Construction Of Female Identity Research Articles

Mujeres ensayistas del Caribe Hispánico: Cuba, Puerto Rico y República Dominicana. Un estado de la cuestión

In the intellectual history of Latin America there is a gap regarding the production of women in the essay genre. It is the essays of identity, of male workmanship, that build the canon regarding the themes and the ways of being approached. The gender essays that the women writers have done arearticulated in response to this dominant vision of the social, political and cultural processes of Latin American countries. They reveal a strong discontent with the construction of female identity, a concern for the construction of full citizenship and represent a response to the political and cultural social demands of women and other marginal groups. The intellectuals debated, discussed and argued with the proposals that the dominant speeches carried in this regard and the gender essay becomes the “weapon of combat.” What is presented here is aimed at recovering this body of knowledge in the literary history of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. A work of literary archeology of themes, works and authors from the twentieth century. The book Women Essayists of the Hispanic Caribbean: Hilvanando el silencio (2007) by Anna Freire Ashbaugh, Lourdes Rojas and Raquel Romeu, provides a panoramic view of the group of essayists from each country. Other researchers such as Catharina Vallejo, Ivette Sóñora, Carmen Dolores Hernández and Consuelo Meza Márquezwill expand that corpus and point out some thematic features of the essayist work of authors such as Luisa Campuzano, Mirta Yáñez, Nara Araujo, Marta Núñez Sarmiento and Zaida Capote Cruz de Cuba; Concha Meléndez, Rosario Ferré, Norma Valle Ferrer, Nara Negrón Marreño and Silvia Álvarez Curbelo of Puerto Rico; and, from the Dominican Republic, Camila Henríquez Ureña, Carmita Landestoy, Carmen Durán and Rosa Inés Curiel Pichardo.

“Uma mulher escandalosa”: situações que marcam a construção de identidade

Neste artigo fazemos a análise da identidade de Eily, protagonista do conto “Uma Mulher Escandalosa”, da irlandesa Edna O’Brien. Para isso, iniciamos problematizando os percursos de como se dá a construção da identidade feminina, sob a perspectiva do ponto de vista da narradora. Em seguida, apresentamos como a narrativa em si contribui para a construção da identidade de Eily, destacando três situações que melhor representam a identidade da protagonista. Desse modo, essa análise justifica-se porque a história narrada intercambia experiências sobre mulheres que foram silenciadas e afetadas em sua individualidade por um conjunto de poderes impessoal e atemporal, para os quais suscita espanto e reflexão. A condução teórica da análise literária está composta pelos referenciais de Luís Alberto Brandão Santos e Silvana Pessôa de Oliveira, que apontam como se dá a construção da narrativa, seguidos pelos conceitos sobre o tipo de narrador proposto por Norman Friedman e Yves Reuter. Para a análise identitária trago as abordagens de Kathryn Woodward, Erich Fromm, Jean-Claude Deschamps e Pascal Moliner, além de Michael Foucault, que explica os mecanismos de poder sobre os corpos, e por último, a perspectiva de Judith Butler sobre a identidade de gênero. *Este artigo é um recorte da pesquisa de dissertação intitulada Mimese da Relação Triádica entre identidade Cultura e Poder em três contos de Edna O’Brien, feita por Albetania Pessoa de Sousa, sob a orientação da Profa. Dra. Rejane de Souza Ferreira.

SYMBIOTIC ILLUSION AND FEMALE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN EATING DISORDERS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL PSYCHOSOMATICS’ PERSPECTIVE

Abstract: This study aims primarily to reflect on the role of symbiotic illusion in the construction of female identity in women with eating disorders (ED), using premises from psychoanalytic psychosomatics. Considering ED as psychopathologies related to the affective economy, Oedipal relations play crucial role in the process of identity constitution. Mother-daughter relationships in ED are shaped in the molds of symbiotic illusion, with weak father figures. We presented a case study to briefly illustrate the theoretical framework. The omissive posture of a father to interdict the symbiotic relation leads daughters to find themselves unable to libidinally invest in other objects.

Comparative study of female identity construction in Chinese and American advertisements

This article investigates the issue of female identity construction in Chinese and in American advertisements from a contrastive perspective rarely adopted in the related literature. We have found that, while the identity of women constructed in the Chinese advertisements reflects the traditional expectations of women, such as being beauty-conscious, romance-pursuing, and maternal love-representing, the identities of women found in the American advertisements are those of confidence and uniqueness. Our interview data indicate that these findings are reflections of respective cultural values in the two societies. That is, women in Chinese culture are still seen as being traditional whereas women in the United States are seen as independent and goal-driven.

Martha Graham, ‘An American, A kosmos’: Border-crossing in Martha Graham’s early works

This paper examines the connection between crossing borders (state limits, borders between America and Mexico or America and Europe, and temporal borders) and pushing choreographical boundaries in dance pioneer Martha Graham’s ballets created in the 1930’s and the early 1940’s.Danced only by women, Primitive Mysteries (1931) was inspired by Graham’s travels in New Mexico, and explores the rituals of the Native Americans of the Southern States of the United States; nine years later, Graham would explore this theme further with El Penitente, which also draws from the Medieval tradition of mystery plays. Frontier (1935), one of Graham’s most famous soli, clearly connects the American Frontier to the construction of female identity, as do American Document (1938) and Appalachian Spring (1944). Graham pioneered a new way for women to dance, to express their femininity and their power: her works, inspired by Native American traditions, Mexican folklore, Greek mythology and literature from both sides of the Atlantic, depict strong women who are not afraid of pushing boundaries.Creating an American choreographic tradition also meant exploring its literary legacy for Martha Graham: this paper therefore also delves into the way the Whitmanian intertext emerges in Graham’s choreographic writing, in her conception of Americanness, modernity, the body and gender.

Sundri, then and now

ABSTRACTThis paper examines Bhai Vir Singh's novella, Sundri (1898) from the context of the Singh Sabha reform movement (1880–1920). Sundri, Vir Singh's fictional heroine, became an important and idealized site of female identity construction during this time. Bhai Vir Singh's Sundri will be juxtaposed with a pixelated version, a recent animated film by the same name. Similar to the novella, the animated Sundri too can be understood as a highly particularized, contemporary construct of Sikh women's identity, created, more than a century later, but similarly, during a period of intense scrutiny of Sikh women's religious identity.

„Niewinne” – od postulatu dziewczęcości do inicjacji w poezji kobiet

The article explores pictures of “a little girl” and of sexual initiation in 20th and 21st-century Polish women’s poetry, especially by Wisława Szymborska, Barbara Klicka, Jolanta Nawrot, Wioletta Grzegorzewska i Małgorzata Lebda. The girlhood showed in their poems is a certain potentiality of womanhood, often imbued with ripening eroticism very difficult to control. At the same time the girlhood is entangled in schematism of potential scenarios destined for a women subject: personal dependence and sense of being dominated, escape or emancipation. Initiatory poems show rather strong dependence on archetypical (The Little Match Girl) and mythicizing conventions of describing adolescence, still they can present idiomatic construction of female identity.

La reconstrucción de la imagen de las mujeres en el penal de Puente Grande, Jalisco

The role that women play in today’s society is the result of an ancestral allocation, however, more and more often this role is questioned by women themselves, and it seems that when most violence is questioned is generated against them placing them in a shaky situation between being a victim or victimizer. This is a project that explores the construction of female identity by means photographs as a proposal for women Women’s Rehabilitation Center in Puente Grande (Mexico) were able to rebuild their identity. We consider subordinates and gender studies as well as research-based art and methodologies Entre Voces so that this support out from the horizontality.

FEMALE IDENTITY AND MAGICAL REALISM IN NATIVE AMERICAN AND AFRO AMERICAN WOMEN WRITING: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LOUISE ERDRICH’S TRACKS AND TONY MORRISON’S BELOVED

<p>This research article is an attempt to evaluate the Native and Afro American women writers ‘sustained efforts to articulate a continuous and internal cultural female identity by constructing re evaluative narratives that deconstruct institutionally supported universal female images inflicted upon the third and fourth world women by the first world feminist intelligentsia. To do so these women writers radically depart from the conventions of Euro American stylistic, formal and structural modalities of the narrative and use instead a stylistic mosaic allowing the native and black oral traditions to imbricate with the white normative models. Since literature and arts have always been an effective medium, an expansive domain, and a discursive field where writers have been voicing the aureate human feelings, conflicting passions and the continuous struggles of the different societal segments, especially of deprived strata against those who maintain and perpetuate their cultural and political hegemony by suppressing the subalterns, the women writers from the fourth world ethnic communities have expressed whole range of the intensely personal and communal human emotions that radiate from the springboard of social, cultural, historic and political practices One of the significant features that the Native American and Afro American women writers often demonstrate include the use of magical realist strategies that express, on one hand, their efforts to indigenize narrative and, on the other hand, help them construct female identity from their own perspective since, within main concerns of contemporary fourth world feminist criticism, the (re) construction of female identity merits special attention and analysis. The stereotypical discursive construction of the Native and Afro American women by the dominant Euro American discourses bracketed them into essentialist categories glossing over the medley of vital differences that these women reveal in their social, cultural, anthropological and sexual strictures. Tackling the issue of the discursive construction of female identity that involves conceptual and perspectival problems, both Native American and Afro American women writers deconstruct the sweeping generalization of the fourth world women by challenging and subverting the clichéd images replacing them with empowered and agentive subjects who are no more subjected to, what Gyatri Spivk conceptualizes, subalternity and “epistemic violence”.</p>

Postmodern Feminism: Cultural Trauma in Construction of Female Identities in Virginia Woolf's The Waves

The present article sheds new light on trauma as a devastating phenomenon respecting the construction of male and female characters' identities and reveals reconstruction of male and female identities in Virginia Woolf's (1882-1941) The Waves (1931). Trauma is defined as an unexpected event that leaves the most terrible marks on the person's self, identity, psyche, emotions, beliefs, etc. Individual trauma is diagnosed by the male and female characters' horrendous responses regarded as post-traumatic stress disorder in terms of a distressing recollection of the traumatic occurrence. In contrast, cultural trauma, like patriarchy, gender, or sexual difference which has a horrific influence on cultures, can encompass traumatically the collective identity of male and female characters. In The Waves, the characters such as Rhoda, Jinny, and Susan get involved in the struggle for the self-definition relating to their collective and individual identities, respectively. No wonder, this article exploits an integrated method of feminism and psycho-trauma. It contextualizes the ideologies of postmodern feminist critics, such as Judith Butler (1956-), Helene Cixous (1937-), Cathy Caruth (1955-), and Luce Irigaray (1930-). Woolf, de facto, reveals how trauma as a catastrophe, either individual or collective, affects shockingly male and female characters' identities, so that their physical and psychological responses can be analyzed in terms of diagnosis of the trauma and its aftermath.

DA VIDA PELA METADE À PERENIDADE DEVIDA: JOSEFA DE SANTO ALEIXO E MARIA MOISÉS

O título enunciado pretende dilucidar os percursos figurativos que estiveram na origem da fortuna literária e artística de Josefa de Santo Aleixo e de Maria Moisés, no conto ‘Maria Moisés’ das Novelas do Minho, publicadas por Camilo Castelo Branco entre 1875 e 1877. Na perspetiva dos estudos de género, a vida ‘incompleta’ que carateriza o percurso existencial de ambas refere-se à parte da história individual inerente à construção da identidade feminina que estes seres de papel nunca concretizaram, dado o universo patriarcal vigente. Segundo Nathalie Einich, em États de Femme. L’identité dans la fiction occidentale (1996), os estados identitários da mulher, no contexto cultural de Oitocentos, são os de ‘fi lha, esposa e mãe ’, mas nem Josefa nem Maria Moisés os reúnem na totalidade. O equilíbrio e a coerência do ser em si da mulher estão longe de se consubstanciar neste universo ficcional. Em termos semio-narrativos, a incompletude converte-se no signo distintivo de ambas, signo fautor da assunção de múltiplas vias para a sua figuração, para a sua justa perenidade. Por outro lado, no que concerne à sobrevida das personagens (Reis: 2015), refira-se a reinterpretação do conto por Paula Rego através de cinco composições, Maria Moisés e outras histórias, expostas na Galeria 111, no Porto, em 2000-2001 (Lima: 2002). Os temas abordados pela artista plástica são, mais uma vez, aqueles que o tempo insiste em fazer perdurar: a paixão, a gravidez indesejada, a incompreensão familiar e social, a solidão.

Models in the construction of female identity in Nigerian postcolonial literature

Gendered identity in Africa has for centuries been a hotbed of ideological and narrative contestations. While colonial constructions of the African female were generally essentialist and negative in character, early postcolonial African literature also ironically deployed essentialisms and rigid gender binaries to portray African womanhood, thus prompting a challenge of both by female African writers of the first generation. However, in a significant twist, second generation Nigerian women writers were to restore the related tropes of wifehood and motherhood to the front burner. This article examines the corresponding models of representation of gendered identity and the inherent, and complex, negotiation of gendered power relations over time in Nigerian postcolonial literature. These models, which we describe here as “essentialism entrenched”, “essentialism challenged” and “essentialism negotiated” are examined against the background of gender theory and African womanist discourse. The essay observes that the resurgence of motherhood, albeit in mediated/transformative forms in Nigerian women writing, underscores the continuing challenge of culture in the formation of African gendered identities and in relation to societal development. The work of Akachi Ezeigbo, a leading Nigerian female writer of the second generation, is used in the article to illustrate this resurgence and its interface with womanist theorizing.

Construction Of Female Identity In Pakistani Television Commercials (November, 2015-April, 2016): A Semiotic Analysis

This study explores how TV commercials in Pakistan construct female identity in the present era. Advertising becomes an essential part in moulding and shaping our behaviour, attitude, values towards lifestyle and advertisers use visual, semiotic and printed text aims to convey their specific messages. This work attempts to analyze how the belief system of "flawless" and "perfect" society is created and constructed in and through advertisements. This study employed semiotic analysis as a research method to examine Pakistani TVCs. With stratified sampling technique, ten TVCs selected that appeared during intervals breaks of famous TV serials ,obtained from main three private Pakistani channels, on a week after week premise for a time of six months. TVCs were analyzed with reference to the representation of Pakistani women in selected time period. As sign frameworks are included in the construction of meaning and advertising utilizes these signs to transmit its message. The ideologically developed messages, TVCs not only depict the image of women but have additionally made that image into the affirmed part of the female identity in the society. The overall findings reveal that women identity thrive in TV commercials that repeatedly represent women as glamorized sex object, there by not reflecting the different and progressive roles of women. This study is an effort to examine the advertising practice in Pakistan that how it constructs and depicts Pakistani women. Most commercials reveal today’s Pakistani women as an independent glamorous and liberal object. This study would be significant for communication experts as well as for the policy makers who can apply it as a basis for creating and executing advertisements in future.

The concept of khranitel’nitsa domashnego ochaga: metaphorical construction of female identity in Russia

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the metaphor of khranitel’nitsa domashnego ochaga, which is often evoked in Russian social, political, religious, and media discourses as part of discussions of the biologically ‘pre-determined’ (and therefore ‘natural’) division of gender roles and the place of women in society. This metaphoric phrase has been translated as ‘custodian [or guardian] of the family hearth.’ In the present study, the metaphor serves as a guiding construct for analysis of the interview discourses of 20 Russian women who live in Moscow, Russia. Following Laclau and Mouffe, the concept of khranitel’nitsa domashnego ochaga is considered a nodal point around which discourses are organized to construct a specific form of cultural narrative that codifies differences between men and women. The study analyzes semantic connections the metaphor reflects in the meaning-making of Russian women, its enduring properties, and the discourses participants drew on in their articulations of khranitel’nitsa domashnego ochaga.

Jake žene Kozarčeve

Josip Kozarac (1858. – 1906.) is most important narrator in the last decades of 20th century: although the literary critic deemed his work as a realist (according to Jelcic, it is about one of two most pure, by style most homogenous realist of Croatians) when it is about construction of female character, amongst other things, author's subversive relation opposite to established model of creation is visible so Josip Kozarac is rightly considered as inauguator of style characteristics (psychologisation, foremostly) which wil reach its zenith and objectification in the period of Croatian modern. Kozarac, said in Flaker's words, exemplified thesis by which literature performs relevant social functions so he filled his works with actual problems from then, and it is important to emphasize, patriarchal Slavonia. Sternly swooping on people and customs which destroy traditional values (foremostly moral), Kozarac is still aware that when it is about female characters, the time of weak apropos mute female subjects as a given fact of patriarchate, is irretrievably over, and with it the perception of woman as a being who is realized only by given role, without possibility (and ability) to determine about herself and her own life. Work is about detection of author's strategies used during construction of female identities in these Kozarac's narratives: Biser-Kata, Tena, Mira Kodoliceva, Oprava, Donna Ines, Poletarci, Krcelici ne ce ljepote; evolution of female identity and its function in said novels.

Impacto de la mastectomía sobre la vida sexual y emocional de las mujeres atendidas por un servicio de salud del norte de Minas Gerais

This study aims to understand the impact of mastectomy on the sexual and emotional life of women receiving care at a health facility in northern Minas Gerais. This is a descriptive, exploratory study with a qualitative approach, conducted with 12 women in the radiotherapy department of a hospital. We used a not structured interview for data collection. Data were recorded and fully transcribed for further categorization and analysis. Data processing was done through content analysis. It was evident that after radical mastectomy, sexual and emotional life of women is committed by both the physical effects of treatment, such as the psychosocial consequences, such as the construction of female identity, self-image and how to understand others the sighted. It is concluded that there are significant changes in the lives of these women, but the removal of the breast means the removal of a problem and the desire to be cured is greater than losing a breast.

A Feminist Study of Otherness in A Streetcar Named Desire and its Iranian Film Adaptation, The Stranger

Movie adaptations of dramatic works have always been very popular. Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) has been adapted several times and in different ways. Feminist and gender studies have examined the important role of Otherness in the construction of female identity. Using their findings, we compare the ways in which the theme of Otherness has been employed in representing female gender identity in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and in its Iranian film adaptation, The Stranger (Bigāneh) (2014). The results of the study show that while in both works the female characters' traditional female roles have been highlighted, in the Iranian movie the main female character economically enjoys a relatively higher independence and can have a voice of her own to act against the patriarchal traditions. Besides, whereas in the source text women’s identity is solely associated with their being the Other of men, women in The Stranger stand on a par with their male companions, if not higher than them. The study also reveals that a main reason for these differences originates in the sociopolitical, cultural and historical discrepancies between the contexts in which the film and the play were created.

La representación de las mujeres trabajadoras en la ficción televisiva española

During the sixties and seventies the limited presence of women in the public sphere was reflected in the restricted repertoire of roles played by female characters in television fiction (mainly those of mothers and wives). The strengthening of the feminist movement in the following decades increased and diversified the portrayals of women in the workplace, and further encouraged academic research on the social construction of working women. Despite the relevance of female professionals in current TV shows, the importance of romantic relationships and sexuality has led to a decreasing number of studies on the subject. This article summarizes the results of a study on working women in Spanish TV fiction, part of a larger project on the construction of female identities. The research uses an original methodology that combines quantitative techniques and qualitative methods (socio-semiotics) to analyse the sample of 709 female characters. The results show a coexistence of the traditional stereotypes of working women in customer service and care-giving positions with those of highly skilled female professionals. However, the empowerment of women in positions of responsibility is often associated with a negative portrayal of the character, while the problems of reconciling family and work are systematically avoided. La reducida presencia de la mujer en la esfera pública durante los años sesenta y setenta se reflejaba en el limitado repertorio de roles (madre y esposa principalmente) que le atribuía la ficción televisiva. El impulso feminista de las décadas sucesivas estimuló las representaciones de los personajes femeninos en el ámbito laboral y la reflexión académica sobre la construcción social de la mujer trabajadora. Pero, a pesar de la relevancia del rol profesional en las protagonistas de la ficción actual, la relevancia de las relaciones sentimentales y de la sexualidad ha revertido en el reducido número de estudios sobre el tema. Este artículo sintetiza los resultados de un análisis de la mujer trabajadora en la ficción televisiva española, integrado en un proyecto sobre construcción de identidades femeninas. La investigación propone una metodología original, que combina métodos cuantitativos y cualitativos (socio-semiótica) para afrontar el estudio de 709 personajes femeninos. La investigación revela la convivencia de estereotipos ligados a las representaciones tradicionales de los empleos de las mujeres (trabajos relacionados con la atención al público y el cuidado de las personas) con otras profesiones altamente cualificadas. Sin embargo, el empoderamiento de las mujeres con cargos de responsabilidad se asocia frecuentemente con una caracterización negativa del personaje, al tiempo que los problemas de conciliación de los roles familiares y profesionales se eluden sistemáticamente.

Between the mirror and the Mosaic: Reflections on performance and musicology in the construction of female identity in music

Between the mirror and the Mosaic: Reflections on performance and musicology in the construction of female identity in music

A Study of the Construction of Female Identity: John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The issue of identity and female consciousness as one of the major concerns of feminists has always been polemical, for there are different attitudes in formulating gender identity and consequently defining what a woman is. As its theoretical framework, this study relies on Judith Butler’s theory of gender and sexuality and studies the construction of identity in the female characters of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Judith Butler, a feminist constructivist, stresses the effect of socially constructed gender roles on creating gender identity and proposes her performative theory of gender and sexuality. In her theory Butler argues that gender is not what one is but what one does. In this sense, gender is not a stable identity from which various acts proceed; rather it is an identity constituted through a stylized repetition of normative gender roles and performances. Regarding gender as performative reveals that, what is taken as an internal essence of gender is actually fabricated through the regulatory frame of interacting discourses. It has an imitative structure which can be deconstructed. The study, thus, focuses on the effect of prescribed gender roles and norms in the process of identity formation, and examines Ernestina Freeman as a conformist character who constitutes her identity by taking on the ideal gender norms of the era and Sarah woodruff who tries to renegotiate and reenact those roles and constructs a sense of self which transcends constraints of the social and cultural hegemonic frame.