Feminine Form Research Articles

Female Representations and Presences in Romanian First World War Commemorative Art.

Art does not represent reality, but it can be an expression of it. Artists always used real-life experiences, including such events as revolutions, wars, etc. as a source for their works. At the same time, political and religious leaders used artistic, visual language for promoting their military victories or the supremacy of their power or faith. So, artworks, buildings, sculptures, or paintings were valuable tools for propaganda. Art can be used as a manifestation of political power or as a form of protesting against it. Sometimes artists were asked to represent abstract values like liberty, victory, peace, or the nation. In such circumstances, artists used the feminine form and not only because the notions were feminine nouns. Considering these general premises, my study explores the female representations and presences in Romanian First World War commemorative art. The study examines how the feminine form was used in the First World War monuments. The personification of abstract notions was examined, together with the presence of real feminine figures in this type of art, and Romanian women’s involvement in creating and sponsoring these kinds of monuments. In addition, the study intends to assess the impact and the extent to which people in general, and women in particular, resonated with these monumental works of art. The main sources for this approach were the public monuments built during the interwar period as part of the commemoration practices of the war. Given the context, reference is also made to other works of art having female representations, created by the same artists who created the monuments under review.

Labors of Love: Sex, Work, and Good Mothering in the Globalizing City

While feminist scholarship has worked to expand theorizations of sex work as reproductive labor, fewer scholars elaborate on sex workers’ role in caring work as mothers. This article draws on interviews with fifty-two cisgender women sex workers in Bangalore to argue that, for them, sex work is central to being a good mother, in a context of increasing economic precarity combined with intensified demands on mothers to provide children with middle-class consumer goods. Tracing interviewees’ paths through sex work reveals how sex workers provide necessary social and economic resources within the family while sex work allows them to attain forms of respectable femininity that other livelihood possibilities might foreclose. These navigations, for these sex workers, puncture patriarchal ideals of masculine protection as well as the neoliberal promise of upward mobility. Further, their accounts help complicate accounts of sex workers’ reproductive labor, showing how they navigate multiple gendered economic arrangements to carve out spaces of autonomy, dignity, and pride.

Searching for the Forest among the Trees

Searching for the Forest among the Trees

Gendering the everyday state: Muslim women, claim-making & brokerage in India

ABSTRACT This ethnographic article focuses on interactions between poor Muslim women, various intermediaries/brokers, and the Indian state. The article illustrates the complexities of claim-making and the forms of subjugation/marginalisation Muslim women experience when attempting to access resources, documents or paperwork. Contrary, however, to many representations of Muslim women’s engagements with the state, we also draw out agentive aspects as women hustle and negotiate to make claims and assert citizenship rights. Outcomes are variegated but also incorporate some women in brokerage roles, challenging assumptions regarding state/people mediation in India which foregrounds male brokers. The empirical detail is situated in a theoretical context incorporating gendered distinctions between shifting imaginaries of ‘nation’ and lived experiences of the ‘everyday state’. In a context where ‘nation’ has been evoked and articulated as a feminine form – through evocations of mata (mother) – we show how shifts towards a masculine imaginary, symbolised within Hindu-nationalist discourses, impacts Muslim women’s subjective experiences. We also illustrate that, whilst gendered imaginaries of ‘the nation’ are shifting, the ‘everyday state’ has long been experienced as a masculinised formation. Here we show how embodied involvements with the everyday state were constituted through gendered bureaucratic histories, spatial configurations, urban cosmologies and broader ideologies.

Computer Analysis of New Language Norms Usage in Ukrainian Online Mass-Media

Introduction. In 2019, a new version of spelling was approved in Ukraine. However, Ukrainian mass media experiences some problems with the new norms. Meanwhile, the correct usage of language in mass media is extremely important, because journalistic texts have a large audience and can be used by readers as a certain model. Thus, it’s important to discover specifics of new norms usage in online mass media to understand the level of the norms compliance. Relevance and purpose. The purpose of the article is to propose an algorithm for computer analysis of texts, which allows to investigate compliance with new spelling norms by leading Ukrainian online media, as well as to determine whether the situation in the media changes over time. This study is relevant, because a comprehensive study of the new language norms usage in online massmedia is lacking, scientists focused their attention on individual norms and the number of texts in sample wasn’t large. Methodology. Computer analysis: with Python programs more than 8 thousand news items were collected from the leading online media. Vocabularies with old and new language norms were designed. Comparative analysis: usage of foreign components, variable spelling changes, spelling of the international sites and Internet resources, spelling of certain words were compared in the mass media in 2019 and 2021. Results. It was determined that the authors of the publications did not adapt to the variable spelling changes. Regarding mandatory changes, problems were observed with the spelling of the names of international websites and Internet resources, as well as some words. The situation with the use of feminine forms was the most stable. Spelling of words with the first foreign component, as well as with part «half/piv-» was observed in two versions: old and new spelling. Conclusions. The situation with the new spelling in Ukrainian online media is improving over time, although the acceptance of the new norms is still very slow. Moreover, this situation is observed precisely in the segment of quality Ukrainian media, which adhere to professional standards and are an example for many journalists to follow. With this in mind, we recommend that the editors of the online mass-media take measures to improve the situation.

GODDESS WORSHIP AND THE DANCING FORM: EXPLORING RITUAL IN INDIAN PREHISTORY AND SOUTH INDIAN ANTIQUITY

The Indian subcontinent has been one of the regions of the world where the worship of goddesses has been amongst the most longstanding. The seminal work of Marija Gimbutas on the Neolithic and Copper Age settlements of southeastern Europe and particularly her explorations into the feminine forms of the period as possible expressions of Goddess worship have implications for the material culture of the Indian subcontinent in ways that have perhaps not been adequately addressed. Equally, insights into some of the surviving trajectories of rituals and iconographies of goddess worship might serve to throw more light on enigmatic aspects of archaeological finds including from the Neolithic, not just in the context of the subcontinent but elsewhere in antiquity. The paper also sets out to explore the place of the dancing form in ritual particularly with respect to goddess worship, which emerged as a more distinctive feature of Indian antiquity than in many other parts of the world. Keywords: Goddess, Neolithic, Harappan, South India, Dance, Ritual.

Pronoun Variants in Standard Lithuanian: Diamesic Dimension

The paper deals with variants of personal pronouns, specifically the third person singular nominative case jis/jisai ‘he’ and ji/jinai ‘she’ in Lithuanian. The existence of such variation has been so far ignored by most linguists. The variation of the use of these short and long variants is analysed within the language “architecture” framework first introduced by G. Berruto (1987) and involving different dimensions, of which the diastratic, diaphasic and diamesic are discussed in more detail. The use of pronouns is studied using the data from eight different written and spoken Lithuanian corpora and the proportions of such use are compared. The analysis shows that the variation in the use of pronoun variants is overwhelmingly associated with the diamesic dimension, i.e., the written language typically uses the short variants only while in the spoken language all four pronoun variants are used. The proportion of the long variants increases as the spontaneity of speech increases. There is a difference, however, in the use of masculine and feminine forms as the long variant of the masculine pronoun is used in one third of the cases while the long variant of the feminine pronouns is found in as much as 80 percent of cases in the spoken variety. Other dimensions do not seem to impact this variation to a notable extent given the data available.

Leader or Leaderess? Consequences of Using Feminatives for the Perception of Leadership

According to the Implicit Leadership Theory, leadership roles are assigned in the process of social construction and depend upon the level of congruence with the cognitive representation of a leader. Previous studies show that this cognitive representation is much more likely to involve a leader being a male rather than a female. The article presents the results of an experiment aimed at tentatively verifying whether the use of the feminine forms could increase the cognitive availability of the representation of a woman as a leader. In the experiment, 135 teams (N = 307 respondents) were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions: 1) generic instruction (without the use of feminatives, “Please, draw a leader”), 2) inclusive instruction (using feminatives, “Please, draw a leader/leaderess”). The results showed a significant interaction between the experimental manipulation and the proportion of women in the team. The use of feminine forms increased the percentage of females drawn as leaders only in teams with a high female-to-male ratio.

Gender asymmetries in ellipsis: An experimental comparison of markedness and frequency accounts in English

Bobaljik & Zocca (2011) argue that ellipsis reveals the existence of (at least) two classes of gender-paired nouns: in theactor/actressclass, the grammatically feminine form is specified for conceptual gender, while the unaffixed form is unspecified, exemplifying the classic markedness asymmetry (Jakobson 1932); in theprince/princessclass, both forms are specified for conceptual gender. Here we test two theories of this asymmetry: one that encodes markedness in the linguistic representation (e.g. Merchant 2014, Sudo & Spathas 2016, and Saab 2019), and one that traces the asymmetry to differences in the relative frequency of the forms in each pair (Haspelmath 2006). The frequency approach predicts that the size of the asymmetries (as quantified by acceptability judgments) will correlate with the size of the relative frequency ratio for each pair. We test this prediction in two experiments: the first is a curated set of 16 pairs in English, and the second is a test of 58 pairs that nearly exhausts such pairs in English. We use frequencies from COCA (Davies 2008) to test the prediction of the frequency approach. Our results suggest that the relative frequency hypothesis is not an empirically adequate competitor for the explanation of gender asymmetries.

Female Crime and Delinquency: A Kaleidoscope of Changes at the Intersection of Gender and Age

This article discusses the role that gender and age play in female crime and delinquency in Portugal, drawing on the voices of female offenders across different generations—childhood, youth, and adulthood. Based on the analysis of 49 interviews with female offenders, it explores the ways in which these girls and women construct and account for their own criminal behavior. The results reveal a kaleidoscope of changes cutting across generational groups, punctuated by increasing involvement of younger groups in offending as a form of emancipation. Young and older female offenders show different patterns of offending, which reflect multiple and ambivalent old and new forms of femininity. Girls’ and women’s paths both to and in offending have their own idiosyncrasies. They also reflect the way gender is being constantly reconfigured and reconstructed through time, and in different social and institutional contexts.

Shelley Jacksons’s Gender Politics in Patchwork Girl (1995): a Cyborg Approach

As a complex fragmented and “syncopated” hypertext, Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson interpellates its reader to place hze in the position of multiple, interconnected subject whose task is to piece together the creature in and of the text, through the physical action of clicking on the hyperlinks. Piecing the female body and the body of the text together in order to read “herstory” forces the reader to adopt a position that ceases to be one of mastery and domination traditionally associated with the reading of print fiction. Rather, Patchwork Girl prompts the reader into adopting a gaze that is “modular and fragmentary” and facilitates her active participation in the textual criticity inherent in the rhizomatic form of the hypertext. By appealing to the reader’s demiurgic powers of imagination, the hypertext replaces the identity paradigm with the performance paradigm. The patched body of the monstrous female serves as a powerful metaphor for the hypertext itself and its capacity as a “feminine form” (Jackson) to deconstruct the binaries and boundaries introduced by modern science at the service of male hybris, which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, one of the key intertexts of Patchwork Girl, forcefully denounced. Thanks to its paradoxical materiality, the hypertext equates the female creature’s body with the monstrous form generating it. Thus, the technological medium makes it possible for Jackson to graft the text as body onto the body as text to deconstruct the logic of male-dominated technocapitalism. Engaging with the hypertext implies for the reader the letting go of the binaries (text/body, text/sex, text/technology) structuring traditional reading. Thus Patchwork Girl sollicits a “cyborg” approach (Hayles) which welcomes and performs multiple, hybrid forms of interconnectedness allowing for the creation of new subjective modalities in and of the text.

A Patchwork of Femininities: Working-Class Women’s Fluctuating Gender Performances in a Pakistani Market

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts. They have studied multiple femininities in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and be enacted by the same individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capital at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Furthermore, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, I explain the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.

Grammatical Gender and Declension Class in Language Change: A Study of the Loss of Feminine Gender in Norwegian

In this paper, we investigate an ongoing change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian. Previous research has shown that the feminine form of the indefinite article is quickly disappearing from several dialects, which has led to claims that the feminine gender is being lost from the language. We have carried out a study of the status of the feminine in possessives across five age groups of speakers of the Tromsø dialect. Our findings show that the prenominal possessives are affected by the change to the same extent as the indefinite article, while forms that have been argued not to be exponents of gender (the definite suffix and the postnominal possessive) are generally unaffected.

The gender gap in access to finance: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

Using gender as a theoretical framework, we analyse the dynamics of debt and equity financing during the COVID-19 pandemic for a cross-country sample of 8,921 private firms. We provide evidence of a slight gender bias in debt financing, with creditors favouring female entrepreneurs when dealing with cash flow problems during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find no evidence of gender bias in equity financing. The results are robust after controlling for a larger number of firm-specific characteristics and selection bias. We challenge the assumption of “gender-based discrimination” in the debt market, speculating that in the context of high uncertainty, prototypical forms of femininity may be advantageous as financial institutions seek to hedge their risk by favouring more conservative borrowers.

О ПРЕЗИМЕНУ ПАЛАВЕСТРА И СЛИЧНИМ ПРЕЗИМЕНИМА

In this article, the etymology of the Serbian surname Palavestra and similar Serbian surnames (e. g. Palonga, Palovrtić) has been scrutinized. Their first part, Pala-/Palo-, has been etymologized from Dalmatian Romance (and – maybe from there – Balkan Romance as well) word *pala/*pal-o- “sword”. Also, the partial possibility of obscene meaning of this word in some of the surnames mentioned has been scrutinized, in addition to what the etymological suggestions of few Serbian terms for distant male ancestors has been given: parđipan, (?) *kurđup, kurlebalo, kurcula, sukurebalo, sukurdov with feminine form sukurdača, (?) * surdepač, *ožmikur, kurajber, maybe even beli orao

The Women of SunLand: Narratives of Non-Compliant Women in the Daily Sun Tabloid Newspaper, South Africa

Post-apartheid, patriarchal gender relations and the violence they generate continue to contradict the promise of the Bill of Rights contained in Chapter 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, which guarantees women a range of rights. How these contradictions are represented within popular media has implications for the achievement of gender justice, for they offer ways of imagining the forms that such justice might take. One popular local publication is the Daily Sun, a tabloid newspaper. Rather than simply aligning itself with the gender status quo, as tabloids in other spaces are sometimes accused of doing, the Daily Sun attempts both to critique and to form its readers’ social and gender identities as members of “SunLand”, the tabloid's imagined community. Using Connell's constructive model of the gender order, and interpretive methods in line with critical discourse analysis, including lexicalisation and narrative analysis, the author analyses the tabloid's 2011 coverage of women whose non-conforming and resistant femininities challenge patriarchal gender relations in township spaces. The findings suggest that while certain forms of non-compliant femininities are condemned, others are validated and the violent masculinities they resist censored. That non-compliant femininities can be also violent is a troubling feature of SunLand's gender order.

Goddess Worship and New Spirituality in the Postmodern World: a Brief Overview

Purpose. The paper aims at examining the phenomenon of the rebirth of the Goddess in the contemporary world. The author has used the hermeneutic approach and cultural-historical method, as well as the anthropological integrative approach. Theoretical basis. The study is based on the ideas of Carol Christ, Margot Adler, Miriam Simos, and Jean Shinoda Bolen. Originality. The rebirth of the Goddess is not a deconstruction of the God. The face of the Goddess is one side of the binary opposition "Goddess – God". Life on the earthly plane presupposes masculine and feminine dualism. However, these polarities are not mutually exclusive and mutually suppressive, but complementary to each other. The return of the Goddess to the throne and a profound appreciation of Femininity is a necessary step forward in establishing true equality and restoring lost harmony. As humanity returns to the Absolute that transcends duality, as divinity is revealed in feminine and masculine forms, and, finally, as humans get in touch with their true self, the two faces, feminine and masculine, will inevitably merge. Conclusions. Identifying herself with the images of the Goddesses, a woman develops self-awareness and self-acceptance that contribute greatly to her reintegration with a wider spiritual reality. The cult of the Goddess finds practical application in women’s lives. These are magical rituals, work with the archetypes, life-changing tours. Recognizing her right to the fullness of being, a woman overcomes rigid gender roles and stereotypes, ceases to be an object of manipulation and becomes the supreme arbiter of her own life.

The Future is Female! Trans(human) Voices of Cher and Anohni

In this article, I want to present trans(human) Cher and Anohni’s voice qualities. Both singers represent ambiguous and queer forms of femininity that denaturalizes the concept of gender and entangles the listener into a transgressive aesthetic experience. By using the cyborg metaphor proposed by Donna Haraway and the concept of the grain of voice by Roland Barthes, I want to show how a female voice can become a critical form of resistance to the patriarchal and misogynistic conception of femininity.

I’m Taking Back My Body (The Female Body in the ‘Purity’ Culture)

This paper aims to analyse the American purity movement by examining how the female body became part of an ideology offered as the most viable solution to moral and cultural crises and how this generated counterreactions from the members of the evangelical community (insiders and outsiders alike) since the evangelical discourse on body with its gender-based expressions produces schematised gender constructions and toxic forms of masculinity and femininity that generate confusion, shame and guilt. The four American writers mentioned here (Dianna Anderson, Bromleigh McCleneghan, Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey) agree that biblical womanhood is a myth; a woman’s body is not what “purity” culture suggests it should be; human sexuality is more than premarital abstinence and a set of rules; sacredness is not the appanage of marital sex. The red thread of all four writings is given by the non-dualistic thinking (rejecting Neoplatonic dichotomous separation between body and spirit) that asserts women’s right to body ownership, a sexual ethics based on consent, mutuality, safety and respect, gender equality and partnership. Anderson, McCleneghan, Evans and Bessey are also among the fiercest contesters of the “purity” movement, an American evangelical movement that reduced purity to its genital dimension and salvation to purification of sexual desire.

Blue is for boys: postfeminist continuations of gender, body and hue in UK magazines, 2009–2018

From 2009 to 2018, social attitudes towards gender in the UK and other western countries significantly shifted, with greater awareness of gender stereotyping and the objectification of women’s bodies in the media due to popular social media campaigns. Arguably, postfeminism has provided a channel in which tropes traditionally critiqued by feminism, such as the objectification or stereotyping of the female body, are appropriated by consumption, and reconceptualised as empowering forms of femininity. In two phases, this study explores if and how this social shift has been translated into how men and women’s bodies are presented to male and female audiences, respectively, by magazines that claim to represent and reflect them. Firstly, content of the front covers from six popular men’s and women’s magazines was analysed to identify the framing, clothing, and staging of the body. A second phase adds further novelty to this study by employing a cultural analytics approach to explore the relationship between gender and hue by analysing the brightness, saturation and hue values of each image. The findings show some continuities in how men and women are presented, despite significant changes in which magazines presented these continuities. Furthermore, the colour attributes of the images underlined significant differences in how men and women are presented for viewing. It is argued that these continuities and changes represent a reinforcement of patriarchal gendered relations (including gendered associations with specific colours) re-imagined through a postfeminist logic.