Zami in particular has focused on issues of identities, queer sexuality, and the importance of communities and difference, my article adds to this body of knowledge by focusing on the relevance of memories, both erotic and traumatic, in Lorde’s creative and activist writing. erotic embodied memories The memoir is structured in three sections. The first deals with Lorde’s ancestry and childhood memories, the second focuses on her school years and her increasing separation from her mother and her family, and the third recalls the lesbian love relationships she has had with various women in her life. In...

“’Little Girls are Even More Perfect When They Bleed”’: Monstrosity, Violence, and the Female Body in Kristin Cashore’s Graceling Trilogy”

This article examines concepts of humanity, monstrosity, and female agency in Kristin Cashore’s recent Graceling trilogy of fantasy novels for young adults. In particular, the teenage protagonists of Graceling (2008), Fire (2009) and Bitterblue (2012) struggle to resist and to reconfigure their societies’ conservative systems of prejudice, fear, desire, difference, and violence regarding “natural” and “unnatural” female bodily experience. Cashore’s trilogy interrogates traditional concepts of normal and aberrant female embodiment and offers thought-provoking opportunities for personal and collective transformation.

Idols of Development

Abstract Inter-Asian cultural flows are transforming everyday Thai gender practices and performances in unexpected ways. The most striking example is the way in which Korean popular music, or K-pop, is molding contemporary beauty and dance aesthetics through cover dance, the copying of choreographed movements from music videos. K-pop cover dance has become a definitive social activity among Asian sissies (young feminine gay men) and is organized into an extensive contest circuit leading to an annual competition in Korea. Thai sissies are among the most enthusiastic and skillful practitioners of K-pop cover dance, and some practitioners, such as the members of the group Wonder Gay, have become national celebrities. I describe how cover dance demarcates a new social arena for feminine Thai males to express themselves through the idiom of modern Korean female embodiment. Semiprofessional cover dancers constitute a class of “hyper-fans” who become “demi-idols,” with fan followings in their own right. I argue that Thai K-pop cover dance can be read as both an aspiration for personal and national development that indexes participation in a new cosmopolitan Asian sphere. The cover dance phenomenon in Thailand highlights recent shifts in Asian regionalism, idol fandom, and transgressive gender performance.

‘The Republic is lived with an uncovered face’ (and a skirt): (un)dressing French citizens

The title of this article refers to the campaign carried out by the French government, in April and May 2011, to publicize and promote the law banning the full veil from public spaces, ‘la République se vit à visage découvert.’ The article examines ways in which political discourses, during the 2009–2012 period over which this law was first discussed, and then applied, used specific norms of female dress in order to establish a certain understanding of citizenship. Drawing on Rancière's notion of the ‘police’ and Dikeç's theorization of ‘aesthetic regimes,’ the article discusses the entanglements of female dress with French republicanism. These are illustrated through controversial representations of ‘Marianne,’ the female embodiment of the Republic, which raise the issue of color, in a country where race remains taboo. Turning more specifically to the report produced by a Parliamentary committee prior to the discussion of the burqa ban, the article discusses the paradoxical promotion of skirts as the epitome of French femininity, and shows how the discussion of women's right to wear skirts challenged ideas about the location of sexism, and the subject of politics, in French society.

Girls in Combat: Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia and the Image of Young Soviet Wartime Heroines

This article explores the literary stylization of adolescent girls as wartime heroes and martyrs. The most famous Soviet adolescent girl heroes of World War II were Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia, Liza Chaikina, or Zinaida Portnova, but Zoia's short life more than any was transformed into an inspirational story for young Soviet readers. She was presented as the perfect female embodiment of the Stalinist values of innocence, youth, altruism, impatience, intellectual curiosity, modesty, and above of all, strong willpower. I demonstrate how the stories about Zoia and other girl fighters became iconic in Soviet culture, and how the following generations of Soviet girls were expected to emulate them. Zoia's story conceptualized life experiences of girls who were both exceptional and ordinary and projected a vivid picture of the Soviet understanding of emancipation, gender equality and progress.

Voicing Women, “Community” Drama, and The Late Lancashire Witches

ABSTRACT On August 17, 2012, as part of the Capturing Witches: Histories, Stories, Images 400 Years After the Lancashire Witches conference held at Lancaster University, a semi-staged reading of Heywood and Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches was performed at Lancaster Castle; the first time a witch trial had been enacted at the castle since 1634, when the witches who are dramatized in the play were tried. When a Lancaster judge disagreed with the verdict against the women in 1634 they were sent to London for retrial by the Privy Council, articulating the tension between London and Lancaster, urban and rural societies, and local and centralized justice, with which the play is concerned. This article considers the dimensions of the play that were revealed through directing this practice-based research project. It focuses on female speech-acts and embodiment in the witch drama, the depiction of official and unofficial justice in the play, as well as its representation of community. It also reflects on some of the difficulties that arise from conducting research-through-practice in historic sites, as well as the benefits: for instance, how the spaces in the castle—a working court since the seventeenth century—interacted with the play and furthered an understanding of its preoccupations. It concludes with an analysis of the impact of economic changes on social constructions of neighborliness during the period, suggesting that traditional notions of hospitality and festivity were waning during the early seventeenth century, and that the activities of the witches in the play partly hark back to a time of integrated communality before the intervention of a new fiscal era.

Ghost girls and sponsorbabes: dystopian performances of white femininity in Lauren Beukes's Moxyland

The overdetermined visibility of white South African women's bodies and their positioning, historically, as the object of visual pleasure and a “sexy” reinforcer of white privilege suggests that looking relations are powerfully linked with how post-apartheid whiteness is gendered. Given the visibility particular to South African whiteness, I argue that the young white female subject's body becomes a site that mediates hegemonic whiteness and interrogates white privilege through her now-precarious role as a “star” for the gaze of the dominant culture. One text that problematizes how young white women's bodies are looked at in the post-apartheid cultural landscape is Lauren Beukes's recent novel, Moxyland. Set in the Cape Town of 2018 and featuring a ‘corporate apartheid’ government that disciplines with an effortlessly casual chic, Beukes's speculative text highlights how the hegemonic power of whiteness maintains itself through a rigorous self-normalised body practices and gendered commodification, with a heightened emphasis on visuality. Kendra Adams is a photographer who has recently agreed to be implanted with nanotechnology that will keep her youthful skin smooth and “improved” in exchange for branding herself permanently as a “hipster” advertisement for the sports drink, Ghost. Through Kendra's attempts to document the process of becoming a “Ghost Girl” juxtaposed with the multi-media manipulation of her image, Beukes deftly limns how the micropolitics of female embodiment is linked with the “global flow” of whiteness.

Material Feminist Practices in a Body Politics Seminar

© 2015 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois In these teaching notes, I want to focus on two course projects in which students apply materialist feminist practices within a capstone women’s studies seminar entitled Body Politics. Undertaking these projects, students become more critically aware of gendered materialities that they had previously taken for granted as they deconstruct material aspects of our social environment that they find oppressive. Students also increase confidence in their power to modify certain oppressive aspects of our material world. Perhaps most importantly, the students enjoy these exercises and find them meaningful and transformative. I teach women’s studies courses at a small Franciscan liberal arts college, where conservative Catholic social norms and traditional gender norms prevail. Even many of our more politicized and activist students do not question the normative gendering of bodies and behaviors. I designed the capstone women’s studies seminar around the topic of Body Politics to encourage the students to engage the conservative ideologies and policies that condition female embodiment on campus. Additionally, I focus on female body issues because although my college’s emphasis on Catholic service for the less fortunate does cultivate student investment in the betterment of the community, it also often discourages women students from focusing on their own experiences of gender oppression: the traditional Catholic gender system defines a good woman as one who serves others and advocates for others, not herself. By addressing female corporeal experience, I encourage students to speak out for themselves, as themselves, and to become more aware of how embodiment and gendering pervade their lives. While most of the students who complete the women’s studies minor and who take this capstone course are cisgender, heterosexual women, lesbians, transmen, and gay and straight men also pursue the minor and take this class, and I encourage all students to bring their own social positions and perspectives to bear on our study of gendered embodiment. My curricular focus parallels a feminist turn toward materiality/corporeality in the twenty-first century. Published in 2008, the anthology Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, brings together a range of feminist scholars whose work focuses on the corporeality of the female body and its co-constitution or Material Feminist Practices in a Body Politics Seminar

Bodyself: Linking dance and spirituality

Abstract Inner-directed movement is a sacred practice that can heal emotional wounds lodged in the body. When the body is attended to with ever-present openness to arising sensations, feelings and images, and drawn on to move and be moved from an inner wholeness, emotional and spiritual transformation occurs. This article reveals the ways in which dance and spirituality co-mingle in girls’ and women’s lives through creative dance. The author presents a qualitative arts-based inquiry – which was her doctoral dissertation – to explore how creative movement impacts adolescent girls from a first-hand perspective. To locate herself within the research, the author explores her encounters that led to dance and spirituality as an inquiry of bodyself discovery, rupture, healing, insight and ecstasy. Findings include body-image acceptance, authenticity with peers, and bodyself respect and reverence as a result of individual and group dance work. Narratives are framed within Jungian active imagination, Authentic Movement, spirituality concepts of self and bodyself, and a feminist perspective of female embodiment through creative movement.

This Is a Man's World: Drag Kings and the Female Embodiment of Masculinity

Portrayals of non-heteronormative characters have been more and more present in the mass media since the last decades of the 20th century. Gay and lesbian characters are now part of mainstream media in films, sitcoms, drama series, talk shows, etc. Apparently, this could mean that non-heteronormative identities and desires are tolerated by the general audience but this might be just so as long as these characters behave according to heteronormative standards of normality or their bodies are easily readable. The presence of trans, drags or genderqueer characters is minimal and with it the potential subversion of the heteronormative matrix. However, not all drag is subversive and therefore an inappropriate reading or decoding could end up reinforcing the same normative gender identities they intend to subvert. To understand the potential subversion of non-heteronormative characters this paper aims to analyze briefly the re/conceptualization of performativity in the work of Judith Butler, the representation of drag as a parody of gender performance, the female embodiment of masculinity and its representation in popular culture.

“Differently normal” and “normally different”: Negotiations of female embodiment in women's accounts of ‘atypical’ sex development

During recent decades numerous feminist scholars have scrutinized the two-sex model and questioned its status in Western societies and medicine. Along the same line, increased attention has been paid to individuals' experiences of atypical sex development, also known as intersex or ‘disorders of sex development’ (DSD). Yet research on individuals' experiences of finding out about their atypical sex development in adolescence has been scarce. Against this backdrop, the present article analyses 23 in-depth interviews with women who in their teens found out about their atypical sex development. The interviews were conducted during 2009–2012 and the interviewees were all Swedish. Drawing on feminist research on female embodiment and social scientific studies on diagnosis, I examine how the women make sense of their bodies and situations. First, I aim to explore how the women construe normality as they negotiate female embodiment. Second, I aim to investigate how the divergent manners in which these negotiations are expressed can be further understood via the women's different access to a diagnosis. Through a thematic and interpretative analysis, I outline two negotiation strategies: the “differently normal” and the “normally different” strategy. In the former, the women present themselves as just slightly different from ‘normal’ women. In the latter, they stress that everyone is different in some manner and thereby claim normalcy. The analysis shows that access to diagnosis corresponds to the ways in which the women present themselves as “differently normal” and “normally different”, thus shedding light on the complex role of diagnosis in their negotiations of female embodiment. It also reveals that the women make use of what they do have and how alignments with and work on norms interplay as normality is construed.