Feminine Virtue Research Articles

The Pre-History of White Feminism in Amatory Fiction

This article reads amatory fiction through the image of white women’s tears, and it argues that amatory fiction assists in eighteenth-century racialization by idealizing a feminine affect that mobilizes passivity for status. A spectacle of sympathetic attention, white women’s tears exemplify the affective work of white feminism, which singularly analyzes power through gender. Lacking intersectionality, white feminism upholds white supremacy and enables constituents to wield gender oppression self-servingly. This article locates and deconstructs that affective dynamic in Delarivier Manley’s “The Wife’s Resentment” (1720), Penelope Aubin’s “Conjugal Duty Rewarded” (1721), and Eliza Haywood’s “Female Revenge” (1727). These retellings of heroines navigating adulterous lovers depict feminine virtue as passive and essentialize this virtuous passivity within the logic of whiteness. This narrativization victimizes the heroine and purchases her sympathy, which protects her virtue and maintains the heteropatriarchal standards that initially threatened her. This genealogical consideration reframes the affordances of amatory fiction within hegemonic affect.

Femininity penalties and rewards: obstacles and opportunities for Chinese female entrepreneurs in gender-segregated industries

PurposeThis study aims to answer two questions: (a) what obstacles and opportunities do Chinese female entrepreneurs face when doing business? And (b) how do they negotiate their entrepreneurial careers and gender identities in different gender-segregated markets?Design/methodology/approachThis study uses qualitative research methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews with 41 female entrepreneurs in China and the theoretical lenses of gender role theory and doing gender in entrepreneurship.FindingsThe study findings reveal that Chinese female entrepreneurs face different obstacles and opportunities in gender-segregated industries. Their experiences vary in industries that are mainly occupied by males and females. On the one hand, women in female-dominated industries may be supported by a feminine working environment that is coherent with their domestic roles. However, they may also be questioned on the cultural impurity implied in some industries, which harms their class-based feminine virtue. On the other hand, women in male-dominated industries may be challenged and marginalized due to their gender. However, some find ways to turn the disadvantaged feminine characters into favourable conditions and break out of the stereotypical gender constraints in doing business.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the literature on gender and entrepreneurship in general. More specifically, it contributes to the study of doing gender in gender-segregated markets, and it also illustrates women’s gendered opportunities and constraints in Chinese society that are affected by the long-lasting traditional gender norms.

Draupadi and the paradigm of woman empowerment in Hinduism

This article aims to bring insights from the philosophy of Hinduism to contribute to contemporary issues related to justice/injustice, empowerment, and liberation. To make important observations, and raise significant questions in this direction, it analyzes and discusses in detail the character of Draupadi from the Indian epic The Mahabharata. The article invites critics to debate the potential for empowerment in feminine virtues through the example of Draupadi who defends her importance and value on the basis of stri-dharma (righteous feminine actions). The article also propounds that the typical masculine traits (aggression, individualistic and courageous actions, etc.) in the personality of Draupadi result from the socio-political normativity that puts Draupadi's virtue under examination because she had unconventionally married five men. Draupadi is under emotional and psychological pressure to publicly prove her virtuous self and this finds expression in emotionally-charged situations apparently as masculine traits.

«По прозвищу Моисей»: литературные интерпретации жизни Харриет Табмен

The article is devoted to the formation of Harriet Tubman's image in the US literature. Two books belonging to the spread of Afrocentrism and the second wave of feminism — A. Petrie's non-fiction novel A Girl Called Moses: The Story of Harriet Tubman and M. Heidish's novel A Woman Called Moses — are chosen as the material for analysis. The article analyzes the main qualitative characteristics identified as early as in S. Bradford's book Harriet, Moses of Her People that form the discourse of race and gender in the mentioned narratives about Tubman, and identifies the main transformations of these characteristics. Thus, the work of African-American author A. Petrie reflects to a greater extent the sentiments of all her fellow women in the 1950s-60s Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States: while remaining within the generally accepted gender framework of feminine virtues, at the same time, the black woman was stepping out of her allotted racial limits. Furthermore, she shows that slavery is a cultural trauma that still defines how the African American community sees itself and its place in the society and how slavery is remembered as a means of self-identification within the African American community. Created by the white writer M. Heidish in the mid-1970s, during the rise of the second wave of the feminist movement, the novel reflects the very sentiments that characterized this movement and shows the view of a sympathetic Other on the issue of race. Thus, the article establishes the fact that Harriet Tubman plays a very important role in the African-American and women's discourse in the United States as an image that is given the necessary functions and qualities for its time based on the socio-cultural context contemporary to the interpreter.

Toxic Masculinity and Compulsive Heteronormativity in Konkona Sen’s Movie, A Death in the Gunj

Gender is one of the most contested subjects in literature. Some prominent scholars like Judith Butler have argued that gender is not innate, but performative. For instance, masculinity is a construct which is always believed to resonate with a compulsive heteronormativity. The fact that men have to behave like an actual “macho; the giver ; the doer completely contrasting feminine virtues such as the emotional , passive and the receiver is prescriptive of the ways through which heteronormativity has become naturalized since the beginning of the civilization. This paper looks into the subtle details about the rooted construct of heteronormativity resembled in the movie “A death in the Gunj’(2016) . Here the protagonist Shutu faces spiritual conflict between his naturally innate virtues like kindness, sensitivity, introversion which goes quite contrary to the compartmentalized masculine virtues such as assertiveness, bravery, manhood and a pressure to maintain a proper “macho” personality. This research looks into the prominent crisis of masculinity and gender performativity that the world faces today. Is it only essential to venerate the so called masculine virtues like dominance and assertiveness? If yes , what about kindness, sensitivity and the capacity to feel emotions that are so much sidelined as feminine virtues? What is the position of man in the modern society? The movie “ A death in Gunj “ paradoxically opens up these hard questions through the characterization of Shuttu who remains unloved and forsaken and drives himself towards the annals of self-destruction and suicide for the reason that he finds himself very vaguely suited to fit into the societal constructs of what makes a proper “man’. This research employs Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity to look into all these prominent gender questions. It also employs Lacan’s construct of symbolic order where language is a source of both alienation and subjectivity considering the fact that while language structures our understanding of self and reality, it alienates from the self that stemmed from the imaginary order from our authentic selves.

Cierpliwa, słodka i skromna. Cnoty niewieście w XIX w. według Klementyny z Tańskich Hoffmanowej i jej Pamiątki po dobrej matce czyli ostatnich jej rad dla córki

Patient, Sweet, and Modest: Female Virtues according to Klementyna z Tańskich Hoffmanowa and Her Pamiątki po dobrej matce (A Memorial of a Dear Mother, or Her Last Pieces of Advice for Her Daughter) in the Nineteenth Century Klementyna Hoffmanowa (née Tańska) published her handbook Pamiątka po dobrej matce (A Memorial of a Dear Mother) in 1819. This collection of advice for girls and young women was an extremely popular publication and went through ten editions in the nineteenth century. Although the author was an educated woman interested in public affairs, in the Pamiątka she propagated a model of a woman subordinated to a man, fulfilling herself on a private level and, importantly, developing certain qualities to satisfy her family and husband: “My daughter! Do not worry that you belong to the weaker sex; her destiny is beauty: after all, she can be a beloved and useful woman. Nature endowed man with power, because it entrusted him with the defence of the weaker, opposing injustice, the punishment of vice […] God created woman more tender and weaker: she should soothe, soften, and make a brave companion happy” (p. 9, 7th edition). In the Pamiątka we find advice on health, appearance, duties, godliness, but also on the female sex and its qualities. In the second part of the guide, Hoffmanowa devotes chapter three to feminine virtues (“On the Virtues Needed by a Woman,” pp. 75–90); however, advice on the canon of desirable features and values can be found throughout the entire collection. “The virtue proper to our sex is sweetness; rare in a man, it seems impossible for a woman to do without it […] Sweetness is not only a charm, but also a weapon for us” (p. 79, 7th edition). In addition to sweetness, the author draws attention to patience, modesty, and cheerfulness, and in the event of “days of numbness in our lives,” which do not encourage cheerfulness at all, she recommends prayer and beseeching God for new strength. Hoffmanowa’s guidebook is worth looking at in the context of its proposed moral model, both in terms of its substantive richness and the frequency of its reprintings. While the proposed model of a woman might not have been shocking in 1819, its tenth edition in 1883 was in contrast to the developing women’s movements and women’s emancipation.

"I had resolved that I would be virtuous, though I was a slave": Enslaved Women, Feminine Virtue and the Sexual Economy of US Slavery

Abstract: This article traces the powerful currency of notions of feminine virtue among enslaved women in the antebellum US South. Early nineteenth-century white American ideas of "female virtue" were limited to white womanhood and legitimized US white supremacist and patriarchal imperialism. Exploited for their reproductive and productive labor, enslaved women were denied the assumption of feminine virtue. Rather, they were positioned at the center of slavery's sexual economy. Yet, enslaved women developed a transnational and multifaceted understanding of feminine virtue that they enlisted and passed on to their daughters as a form of subversion. This article argues that enslaved women's concerns with and actions around virtue reveals a strategy through which they struggled for sexual autonomy.

Empowered, thy name is woman: lite feminism and Hindi SVOD platforms in India

ABSTRACT This essay problematises representations of Indian women on the SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) platforms. The oft-invoked image of Indian woman as the repository of traditional values and feminine virtues has undergone a phenomenal transformation in recent years owing to several factors such as economic liberalisation, globalisation and technological revolution. Female characters in most of the SVOD contents are often depicted as independent, agentic and empowered. Nevertheless, the nature of empowerment that these contents uphold is highly controversial from a feminist standpoint. Employing critique of postfeminism as an analytical tool, this paper argues that the representation of Indian women on SVOD platforms as empowered subjects is an outcome of a negotiation between postfeminism, patriarchy and neoliberal culture of consumption.

‘The Buddha in the home’: dwelling with domestic violence in urban Sri Lanka

This paper examines how home is produced by women under conditions of violence. It contends why domestic violence (DV) is not a disruption, but a ‘condition of possibility’ in the production of the ideal home. Drawing on cultural aphorisms the paper highlights the role of gender norms in simultaneously idealizing the mother and normalizing DV in Sri Lanka. The veneration of the mother in all ethno-religious communities, the paper argues, is conditioned upon a woman’s capacity for nurture and her absorption of violence through the embodiment of feminine virtues: selflessness, forbearance, and long-suffering. The paper contributes to discussions of home and domestic violence in three ways. First, it illuminates cross-cultural meanings of home and the gendered labour that produces it. Second, it describes how women dwell with DV by embodying gender norms through acts of care and repair. Finally, the paper aims to underscore the materiality of gender norms in creating a ‘moral-economy of care’; that is, the ways by which cultural truisms – in postulating a triumvirate of woman-home-suffering – emotionally tethers woman to home compelling her to produce it under conditions of violence.

Study of Female Consciousness in Female Gothic Literature

The female characters in Gothic novels are usually the representatives of fear or even the persecuted, while Female Gothic literature aims to establish the standard of female own value. The heroines achieve self-salvation through their own wisdom and calm attitude, and finally awaken their self-consciousness to form female subjectivity. This is a challenge to the gender hierarchy and the culture of male control.The style of Female Gothic runs through Angela Carter’s life of writing. She pays attention to the sufferings of female, delving into areas where other female writers have not or dare not explore, boldly and frankly addressing topics such as incest, sexual abuse, and pornography. From her point of view, female’s body and desire are subjects that cannot be bypassed in feminist writing and research. Through analyzing Carter’s work, The Company of Wolves, this paper focuses on the power of female as subversive to the established value system and the guiding role they play as constructors of a new order and has a deep thinking of female in deconstructing patriarchal centralism to construct harmonious relations between male and female.In The Company of Wolves, the author also creates a new Little Red Riding Hood with a rebellious spirit, but here, the little girl is more about exploiting the fighting potential contained in the female “sexual energy”. The seduction of Little Red Riding Hood by a Wolf disguised as a hunter can also be directly interpreted as a sexual seduction. Carter’s rewriting is to release the repressed potential desire of the female subject in the traditional fairy tale, so as to break the traditional pattern of gender relations. For a long time, female have grown up under the discipline of male power, in a position of oppression and constraint, being taught to restrain their desires, learn to protect themselves and be a good girl, and being instilled with the idea that “it is their natural duty to bear and raise children and do a good job at home”. Female are bound by the “feminine virtues” of self-sacrifice, obedience and docility, while their individual needs and desires are denied and hidden. Carter’s new Red Riding Hood is not bound by moral norms, but boldly follows her own desires, using “sex” as a tool to gain a new life, so that sexual liberation is achieved and sexual reconciliation with men is completed. Female’s self-consciousness and subjectivity are realized in this process.

Spectrality and Thanatic Ethics of Care in Atlantique and Biutiful

Although the gendered response to moral problems articulated by Carol Gilligan in her 1982 book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development – which heralded the area of study that came to be known as care ethics – has become passé, the binary approach to moral problems where one response is based on emotion and connection, whereas the other is based on autonomy from others and justice and fairness, has remained. While some scholars have called for the integration of these approaches, others have come to question dominant liberal forms of political care such as humanitarianism and welfare. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown and Woodly have called for a new politics of care for the twenty-first century. This kind of refashioning dismantles the care–justice binary and even troubles the meaning of justice by thinking care and justice together. My purpose in this essay is to see what this binary at the heart of care ethics and the new ways of looking at care ethics have to offer to migration studies. Through a reading of two films, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2010 film Biutiful and Mati Diop’s 2019 film Atlantique, I suggest that both these films use spectrality to provide a critique of regimes of care in migration and offer alternative models which I call a thanatic ethics of care. By proposing an alternative, “thanatic” ethics of migrant care through the use of spectrality, both films offer newer models of care not based on feminine virtue or racial hierarchies but rather on dismantling care–justice binaries and seeing the world in new ways through relationality and responsiveness.

Freedom and Agency in The Second Sex

Freedom and Agency in <i>The Second Sex</i>

Eron, Sarah. Mind over Matter: Memory Fiction from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen

Eron, Sarah. <i>Mind over Matter: Memory Fiction from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen</i>

The Matter of Virtue: Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare

The Matter of Virtue: Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare

Feminism in French Novels in the Late Renaissance-From the Perspective of Madeleine de Scudéry’s "The Story of Sapho"

At the end of the Renaissance, Madeleine de Scudéry, an early exponent of historical fiction, infused French feminism with the spiritual qualities of the Renaissance with her novel The Story of Sapho. In this context, this essay takes it as the main subject and analyses the feminist qualities of this novel by examining the influence of the work over a period of nearly four centuries and comparing it specifically with the ideas of Gournay, one of the pioneers of French feminism, Rousseau, a revolutionary tutor, and Mona Ozouf, a contemporary historian. The study reveals that, unlike the feminism of Gournay's novel, Scudéry uses Sapho to reveal the birth of a new era of women with feminine virtue, feminine friendship and feminine love, and in this way to leave behind the old feminism of power struggles and gender differences. In the 18th century, this novel influenced Rousseau's Émile, in which the heroes and heroines are highly similar, and he continues to some extent the universalist spirit of The Story of Sapho, Rousseau's examination of the relationship between men and women has a similar concern to that of Scudéry, the pursuit of a harmonious society for both sexes. Finally, this novel echoes the uniqueness of French feminism as described by contemporary historian Mona Ozouf. In the long line of French feminism, Scudéry’s vision embodies the humanistic concerns of a feminism with a humanist core.

Calkas’s Daughter: Paternal Authority and Feminine Virtue in Troilus and Criseyde

The heroine of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has been of considerable interest to medieval feminist scholars as a woman who is depicted as both virtuous and an adulteress. Yet critical discussions do not often view Criseyde’s virtue in light of her role as daughter. This article explores that role, focusing on how her father Calkas is described by the characters as having authority over his daughter’s body in the marriage market. This will later enable them to use him as an excuse for Criseyde’s failure to return to Troy and thus preserve her status as virtuous. However, the characters may be exaggerating his power, and Criseyde is actually acting autonomously in both her avoidance of marriage and her betrayal of Troilus. I argue that, in light of medieval ideas about marriage, we can consider how Calkas’s representation as controlling his daughter’s virtue reveals the complex interactions between societal expectations for medieval women and their own desires. My conclusion is that feminine virtue might not always already be a failure if it is dependent on a man, but, rather, that the appearance of such dependency was a way in which a medieval woman like Criseyde could navigate the world on her own terms while keeping her reputation intact.

Waza and Feminine Virtue in Japan

Waza and Feminine Virtue in Japan

Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon (by Nicola Pratt)

Reviewed by: Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women's Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon by Nicola Pratt Sher Afgan Tareen Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women's Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon Nicola Pratt University of California Press, 2020, 224 pages In 2011, people across North Africa and the Middle East (MENA) region gathered in public spaces to denounce tyranny. The filming of a crowd gathered around the burning body of Mohammed Bouzizi, a young Tunisian man who set himself on fire in late 2010 in retaliation against the police seizing his scales for working as a street vendor without a permit, is routinely attributed for triggering the uproar. But the profile of Arab women protesters has received far more extensive coverage than the tragic death of Bouzizi might suggest. Western media accounts framed women who had gathered at Tahrir Square as pioneers in speaking out against male aggressors. According to Nicola Pratt, Arab women activists not only predate the 2010 uprisings but have also routinely both upheld and upended the geopolitical order through cultivating a feeling of "respectability." Her book Embodied Geopolitics: Generations of Women's Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon traces the recurrence of respectability in the geopolitics of these three countries over the course of the 20th century with particular focus on the following key moments: the late-19th and early 20th-century decolonization movement, the 1967 Six Day War (remembered as a catastrophy or a Nakba) and ensuing student-led Palestinian Movement, the proliferation of NGOs and advocacy for women's rights during the late 1980s and '90s, and lastly the restoration of military rule in the fallout after the Arab uprisings. "Respectability" is a feminine virtue that defines itself against the specter of a repressed woman living under the scrutiny of a male kin within the confines of the home. But during the early 20th century, the daughters, wives, and sisters of Arab nationalist leaders leveraged the expansion of higher education and emergence of women's clubs to cultivate respectability, thereby transforming it from a gift of the colonizer to an indigenous attribute of Al-mar'a al-jadida, "the new woman." This new woman dissolved polygamy and reformed marriage from an obligatory to an intimate relationship that avails opportunities for extending educational opportunities to the poor as well as nurturing children into civic-minded citizens. As the reproductive powers of women enveloped child-rearing into a larger project of giving birth to the nascent nation-state, the older [End Page 123] hierarchy between the colonizer and the colonized collapsed while a newer hierarchy between national/natural and foreign/unnatural women arose. The latter includes a large number of women who are ineligible to pass on their national identity to their children, due to marrying a man with a different nationality, instilling in these women a feeling of foreignness created by personal status laws. Personal status laws in Lebanon, for instance, create equality between the various sectarian groups that make up the national assembly on the basis of a consensus among its members of women's subordination to their male kin. Since the decolonization of Arab nation-states, women have continued to enact competing visions of female "respectability" amid an ongoing struggle against personal status laws. At moments of disillusionment with the existing regime, female respectability conveys disrespect for the male elders in the family. But when unrest descends into chaos, hastening calls for a return to order, female respectability restores the family and by extension the nation. During the fallout of the Arab uprisings, for instance, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi hailed the Egyptian daughter who fights for women's rights while his regime jailed female protesters and subjugated them to forced virginity tests inside the prison cells. The suspicion that they had slept with male protesters in outdoor tents not only made their bodies uncouth, but more importantly a threat to national security. By studying the geopolitics of the MENA region through the frame of female respectability, Pratt reveals that the seemingly abstract ideas such as colonialism, decolonization, neoliberalism, and martial law are in fact gendered practices waged over women's bodies. While conventional studies are replete with maps charting the influence of...

Abject Desires in Lisa See’s Peony in Love

The establishment of the Manchu led-Qing dynasty in 1636 led to the continuation of Confucianism as the dominant belief system in China. Based on these Confucian principles of patrilineality and patrilocality, women were expected to portray exemplary feminine virtues that required them to remain subservient and obedient to the men in her family. This oppressive practice placed women lower in the hierarchy as, unlike men, they were denied the means and avenue to express their subjectivities and, consequently, had to repress their desires to conform to a collective identity. Female desires are viewed as a form of abject as they do not conform to the female codes of behaviour assigned by the patriarchal system. To follow their desires would mean going a gainst the gender norms of the society. As such, women’s desires are attributed abject qualities due to their ability to disrupt the boundaries of the dominant system and are thus subject to censorship. Lisa See’s Peony in Love (2007) depicts the struggles and predicament of Chinese women who had to repress their desires due to their gender. Using Julie Kristeva’s concept of the abject, this study intends to examine how the female protagonist, Peony negotiates her position within the patriarchal setting to reclaim her sense of identity. According to Kristeva, the abject can distort boundaries due to its transgressive nature. For this reason, the study will set out to identify representations of abject desires and their implications on Peony. This study argues that it is through these representations of abject desires that enable Peony to subvert the patriarchal boundaries and reclaim her sense of identity. Keywords: abject; Julie Kristeva; Chinese culture; gender; Lisa See

Art in the Time of Pandemic: Elisabetta Sirani, Artistic Agency, and Capitalist Social Reproduction

Art in the Time of Pandemic: Elisabetta Sirani, Artistic Agency, and Capitalist Social Reproduction