Feminine Faces Research Articles

A THOUSAND DISSONANCES

A THOUSAND DISSONANCES

Circum-menopausal effects on women's judgements of facial attractiveness

The marked change in a woman's hormonal profile that happens at menopause affects many aspects of behaviour. We investigated circum-menopausal women's preferences for femininity in the faces of young adult men and women. Post-menopausal women demonstrated stronger preferences for femininity in same-sex faces than pre-menopausal women did. This effect was independent of possible effects of participant's age and suggests that dislike of feminine (i.e. attractive) same-sex competitors decreases as fertility decreases. No significant difference between pre- and post-menopausal women was observed for men's faces, potentially because circum-menopausal women do not necessarily view young adult men as potential mates. To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate circum-menopausal changes in women's face preferences.

Feminine Faces of Leadership: Beyond Structural-Functionalism?

Leadership continues to be a central focus for research in educational administration. Until recently, many studies about leadership have been based largely on the experiences of white males and interpreted based on the structural-functionalist perspective. In this paper the writer explores the phenomenon of leadership through the eyes and experiences of six women leaders who are school principals. The findings are from a recently completed phenomenological study of six women principals’ lived experiences with leadership.

Exposure to sexually attractive men decreases women's preferences for feminine faces

Here we show that women's preferences for femininity (vs. masculinity) in men's faces are decreased after viewing a slideshow of images of highly attractive men, but not after viewing a slideshow of relatively unattractive men. As masculinity is thought to be a cue of men's heritable fitness, and viewing images of highly attractive opposite-sex individuals increases sexual motivation, this may indicate that women increase their preferences for male cues of heritable fitness in circumstances where mating is likely to occur. This context-sensitivity in women's face preferences may, therefore, be adaptive, since decreased preferences for feminine men (i.e. increased preferences for masculine men) when sexual motivation is enhanced may increase offspring viability. Interestingly, we found that viewing images of highly attractive men also decreased women's preferences for femininity in female faces. This latter finding could either reflect increased derogation of attractive (i.e. feminine) same-sex competitors when sexual motivation is enhanced or be a low-cost functionless by-product of a mechanism for increasing preferences for cues of men's heritable fitness when sexual motivation is high. Collectively, our findings demonstrate that recent visual experience with highly attractive opposite-sex individuals influences attractiveness judgments and present novel evidence for potentially adaptive context-sensitivity in attractiveness judgments.

Feminist Interpretations of Augustine: Re-Reading the Canon (review)

Reviewed by: Feminist Interpretations of Augustine: Re-Reading the Canon Roland J. Teske, S.J. Judith Chelius Stark , editor. Feminist Interpretations of Augustine: Re-Reading the Canon. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Pp. x + 326. Paper, $35.00. This present volume is the twenty-ninth in the Re-Reading the Canon series, the title of each of which volumes begins Feminist Interpretations of . . . . Surprisingly, the volume on Augustine has appeared relatively late in the series. The editor has collected eleven essays plus a poem on feminist interpretations of the bishop of Hippo, who has certainly exerted a powerful influence on the view of women in the Western Christian churches of all major denominations. Besides the essays, Stark has provided a substantial introduction to the volume in which she touches upon the principal events of Augustine's life and briefly sketches the main points of each essay. The feminist interpretations of Augustine included in the volume represent a broad spectrum running from quite radical to fairly moderate or even tame approaches. In "Augustine, Sexuality, Gender, and Women," Rosemary Radford Ruether presents a call to critique the views of Augustine from which women and men have suffered for over 1500 years in Western Christianity. Anne-Marie Bowery argues in "Monica: The Feminine Face of Christ" that Augustine's portrait of Monica allows us to "reframe the masculine image of the divinity" (70) that is basic to Western Christianity. In her essay, Felecia McDuffie examines Augustine's rhetoric of the feminine in a literary and historic analysis of the Confessions and concludes that, since Augustine does include some aspects of the feminine, his postmodern daughters may enter into dialogue with him on this subject. "Confessing Monica," the joint work of Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, presents the Confessions as a meditation on Monica from a literary and historical and from a theological and exegetical perspective. In "O Mother, Where Art Thou? In Search of Saint Monnica," Rebecca Moore struggles to discover what we can really know about Monnica and comes up with a quite limited view of the facts we can known about Augustine's mother. The other unnamed, but not nameless woman in the Confessions is the topic of Margaret R. Miles's essay, subtitled "The Woman Torn from Augustine's Side." In "Augustine's Letters to Women," Joanne McWilliam surveys Augustine's letters written to women, which fall into the following groups: letters of condolence, letters of advice, letters on religious matters, and finally letters of theological content. She notes that the letters are not condescending or patronizing and even in some cases reveal considerable respect for the talents of the addressee. E. Ann Matter's essay, "De cura feminarum: Augustine the Bishop, North African Women, and the Development of a Theology of Female Nature," a brief essay with so long a title, finds that Augustine's letters to women show kindness and consideration for them and suggests that the women involved in the Pelagian controversy may have contributed to his later more negative views. Stark's essay, "Augustine on Women: In God's Image, but Less So," reviews the texts and current literature on Augustine's view of women as made in God's image in their rational souls, but inferior in terms of their bodies. In "To Remember Self, to Remember God: Augustine on Sexuality, Relationality, and the Trinity," Julie B. Miller attempts to explain his teaching on God and the Self as well as to offer "a feminist psychological critique of Augustine's early relationship with his mother," in an alternate view to that of "traditional non-Freudian analyses" (245). The final essay, "The Evanescence of Masculinity: Deferral in Saint Augustine's Confessions and Some Thoughts on Its Bearing on the Sex/Gender Debate," by Penelope Deutscher, explores "a by-product of the sex/gender debate, namely, [End Page 480] attempts by some authors to maintain a terminological distinction between the terms 'man' and 'masculine' and between 'woman' and 'feminine' (282). She argues that one can understand the opposition of such terms as theologically grounded in a particular sense. The closing poem, "To Aurelius Augustine from the Mother of His Son," by Ann Conrad Lammers...

Context-dependent preferences for facial dimorphism in a rural Malaysian population

Participants in a rural Malaysian population rated masculinised and feminised faces for attractiveness and for trait attribution. Consistent with previous research, we found that female preferences were affected by relationship context but male preferences were not. In a long-term context, however, both male and female preferences were predicted by the observers' own physical quality, as measured by physical health. This suggests that highly sex-typical faces signal high phenotypic quality across contexts but that preferences are constrained by competition from other mates. We also found that perceptions of the health, fecundity, and personality of opposite-sex individuals were predicted by facial masculinity/femininity. For both sexes, highly sex-typical faces were perceived to be more healthy and fecund, while masculine faces were perceived to be “nasty” and feminine faces were perceived to be “nice.” Perceptions of health were somewhat different to findings from Western populations, which may be attributable to the harshness of the participants' environment.

Marquardt’s Phi Mask: Pitfalls of Relying on Fashion Models and the Golden Ratio to Describe a Beautiful Face

Stephen Marquardt has derived a mask from the golden ratio that he claims represents the "ideal" facial archetype. Many have found his mask convincing, including cosmetic surgeons. However, Marquardt's mask is associated with numerous problems. The method used to examine goodness of fit with the proportions in the mask is faulty. The mask is ill-suited for non-European populations, especially sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians. The mask also appears to approximate the face shape of masculinized European women. Given that the general public strongly and overwhelmingly prefers above average facial femininity in women, white women seeking aesthetic facial surgery would be ill-advised to aim toward a better fit with Marquardt's mask. This article aims to show the proper way of assessing goodness of fit with Marquardt's mask, to address the shape of the mask as it pertains to masculinity-femininity, and to discuss the broader issue of an objective assessment of facial attractiveness. Generalized Procrustes analysis is used to show how goodness of fit with Marquardt's mask can be assessed. Thin-plate spline analysis is used to illustrate visually how sample faces, including northwestern European averages, differ from Marquardt's mask. Marquardt's mask best describes the facial proportions of masculinized white women as seen in fashion models. Marquardt's mask does not appear to describe "ideal" face shape even for white women because its proportions are inconsistent with the optimal preferences of most people, especially with regard to femininity.

Visual adaptation to masculine and feminine faces influences generalized preferences and perceptions of trustworthiness

Although previous studies of individual differences in preferences for masculinity in male faces have typically emphasized the importance of factors such as changes in levels of sex hormones during the menstrual cycle, other research has demonstrated that recent visual experience with faces also influences preferences for sexual dimorphism in faces. Adaptation to either masculine or feminine faces increases preferences for novel faces that are similar to those that were recently seen. Here, we replicate this effect and demonstrate that adaptation to masculine or feminine faces also influences the extent to which masculine faces are perceived as trustworthy. These adaptation effects may reflect a proximate mechanism that contributes to the development of face preferences within individuals, underpins phenomena such as imprinting-like effects and condition-dependent face preferences, and shapes personality attributions to faces that play an important role in romantic partner and associate choices. Furthermore, our findings also support the proposal that visual exposure alone cannot explain the context specificity of attitudes to self-resemblance in faces.

Correlated preferences for facial masculinity and ideal or actual partner's masculinity

Studies of women's preferences for male faces have variously reported preferences for masculine faces, preferences for feminine faces and no effect of masculinity-femininity on male facial attractiveness. It has been suggested that these apparently inconsistent findings are, at least partly, due to differences in the methods used to manipulate the masculinity of face images or individual differences in attraction to facial cues associated with youth. Here, however, we show that women's preferences for masculinity manipulated in male faces using techniques similar to the three most widely used methods are positively inter-related. We also show that women's preferences for masculine male faces are positively related to ratings of the masculinity of their actual partner and their ideal partner. Correlations with partner masculinity were independent of real and ideal partner age, which were not associated with facial masculinity preference. Collectively, these findings suggest that variability among studies in their findings for women's masculinity preferences reflects individual differences in attraction to masculinity rather than differences in the methods used to manufacture stimuli, and are important for the interpretation of previous and future studies of facial masculinity.

Commitment to relationships and preferences for femininity and apparent health in faces are strongest on days of the menstrual cycle when progesterone level is high

Previous studies of changes in women's behavior during the menstrual cycle have offered insight into the motivations underpinning women's preferences for social cues associated with possible direct benefits (e.g., investment, low risk of infection) and indirect benefits (e.g., offspring viability). Here we sought to extend this work by testing for systematic variation in women's preferences for male and female faces and in their attitudes to their romantic relationship during the menstrual cycle. In Study 1, we found partnered women's reported commitment to their romantic relationship and preferences for femininity in male and female faces were strongest on days of the menstrual cycle when progesterone levels are increased (and fertility is low). Happiness in relationships did not change across the cycle. In Study 2, we found that the effect of cycle phase on women's preference for feminine faces was independent of increased attraction to apparent health in faces during the luteal phase. Collectively, these findings are further evidence that women's preferences for social cues associated with possible direct benefits and commitment to relationships are strongest during conditions characterized by raised progesterone level, while attraction to men displaying cues associated with possible indirect benefits is strongest when women are most fertile.

Postfeminism from A to G

Postfeminism from A to G Chris Holmlund (bio) Does postfeminism indicate (a) an attitude, (b) an optic, or (c) an object? In search of answers, I perused databases, surfed Web sites, pursued bibliographic leads, and queried friends, young and old. It seems the answer is (d) all of the above. I was surprised to see that while several books use the word (with Tania Modleski's 1991 Feminism without Women seminal), databases focused on media journals yield little on the topic. In hopes that my peregrinations will be of use to Cinema Journal readers, I shall provide an overview of how "postfeminism" and "postfeminist" have been used and by whom. I will then offer my "take" on which recent films may be labeled postfeminist. Finally, I will sketch where earlier postfeminist analyses will require updating and why, if they are to "fit" postmillennial media artifacts. As a noun, "postfeminism" has had at least three distinctly feminine faces. For me, these range from A to G: "academic," "chick," and "grrrl."1 Since 1982, when the term first popped up in a New York Times magazinearticle featuring "Voices from the Postfeminist Generation," the most prevalent variant has been "C," or "chick," postfeminism. Periodically promoted in magazines, debated on talk shows, and paraded in newspapers, "chick" postfeminism entails a backlash against or a dismissal of the desirability for equality between women and men, in the workforce and in the family. "Chick" postfeminists are generally young; a few are middle-aged; none seem old (Botox helps). Many are hostile to the goals and gains of second-wave feminism; others simply take these gains and goals for granted. Some like to party, dress up, and step out, taking breaks from work to date or shop; others stay home, tending hearth, hubby, and kids. A second, "wilder," bunch of postfeminists knows both popular and academic haunts. Primarily American, these riot grrrls ("G" postfeminists, aka third-wave feminists) are politically engaged yet playful. They are happy to acknowledge the diversity among women that "chick" postfeminism ignores, and they are eager to carry on first- and second-wave feminist struggles. A third, smaller group of "A" (for "academic") postfeminists is steeped in French, British, and American postmodern, postcolonial, poststructural, queer, (etc.), theory. All three variants would seem tied to contemporary times, yet many commentators note that postfeminism is not new and that feminism is not "done" (e.g., [End Page 116] postfeminism also emerged in the 1920s, after women won the vote). But if postfeminism can be said to have a long(ish) history, the adjective "postfeminist" has been applied to texts—from books and songs to TV programs and films to paintings, cartoons, and photographs—only since the 1980s. Madonna long reigned as postfeminist queen, thanks to her sexually charged performances and mutating persona, rehearsed through songs, stage shows, screen appearances, books, interviews, photographs, and more. To date, postfeminist discourse in film studies has concentrated on big-budget late-1980s to early-1990s titles like Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1987), Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), Baby Boom (Charles Shyer, 1987), Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1991), and Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992).2 Most commentators envision postfeminism as a white "chick" backlash that denies class, avoids race, ignores (older) age, and "straight"-jackets sexuality. A few celebrate the poise, panache, and performance of the "girly woman" or relish the coolly cutthroat competence of the "glam" exec. A very few believe that boy characters or male critics can also be postfeminists.3 But can late-1990s and early-2000 films also be termed postfeminist? If so, which ones? And what is at stake? Simply the refashioning of previously "feminist" topics (rape, battery, abortion rights, birth control, equal pay, child care, healthcare) or the redesigning of previously "feminist" figures (outspoken teens, working girls, embattled moms, poised professionals, gentle men) along (post)millennial lines? To explore whether and how postfeminist discourse may be applied to contemporary films, let us examine two recent movies featuring Latinas: Out of Sight (1998) and Real Women Have Curves (2002). Admittedly, each reached a different audience. Out of Sight is a star-studded (Jennifer Lopez, George...

Populational differences in attractiveness judgements of male and female faces: Comparing British and Jamaican samples

In the UK and Japan, both men and women prefer somewhat feminised opposite-sex faces, especially when choosing a long-term partner. Such faces are perceived as more honest, caring, and sensitive; traits that may be associated with successful male parental investment. By contrast, women prefer less feminised faces for short-term relationships and when they are near ovulation. As genetic quality may be associated with facial masculinity, women may ‘trade-off’ cues between genetic quality and paternal investment in potential partners. No analogous trade-off has been suggested to influence men's preferences, as both attributions of prosociality and potential cues to biological quality are associated with facial femininity in female faces. Ecological and cultural factors may influence the balance of trade-offs leading to populational differences in preferences. We predicted that Jamaican women would prefer more masculine faces than British women do because parasite load is higher in Jamaica, medical care less common (historically and currently), and male parental investment less pronounced. Male preferences, however, were predicted to vary less cross-culturally, as no trade-off has been identified in female facial characteristics. We constructed masculinised and feminised digital male and female face stimuli of three populations (Jamaican, Japanese, and British) and presented them to men and women in Jamaica and in Britain. The results demonstrated that Jamaican women preferred more masculine male faces than their British counterparts did. Jamaican men tended to prefer more masculine female faces than did British men did, but this effect was complicated by an interaction suggesting that more feminised faces were preferred within culture.

Testosterone increases perceived dominance but not attractiveness in human males.

Recent evidence suggests that certain features on the human face indicate hormonal levels during growth, and that women judge the attractiveness of potential partners based on the appearance of these features. One entrenched notion is male facial features that are affected by testosterone are used as direct cues in mate preference. Testosterone may be particularly revealing as it is purported to be an honest indicator of male fitness. Increased testosterone may impose an immunocompetence handicap on the bearer and only the best males can carry this handicap. To date, tests of this theory have been indirect, and have relied on digital manipulations that represent unrealistic continuums of masculine and feminine faces. We provide a much more direct test by manipulating digitally male faces to mimic known shape variation, caused by varying levels of testosterone through puberty. We produced a continuum of faces that ranged from low to high levels of testosterone in male faces and asked women to choose the points on the continuum that appeared most attractive and most physically dominant. Our data indicate that high testosterone faces reveal dominance. However, there is no evidence of directional selection for increased (or decreased) testosterone in terms of attractiveness to the opposite sex. We discuss the relevance and applicability of evolutionary interpretations of our data and, contrary to predictions, provide evidence of stabilizing selection acting on testosterone through mate preferences.

The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727-1852

The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727-1852

As múltiplas faces de um rosto feminino

This paper discusses the relations of interaction created by different languages in the construction of complex texts presented by the media and the paper also considers the methodological issues arising from the description of such texts, to which several languages concur. From there, the paper analyses the production process involving signification and meaning of a black and white captioned photographic text, namely, the closed close-up of the feminine face of a rock-androll singer, which allows different readings, depending on the enphasis given to the different possible articulations between the meanings. The way these different meanings overlap explains the textual signification, which retrieves the course the feminine has run in the last fifty years in the western culture.

Nature, Craft, Domesticity, and the Culture of Consumption: the Feminine Face of Design in Italy, 1945–70

SummaryThis article sets out to outline the way in which existing narratives dealing with the development of modern design in post-1945 Italy have ignored those aspects of the story which do not concur with a characterization of that phenomenon that relies on the concepts of rationality, mass production and the impact of new materials. By focusing on and elaborating a number of ‘other’ themes—namely those of nature, craft, domesticity and the culture of consumption—this study sets out to redress this imbalance and to introduce the possibility of a new reading of modern design in Italy which can be seen to be rooted in a set of cultural values which are more obviously feminine’ in nature.

Feminine Faces of Leadership: Beyond Structural-Functionalism?

Leadership continues to be a central focus for research in educational administration. Until recently, many studies about leadership have been based largely on the experiences of white males and interpreted based on the structural-functionalist perspective. In this paper the writer explores the phenomenon of leadership through the eyes and experiences of six women leaders who are school principals. The findings are from a recently completed phenomenological study of six women principals’ lived experiences with leadership.

At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst (review)

Reviewed by: At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst Jacalyn Claes (bio) At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst by Carol Flinders. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998, 369 pp., $22.00 hardcover. Carol Flinders joins her life passions of spirituality and feminism by exploring their inherent dichotomies as well as their possibilities for empowerment. Flinders takes the reader back to the Middle Ages and the lives of the women who are Christian mystics to show the significance to women of their relationship with the Divine. At first glance, these women seem to be handmaidens who submitted themselves willfully to the [End Page 213] patriarchal structure of the Church. However on closer inspection and in the context of their time, these women were radical resisters who redefined the Divine with female attributes and who, by their actions, challenged women’s right to define theology. As these women entered the deepest parts of themselves through meditation they discovered forms of spirituality uncontaminated by patriarchy. They saw the face of the Divine embodied in them as women and, as their meditation deepened, they experienced an increased flow of creativity, energy, and stamina. The tenets of feminism and spiritual practice are made clear from a contemporary perspective; Flinders then suggests a course for navigating the dichotomy. Four themes emerge to form a foundation for spiritual practice: silence, self-naughting, redirecting desires, and enclosure. Silence is a bedrock of spiritual practice and spiritual seekers are urged to be still and wait for the Divine. On the other hand, feminists urge a woman not to silence her voice, but to speak her truth. Flinders calls for discernment in this area, in knowing when to speak and when to seek counsel and wait. There is also the important receptive skill of listening that is necessary for speech to have impact. There is a “difference between having permission to speak and enjoying the hope that someone might actually listen to you” (65). The task of putting others first and vanquishing self-will that is inherent in self-naughting are skills that are designed to lead men who have been in power to be open to the spirit. These are skills that do not lead women to a greater openness to the Divine. Flinders urges women to focus on loving self rather than on being selfless. In focusing on the third task there is a need to embrace dichotomy. On the one hand, as Gandhi advised, a woman must be able to say no to herself if she wishes to be mobilized to carry out civil disobedience. Still, many of us are alienated from what matters most to us or are unable to recognize it when it comes. Therefore, we must also practice attunement to our desires and not simply work on dismissing them. As desires become known, a woman may be naturally led to the fourth task of enclosure. Finding a safe place where a woman can be her whole self may lead a woman to “a room of her own” where she can have quiet reflection to begin or end her day of accomplishment. In practicing these tasks, the “feminine face of God is made visible through her, and other women see new reasons to believe in themselves” (138). After laying the foundation for the necessity of spiritual practice for feminism, Flinders then turns her attention to the importance of feminist action in spirituality. In the second half of the book, Flinders details the abduction and murder of a young female acquaintance and uses her personal reflection to elucidate the misogyny that is rampant in our culture. The connection between violence against women and patriarchy is briefly [End Page 214] but powerfully made. Flinders states that men who deal out violence against women are “the unacknowledged but systematically groomed enforcers of a system of values and priorities that it seemed to me as inaccurate to identify as anything but patriarchy”(212). This book is a good first effort on a controversial subject. Flinders does an admirable job of describing the tension that many women experience between their spiritual and feminist beliefs. By...

Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism by Kathy Alexis Psomiades (review)

8 8 Victorian Review Dickens's anxiety about the legibility of class, women, the body and "significatory excess" (82) causes him to turn to the scar in order to "substitute fixity for [the] instability" of the blush (82). Mortification, in Dickens, becomes violence. O'Farrell situates Dickens's novel in a context of a number of novels concerned with scarred or marked characters whose identity is comfortingly fixed by their inability to evade or eliminate these marks. "Writing about bodies", O'Farrell observes, "resembles and generates a desire to write on them" (85). The teleology which O'Farrell adopts has its strengths and weaknesses. It offers a lineage of literary treatments of the body, helpfully positioning each novel in response to an earlier statement. The weakness of the approach is that it grants Austen's work a kind of magisterial and originary quality which may or may not be justified. It also does not explain why Dickens and Gaskell might have responded so differently, writing in similar historical circumstances. Because O'Farrell does not concern herself with history, the changes in the body's perceived legibility float free of any explanatory framework; they just are (although there is some explicit connection to the history of literary style). O'FarreH's last full chapter (preceding a brief conclusion) takes as its subject "The Mechanics of Confusion", and proffers short readings of a number of texts, by Braddon, Trollope, Eliot, and especially James, ending with Rushdie's Shame as a novel in which the blush of self-consciousness as a topic is combined with self conscious narrative style. In the novels O'Farrell reads in this chapter, she finds the blush to be no longer an indicator of legibility, but an index of illegibility — of the confusions of instability, both social and physical, which is it charged with representing. Altogether, O'Farrell provides a fascinating and illuminating series of close readings, well worth the perusal of readers interested in these texts. PAMELA K. GILBERT University of Florida Kathy Alexis Psomiades. Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. 241. $39.50 US (cloth). It is quite easy, if troubling, to take for granted what Kathy Alexis Psomiades calls the "feminine face" (1) of nineteenth-century aestheticist visual and literary texts. In Beauty's Body Psomiades Reviews89 suggests that the most apparent and seemingly obvious feature of aestheticism — the feminine images which are "the central visual objects and occasions for metaphor of aestheticist art" (Psomiades 1) — remains unresolved. The sinister and lovely women inhabiting, say, D.G. Rossetti's paintings present an insistent and burdened femininity that almost demands feminist attention. While Psomiades admits that such attention has yielded impressive results, she argues that current scholarship has understood femininity as merely symptomatic or characteristic of aestheticism. This book brings together an expansive range of texts from Tennyson to Michael Field (approximately the latter half of the nineteenth-century) to demonstrate that images of femininity "play an integral part in the cultural work aestheticism does" (Psomiades 2). Aestheticism becomes constitutively gendered as feminine, Psomiades argues, as representations of femininity come to serve as the point of mediation between aestheticism's claim to an autonomous and privatized art and the dominant bourgeois commodity culture. The real work of Beauty's Body is evident not so much in its selection of texts (which are largely familiar) or in its textual analyses (which are not particularly close or sustained) but in the theoretical leverage applied to the primary material. The salient feature of this work is its generally successful attempt to cast a theoretical focus which avoids the pitfalls and harnesses the strengths of both Marxist and feminist critiques. Psomiades draws upon the strong critical history produced by theorists of Victorian gender and sexuality such as Thais Morgan, Nancy Armstrong and Griselda Pollock yet manages to keep her analysis clear of the temptation to read aestheticist (especially preRaphaelite ) texts as either resistant to or complicit with the dominant patriarchal Victorian culture. Psomiades avoids the feminist line of inquiry which leads to the stultifying dichotomy of "subversive" vs. "conservative" — treating representations as though they were teleological political agents. Instead, she reads aestheticist femininity...

A marriage made in heaven: the sexual politics of Hebrew and Yiddish

With remarkably original formulations, Naomi Seidman examines the ways that Hebrew, the Holy Tongue, and Yiddish, the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews, came to represent the masculine and feminine faces, respectively, of Ashkenazic Jewish culture. Her sophisticated history is the first book-length exploration of the sexual politics underlying the 'marriage' of Hebrew and Yiddish, and it has profound implications for understanding the centrality of language choices and ideologies in the construction of modern Jewish identity. Seidman particularly examines this sexual-linguistic system as it shaped the work of two bilingual authors, S Y Abramovitsh, the 'grand-father' of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature; and, Dvora Baron, the first modern woman writer in Hebrew (and a writer in Yiddish as well).She also provides an analysis of the roles that Hebrew 'masculinity' and Yiddish 'femininity' played in the Hebrew-Yiddish language wars, the divorce that ultimately ended the marriage between the languages. Theorists have long debated the role of mother and father in the child's relationship to language. Seidman presents the Ashkenazic case as an illuminating example of a society in which 'mother tongue' and 'father tongue' are clearly differentiated. Her work speaks to important issues in contemporary scholarship, including the psychoanalysis of language acquisition, the feminist critique of Zionism, and the nexus of women's studies and Yiddish literary history.