Feminine Figure Research Articles

The Quiet Strength: Exploring Femininity in Lahiri’s Literary Gaps

The present research paper focuses on the compelling form and figure of femininity articulated throughout Lahiri’s diverse literary repertoire. Lahiri tells stories usually referred to as narratives of identity, migration and double loyalties that deepen the understanding of the lives of South Asian women. Interestingly, the study exposes a powerful silence amid Lahiri’s women while reading between the lines of these gaps in writing— the silences and omissions— untold stories, silently commanders even if they seem not to know it: an image emerges as Lahiri simultaneously deconstructs probably all that is known about femininity and make firm recusal against patriarchy. Through close readings informed by feminist literary theory and postcolonial discourse, it argues that Lahiri’s women are active agents interacting with multiple levels of inequality related to gender, race and class. An honest effort has been made to contribute not only to scholarship on Lahiri’s writing but more broadly to literary theory related to all contests that bridge race with autonomy from mainstream views. The article also celebrates Lahiri’s part in growing the ranks of South Asian women writers.

পুরাণের সর্প দেবী: লৈঙ্গিক ও সমাজ চিহ্নতাত্ত্বিক বিশ্লেষণ

Mythology captures a distinctive aspect of cultural folklore, usually emerging from the imaginative realms of ancient societies. Despite its magical veneer, myths foster profound insights into societal realities. This article explores existing societal insights into the Snake goddess archetype in mythologies from different cultures across the globe. It depicts how this godly feminine figure intersects with prevailing patriarchal structures, scrutinizing stereotypical gender roles, sexuality, and cultural attitudes. However, three foundational textbooks, A Dictionary of World Mythology (1986), Gods and Goddesses: A Treasury of Deities and Tales from World Mythology (1996), and The World Mythology Collection (2022) have been consulted that provided essential guidelines for selecting principal mythologies examined in this research. Additionally, the present study selects eight mythologies (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, East Asia, Mesoamerican, African, and Celtic Mythology) based on three main factors: geographic locations, cultural diversity and ancient literature. In light of Social Semiotics, Representation theory, and Postmodern feminist theory and following purposive sampling this article comprehensively analyzes twelve snake goddesses across these mythologies to interpret their cultural heritage, traditions, and symbolism. Nevertheless, the concept of ‘shwarpa devi’ or Snake goddess is analysed as a symbolic representation of power, resilience, and sensuality, which is often constrained by societal expectations and culturally defined subordinate roles of women. Despite the evolving positive image and archetype of Snake goddesses in different cultures, the patriarchal society always tends to marginalize women's contributions to human civilization.

Abdominoplasty Combined with Hip Expansion by Fat Grafting: An Evolution in Waistline Contouring.

Recent sociocultural trends show numerous patients requesting more curvaceous profiles. Abdominoplasty techniques had evolved into a combination of fascial plication with liposuction of the lateral torso, but often left patients with "boxy" profiles. The senior author performs 360-degree liposuction of abdomen and back, hip expansion with structural fat grafting, excision of redundant soft tissue, and wide plication of abdominal fascia to create the desired profile. Retrospective review of patient charts and CosmetAssure claims of female patients treated from January 2014 through May 2022 identified 1125 patients with a minimum 6-month follow-up who underwent abdominoplasty using 360-degree liposuction of waist, back, and flanks; wide plication of the rectus abdominis muscle; and hip expansion with fat grafting. Authors reviewed pre- and postoperative photographs to evaluate the technique's effectiveness. Hip expansion with fat grafting combined with abdominoplasty was successfully achieved in 1125 cases. Average age was 38 years. Average body mass index was 29 kg per m2. Average amount of aspirated fat was 1896 mL. Average amount of fat injected into the bilateral hips was 493 mL. Complication rates were comparable to those observed in similar abdominoplasty series reported in the literature. Abdominoplasty combining liposuction of the waist, back, abdomen, and flanks followed by wide fascial plication and expansion of the hips with fat grafting is a safe, reproducible technique for female patients. This technique prioritizes the hip anatomical area as an aesthetic consideration in abdominoplasty and facilitates creating a harmonious hip-to-waist ratio characteristic of a feminine figure.

Gender Roles and Translation in the Book of Proverbs

The editors of Proverbs structured the book to counter traditional negative sentiments about women. Proverbs such as 19.13, “a stupid child is a ruin to a father, and a wife’s quarreling is a continual dripping of rain” (NRSVue), are misogynistic, presenting problems for the contemporary reader and arguably for the ancient editor as well. Their strategy to combat these old sayings included beginning and ending the book with positive feminine figures, Wisdom in the prologue (Prov 1–9) and the Strong Woman in Prov 31.10-31, and using negative masculine stereotypes as a foil for the negative feminine ones. Recent translations that use gender-neutral language mask these tropes about men’s behavior.

Nachleben der Antike, Time, and Restitution: Notes for a Nocturnal Jurisprudence of the Image

Justice is usually represented as a feminine figure holding a pair of scales and a sword. The history of that image is relatively recent and has attracted a great deal of attention. However, a different appreciation of it may come from a “nocturnal” jurisprudence seeking to foreground its presence and effects in the transmission of modern culture and so also of law. In this essay, I take my cue from Aby Warburg and the Pathosformeln that, he suggested, can be glimpsed through certain material objects inherited from the past—specifically, Dürer’s The Death of Orpheus and other related visual art. I then consider what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘the image of the image’ emphasising the timely quality of those images and I ask, with Georges Didi-Huberman, whether it might not be high time to “return” that which those images ostensibly show. The associations established in this essay between those different insights may help to recognise the extent to which the innumerable images to do with justice found at the four corners of the world can make the cognitive and emotional experience of those encountering them a rather more complex and potentially problematic affair than it may be at first supposed. What, on closer inspection, can those images give us to see? Are the ancient configurations they sometimes transmit not made up of crystals of historical memory carrying dormant energies that could be suddenly reignited in unpredictable ways? Should the task ahead not be, in some cases, one of restitution—the inapparent gift that turns the “blotted-out” into something striking that can be then handed over and known? These, I argue, are some of the questions a “nocturnal” jurisprudence of the image can be about.

SCURT DEMERS COMPARATIV ASUPRA FIGURII FEMININE ÎN DRAMATURGIA LUI LUCIAN BLAGA ȘI VALERIU ANANIA

The aim of this paper is to explore, from a comparative mytho-symbolic perspective, the ways in which the feminine figure is configured in the dramatic texts of Lucian Blaga and Valeriu Anania. The foundation of this approach lies in the classical symbolic opposition between angel and demon, as it highlights two distinct yet complementary faces of femininity: the angelic woman, a variation of the Eternal Feminine, and the demonic woman, perpetually dark, whose erotic fascination spills into the realm of destructive lunar power, reminiscent of malevolent mermaids. In this regard, the angelic figure of femininity will inevitably be associated with Mira from Lucian Blaga’s dramatic text Master Manole (1927). As an archetypal variation of the saviour woman, Mira, through her own death, manages to fulfil the creative destiny of the man, while also facilitating the re-signification of all existence by transforming the profane space into a sacred one once with the raising of the monastery in which she is embedded. In contrast, Iovanca from Valeriu Anania’s dramatic poem Master Manole (1968) embodies the demonic face of femininity. Resembling the mermaids who disturb a man’s peace, Iovanca succeeds in destabilizing the existence of the devout painter Safirin, becoming a death-bringing temptation. At the same time, the paper will also focus on Simina, the young wife whom Iovanca manages to inoculate, in the spirit of a Mephistophelian reminiscence, a sense of rebellion. This transformation will symbolically turn her into one of the “demonic women” which Manole believes demolish the walls of the monastery during the night.

Sleeping Capitalism Away: On Private Property and the Fantasy of Idleness in Michal Ben-Naftali and Ottessa Moshfegh

Abstract: The article deals with the dominant presence of feminine figures who choose to do nothing in recent Israeli literature. The article discusses this recurrent fantasy from a materialist perspective, arguing that it stems from changes in global capitalism's forms of production and neoliberal ideology. To do so, the article discusses the works of Israeli author Michal Ben-Naftali in which just such a reclining protagonist takes center stage, and the novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation written by the American author Ottessa Moshfegh, which follows a similar fantasy of "doing nothing." In doing so, the article shows how recent dominant trends in Israeli literature should actually be understood from broad and global perspectives — the comparison of similar fantasies under ostensibly different cultural contexts serves as a form of historicizing. And, following, the article shows how the limits, contours, and contradictions of neoliberal capitalism are both expressed and repressed in Moshfegh's and Ben-Naftali's prose.

Murmurs and Miracles

Abstract This article explores how early Pentecostals read, interpreted, and utilized the character of Miriam within the Old Testament. Despite the prominent focus upon masculine Old Testament figures within pentecostal history, the reception of feminine figures within Pentecostalism is less clear. As such, this article seeks to uncover how Miriam the prophetess was presented and interpreted within early pentecostal literature, with the emphasis on such subjects as divine healing, dancing, support for women in ministry, faithfulness, and murmuring. These interpretations of Miriam demonstrate positive and negative appraisals of her character and reflect her multifaceted reception within Pentecostalism. Finally, this article concludes with a summary of these interpretations and a call for continued reflection upon historic readings within pentecostal history.

Being-in-blackfeminineflesh

In the Dirty Southern vernacular medium of the twerk video, performances of eroticized Black femininity by digital performance artist BeTTy BuTT and others knead into traumas of ecological dispossession, sexual vulnerability, and patriarchal violence. As an aesthetic survival strategy forged in the Black sexual economies of the contemporary Dirty South, being-in-blackfeminineflesh occasions a critical reappraisal of the performative labors of contemporary Black feminine figures, how our bodyminds witness them, and how we write about them.

Representation of Lian Namang Music In The Besi Pare Ritual With An Ecofeminist Approach

Music is a universal language that can penetrate space and time. However, traditional music requires semi-improvisation to adjust to environmental conditions. Lian Namang's music for the Lamaholot community is a traditional music that tells some of the life philosophies of the predecessor community. One type of Lian Namang music is used in the Lamaholot tradition to personify a feminine figure in the mythology of the goddess of rice. Lian Namang's musical lyrics in rice mythology require contextuality with the times. In connection with the phenomenology that occurs in the Lamaholot culture, that patriarchal culture becomes dominant in the domination of nature and women, it is necessary to hold contextual musical representations based on Lian Namang's music so that they can have a persuasive influence on the Lamaholot community in respecting women and nature as the womb of life. The results of the research are used as a medium to represent the ecofeminist movement, which aims to influence society in responding to patriarchal culture. Masculine representation is not only seen as a centre (androcentric) that dominates and uses a fragmented nature. The mukti trilila theory is one of the foundations that helps humans to continue to adapt their knowledge and skills to the times, so that the noble values of life are passed down from generation to generation.

The Professor's "Women": Gendered Silence and Self-Revelation in Cather's The Professor's House

This paper discusses how the themes of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House and her ban on publishing her private letters affect our future readings of her work. By utilizing close analysis of the text and evidence from Cather’s life, I show how the novel relates to gender narration and the way women tell their own stories. In the novel, Professor St. Peter adopts two dress forms as his “women,” as Tom Outland does with Mother Eve. The dress forms and Mother Eve have no way to share their own stories, causing the male characters to create stories about the figures. This juxtaposes the unique privilege of self-revelation that Cather gives to Outland in “Tom Outland’s Story.” Cather identified herself with Outland through her desire to manage the revelation of her personal life; however, her reticence led to unwarranted speculation about her character. A similarity can be drawn between this aspect of Cather’s image and the feminine figures in The Professor’s House, as the “women” all become what the people around them need them to be. Reading Cather’s novel from this perspective transforms it into a cautionary tale about the consequences of allowing gendered biases to impact our speculation about a figure’s life.

Fashion on Currency: Analysis of the 1977 – 1986 Millinery Fashion in Post-independence Ghana

This article showed interest in millinery displayed pictorially on the currencies as well as the significance of those fashion representations in Ghana’s fashion culture. The article specifically analysed the millinery fashion that featured on currency notes of 1977 and 1986 and the Yaa Asantewaa’s imagery on the currency note of 1984. Three Ghanaian currencies purposively sampled for the study were the Five Cedis note issued on July 4, 1977; the Fifty Cedis note issued on 15th July 1986; and the Twenty Cedis note issued on 15th May 1984. These currency notes were released within nine years interval, that is, between 1977 and 1986. Content analysis of visual images, and social semiotics methods of visual data analysis constituted the method of analysis for the study focusing on the dominant feminine figures on the currency accessorised with millineries. The study put forward those feminine images represented on the Five Cedis, Fifty Cedis, and Twenty Cedis currency notes issued on July 4, 1977, 15th July 1986, and 15th May 1984 respectively that displayed the repertoire of straw-woven and the Akan militaristic millinery fashion in post-independence Ghana. The millinery practices depicted on the currencies embodied historical allusions to Ghanaian women irrespective of economic background and ingrained in the memory of the citizenry the fashioned feminine identities constructed through millinery fashion in relation to the popular culture of twentieth-century Ghana. The selected indigenous millinery-inspired visuals also celebrated female vitality and brought to the fore the visibility of women in the public sphere and represented the epitome of independent women of twentieth-century Ghana who contributed to national development. It also made a strong socio-political fashion statement about the indigenous classic millinery fashion consciousness of Ghanaians and the millinery structural design in use in the post-independence era.

Mata Hari as a New Woman in Paul Coelho’s Novel The Spy: Magnifying Hari’s Subjugation Through A Feminist Lens

This study aimed to analyze the character of Mata Hari as a new woman, who goes to any extent to safeguard her desires and to materialize her dreams in a patriarchal society, where she is systematically kept oppressed and is at last executed. However, she strongly resists discrimination and oppression by demonstrating the traits of a new woman. This study analyzed Hari’s character from a feminist perspective and magnified her strong resistance against subjugation. This study used textual analysis via a qualitative method to explore the newness in Mata Hari’s character. The finding revealed Mata Hari in The Spy is an unusual, powerful, courageous, sensational, free-sighted, and independent woman who dared to defy the conventions of her times. She is not presented as a dependent, weak, and passive woman, as women used to be in her time. She is found as a woman of great charisma and an influential feminine figure.

Mata Hari as a New Woman in Paul Coelho’s Novel The Spy: Magnifying Hari’s Subjugation Through A Feminist Lens

This study aims to analyze the character of Mata Hari as a new woman, who goes to any extent to safeguard her desires and to materialize her dreams in a patriarchal society, where she is systematically kept oppressed and is at last executed. However, she strongly resists discrimination and oppression by demonstrating the traits of a new woman. This study analyzes. Hari’s character from a feminist perspective and magnifies her strong resistance against subjugation. The study uses textual analysis via a qualitative method to explore the newness in Mata Hari’s character. The finding reveals Mata Hari in The Spy is an unusual, powerful, courageous, sensational, free-sighted, and independent woman who dares to defy the conventions of her times. She is not presented as a dependent, weak, and passive woman, as women used to be in her time. She is found as a woman of great charisma and an influential feminine figure.

Women as Frontier‐Makers in the Llibre dels fets of James I of Aragon

AbstractMuch of the reign of James I of Aragon (1213–76) was devoted to the conquest and colonisation of Islamic Majorca and Valencia, as he elaborates in his Llibre dels fets, or Book of Deeds. This article offers a close reading of the role of women and feminine figures in the Llibre, arguing that James portrays them as frontier‐makers who signal and embody the Christianisation of previously Islamic territory. It also explores what the relationship between women and the frontier can tell us about the gendered construction of power in thirteenth‐century Aragon.

The Rise of the Feminine Voice in Thomas Hardy’s “An Imaginative Woman”

This present article deals with the idea of the feminine voice in Thomas Hardy’s short story “An Imaginative Woman”. As a naturalist writer, Hardy portrayed women’s faith as tragic and obscure; this how Ella Marchmill, Hardy’s heroine, encounters nothing but doom and disease when trying to free herself from herascribed duty as the “Angel of the house”. However, it is through her narration that she can challenge the social impositions that were place upon women; their public role and their intimacy. The concept of the“New Woman” rises as a feminine figure that opposes these constraints: a woman who speaks her mind and explores her sexuality by means of her imagination, the only place that does not surrender to male domination

The eropolitical compound: immanence, transcendence and a parasitic operation of patriarchy in Sanskrit literature

Abstract This paper examines a pattern in Sanskrit literature, labelled for convenience the “eropolitical compound”. This is a formula whereby a male protagonist's claiming of a feminine figure is made instrumental to, or tied indissociably with, a political victory or reclamation of control over a public domain. This paper first reviews a number of examples of the motif in well-known works of drama, poetry, and eulogistic inscriptions largely of the fourth–seventh centuries ce, setting these against the particular historical and social contexts in which they occur. In a second step, the motif is identified at work in other genre and historic contexts of Sanskrit tradition, suggesting thereby that the figure also requires treatment at a broader level of analysis. The paper's third and final step is to adopt from Simone de Beauvoir the constructs of immanence, transcendence, and the woman as Other, in order to argue that the eropolitical compound is indeed a kind of formula or persisting theme that cuts across multiple historic and genre contexts, and that it should be seen as a normative construct reflecting and enacting a common strategy of patriarchal cultures.

Into the Wilderness: Tracing the Steps of a Birdlike Wisdom

This paper draws on the threads of Wisdom spirituality that were explored within the context of the history of capitalism and its underpinning ideologies in two papers previously published in the Kenarchy Journal: The Spiralling Dance of Wisdom and Hidden in Plain Sight: reconsidering the value of social reproduction, work and nature. Envisaged as occupying the centre in what I have come to imagine as a Triptych, this third paper works with and through two, sketching an outline of Divine Wisdom, both figurative and as praxis, to add further dimension to what was glimpsed in the earlier papers. Sight of a multi-faceted feminine divinity is first sought out through Walter Brueggemann’s interpretation of the Exodus account as a journey to the common good in an existential struggle against empire forces. To this is added Catherine’s Keller’s “dreamreading” of John’s first-century CE text of Revelation and the “great sign” of the woman clothed with the sun who flees an imperially-charged Dragon to the refuge of the wilderness. Both texts are read together for insinuations of a complex, grammatically feminine figure of Divine Wisdom, whose cosmic and everyday dimensions can be traced in struggles for the common good in opposition to centralising forces of domination. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s feminist biblical inquiry which formed the foundation of the inquiry into Divine Wisdom in the two previous papers is developed by A. Paige Rawson’s queer postcolonial reading from a socioeconomic perspective that further unties Wisdom from masculine/feminine binaries. Correlating with the Shekinah-Hochma-Ruach presence of the two wilderness accounts, the political nature of wild Wisdom is further explored via the Black Studies of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. The central theme of their work, “the undercommons,” suggests a wild, unregulated and ungovernable realm that lies beyond institutions of control. The concept of the fugitive is key to the understanding of space where the colonised, queer, and otherwise marginal make meaning with each other; for the undercommons is not a settled location, but something always there, a way of life in antagonistic relationship to colonialism and capitalism. In particular, Jack Halberstam’s introduction to Moten and Harvey’s book is drawn upon to form a bridge between the wild spatiality of the divine, dynamic, agent and guide who merges from the two wilderness accounts and the politics of the undercommons. The nature of generative struggle – identified in the Exodus and Revelation accounts – is further explored in relation to the politics of the undercommons as outlined by Catherine Keller in The Political Theology of the Earth. The strategic importance of the work of social reproduction, of re-enchantment and re-connection to the earth as sites of social, economic and political transformation is emphasised as part of the concluding section that connects the wilderness divinity to Jesus and the kenarchy project of recognising a loving God who empowers forms of living for the good of both people and the earth.

THREE WOMEN ON THREE FRONTS: THE FEMININE EXPERIENCE OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR AS REFLECTED IN WAR JOURNALS AND LETTERS

The aim of this article is to provide a close reading of two illustrative texts for the feminine version of the war diary during WWI in the Romanian territory, namely Yvonne Blondel’s War Journal: 1916-1917 and Queen Marie’s unabridged version of the diary she kept between 1916 and 1918. The contrastive element is represented by Sextil Pușcariu’s Memoirs, which are relevant from a threefold perspective: gender, geography, and the representation of the feminine figure. The article will focus on six feminine roles: the nurse, the patriot, the diplomat, the wife, the mother, and the writer.

The “Shop Girl” and White Nationalism: White Working-class Women and Femininity in Johannesburg Department Stores, 1930s–1970s

AbstractBased on media stories and union campaigns, this paper tracks the discourses from the 1930s to the 1970s around the ‘shop girl’ in Johannesburg. It argues that the shop girl was a figure of white femininity that complicates the now extensive literature on white women in South Africa through its reproduction of the enduring tension of class difference. Through archival research and interviews, the paper shows how the ‘shop girl’ contributed to an ideology of white nationalism, focused more traditionally around motherhood and domesticity. The embodied labor of white women workers in Johannesburg both relied on their femininity and ensured that the affective labor of service work was a site of contradiction and contestation with white middle class women consumers. Class difference could therefore be contained within the semiotics of white nationhood through the site of consumption and retailing.