The monstrous birth: A feminist re-reading of mary shelley's frankenstein

This article proposes a queer and feminist re-reading of the Gospel passage Mark 7:15–23, questioning traditional notions of purity and sexual morality in Christian theology. From the subjective experience of a Latin American homosexual believer, the author examines how biblical, patristic, and psychiatric discourses have contributed to the dehumanization of non-normative bodies and desires. Drawing from the narrative in which Jesus declares that “nothing that enters a person from outside can defile them,” the article develops a critique of religious structures that have used categories of purity and impurity to exclude and criminalize dissident identities. The concepts of kósmos, moral order, and the body are analyzed as spaces of symbolic power and control. Finally, a new Christian sexual ethic is proposed—one grounded in consent, reciprocity, and care—that recognizes all bodies and pleasures as sacred expressions capable of revealing the divine.

This article offers a feminist re-reading of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” traditionally studied as a masterful dramatic monologue. Drawing on feminist theories by Toril Moi, Laura Mulvey, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Adrienne Rich, the study interrogates the patriarchal power structures embedded in the Duke’s narrative. Through close textual analysis, the article reveals how the poem silences and objectifies the Duchess and frames her within a male gaze that reduces her to a visual and narrative possession. However, feminist theory allows for the reclamation of her agency by reading her silences as acts of quiet resistance. The study further reflects on the pedagogical value of feminist interpretations in re-centring marginalized voices in literary texts. It concludes by identifying directions for future research, including speculative feminist rewritings, intersectional readings, and classroom applications. Ultimately, the article calls for an ethical, inclusive engagement with canonical literature that challenges inherited hierarchies of voice and authority.

Overcoming Moral Deterioration in the Workplace: Insights from a Feminist Re-reading of Camus’ The Voiceless Ones

The war over the iron throne: A feminist re-reading of Game of Thrones

In La jeune femme et la mer (2021), French cartoonist Catherine Meurisse rewrites Kusamakura, a novel by Natsume Sōseki ([1906] 2008; [1906] 2015) in which the narrator and main character, a painter-poet, travels to a seaside thermal resort village in Japan, searching for artistic inspiration. She weaves into her rewriting an autofictional story based on her two visits to Japan, including a 2018 artistic residency at Villa Kujoyama, in Kyoto. Through her fictional double’s interactions with Sōseki’s characters, including the painter-poet and his muse, Meurisse reflects on the novel’s positions, notably regarding women as artistic inspiration and subject. She also redraws artistic works from Western and Eastern artistic traditions, including Ophelia (1851–1852) by John Everett Millais, and Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa (ca. 1830–1832), and works them into her narrative. She represents the natural beauty of the Japanese countryside through images inspired by Japanese and French paintings and prints. Meurisse rearticulates several favorite themes and approaches, including self-portraiture, comic-strip humor, a celebration of the natural world and human dependency on it, a feminist rereading of art and literary history, and legitimating comics by reworking and reflecting on canonical works of art and literature.

The war over the Iron throne: A feminist re-reading of Game of Thrones

Introduction: Research has established that experiences of substance use and housing insecurity leads to violence, alienation, and health deterioration for women. However, no literature has assessed how the gendered nature of substance use and housing insecurity influence the ontological insecurity of women. This paper examines the relationship between ontological insecurity, substance use, and housing insecurity for women. We provide considerations for the theorization of ontological (in)security to account for gender. Methods: Feminist-informed interviews were conducted with 20 women who were clients of a safer supply program located in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. Interviews took place in person, were audio-recorded, and transcribed. Interviews focused on women’s experiences of substance use and housing insecurity across their lives. Data analysis was guided by a feminist re-reading of the theory of ontological security. All women completed a socio-demographic questionnaire. Results: Most women were aged between 22 and 43 ( n = 11), with nine being over the age of 44. Fifteen women identified as white, with five identifying as First Nation, Indigenous, or Metis. Ten women resided in supportive housing units, five resided in transitional housing units, social service agency run motels, or in the private rental market, and five resided in tents or encampments. Women shared how gendered experiences of substance use and housing insecurity, which were associated with trauma and violence, contributed to perceptions of ontological insecurity. Dimensions of ontological insecurity which were discussed by women included a disrupted sense of self, instability, and a loss of autonomy. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate how mechanisms of ontological insecurity for women who use drugs and experience housing insecurity are engrained in the gendered structuring of society. These findings suggest that the current theorization of ontological (in)security is insufficient in examining complete mechanisms which promote ontological security or insecurity for women. Future work which explores ontological (in)security must consider the gendered ordering of society.

Sita the Shuru: Interrogating the politics of the portrayal of Sita in a feminist rereading of Ramayan by Nabaneeta DevSen

This article examines Shabih’khani, a traditional ritual performance in Iran also known as Ta’ziyeh, in the context of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement. It includes the historical challenges faced by Iranian women in a patriarchal society dominated by politics and religion, augmenting existing research on women’s Shabih’khani through recently discovered documents that show the erasure of feminine symbols within the tradition. The article also explores the theatrical conventions, dramaturgical elements, and historical reasons for the emergence and decline of women’s Shabih’khani, together with factors that contribute to the endurance of men’s Shabih’khani. By drawing connections and comparisons between Shabih’khani and the contemporary ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, it illuminates the factors shaping the movement and offers insights into its potential for success and progress.

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady Macbeth plays a crucial role. The moment she learns from Macbeth, the prophesies of three witches, she immediately begins to dream that Macbeth would become the king of Scotland. She couldn't kill Duncan as his face resembled his father. It is true that whatever she did, she did for Macbeth. She wanted to see Macbeth as the king. She is fully aware of her feminine virtues. That's why she wants to ripped off those virtues before committing any hedious crime. The guilt that torments her till the last day of her life shows that she is not a cool-blooded criminal. This paper seeks to attempt a gender critique of Lady Macbeth's character.

Female Protagonists in Adichie’s Anthology of Short Stories “The Thing around Your Neck”: A Feminist Rereading

The overall aims of this article are to revisit one of the key contributions to narratology of the late twentieth century, Juri Lotman’s The origin of plot in the light of typology of 1973, to attempt to determine its place in Lotman’s work as a whole, its relationship with the work of other theorists, as well as to suggest its value, and its applicability to literature and other manifestations of human culture. Of course, Lotman was not the first to suggest that narrative structure and plots have some claims to universality. Moreover, in the twentieth-first century story, plot and narrative—and the terms are more or less interchangeable in general usage—have become almost ubiquitous, being applied to politics, sport, history as well as cultural objects as such. In this seepage of cultural theory into popular culture, and, in fact, into everyday day parlance, Lotman’s article plays a pivotal role, and has become a modern classic of literary theory.Origins itself covers a wide area and ranges from prehistory to contemporary times. In this overview he offers myriad examples from Ancient Greece, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and many more besides. In some ways, it is important to see this piece of 1973 as an extension of his own Struktura khudozhestvennaia teksta of three years previously. In this, one of his more rigorously structuralist works, Lotman sees semiotic space organised in binary terms along the positive / negative axis of verkh / niz. But in Origin, Lotman establishes a very powerful, infinitely replicable typology, encapsulated in the simple chain: “entry into enclosed space—exit from it.”Important refinements have been made to this model by Teresa de Lauretis in her seminal article “Desire in narrative,” where in her feminist re-reading of Lotman she does not in any way undermine the validity of Lotman’s model, but greatly enhances it. This model, especially as refined by de Lauretis, has immense applicability. For example, Turgenev’s four major novels, with their heroes entering the enclosed space of the ‘enclave’, only to fail the ‘test of love’, readily spring to mind, as do most of the stories comprising Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, as well as Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin. After offering an overview of such instances, this article will give about half a dozen ‘case studies’ to provide more in-depth assessments of the applicability of Lotman’s theories. The texts to be analysed as case studies are Turgenev’s Asya, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Brothers Karamazov; Tolstoy’s Father Sergius, and the films Kommissar by Askoldov, and Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Caucasus.

مسرحيه جورج کولمان أنکل و ياروکي و التي عرضت في لندن للمره الأولى عام 1787 صنفها النقاد کجزأ أساسيا من الخطاب الأدبي المناهض للعبوديه. هذه الورقه لا تتفق مع هذه القراءه بل تأکد على أن المسرحيه تهدف الى الدفاع عن تجاره الرق و الإستعمار الذي ساعد على تقشي العبوديه. يتضح دفاع الکاتب عن تجاره الرق من خلال ثلاثه خطوات: نزع صفه الانسانيه عن السکان الأصليين لمنطقه الکاريبي حيث تدور أحداث المسرحيه, إصباغ صفه الإنسانيه على المستعمرين الانجليزو نفي أي صله بينهم و تجاره الرقيق. لإثبات ذلک يعتمد التحليل على النظريه النقديه الاستوائيه و نسويه السکان الاصليين. النظريه النقديه الإستوئيه تساعد على فهم کيفيه إستخدام البيئه الطبيعيه لجزر الهند الغربيه و سکانها الاصليين من أجل عرضهم کرمز للتخلف و دونيه الآخر في مقابل المستعمر الأنجليزي و الذي يعرض کرمز للحضاره و سمو مکانه الأنا. النظريه النقديه لنسويه السکان الأصليين من شأنها أن تبعدنا من فخ الوقوع في التحليل العاطفي لعلاقه أبطال الامسرحيه أنکل و ياروکي و محاوله الترکيز على إستغلال الکاتب مکامن القوه التي تتمتع بها ياروکي کأنثى من السکان الأصليين لمنطقه الکاريبي أوجزر الهند الغربيه. الکاتب وضف دورها التقليدي کحارسه للأرض, مناحه للحياه و همزه وصل بين عالم الروح و عالم الأحياء حسب معتقدات السکان الاصليين الذين يرون المرأه کائن مقدس من أجل تطهير المستعمر أنکل و تنصيبه کسيد على الارض الکاريبيه و سکانها الاصليين.

The present article argues that Robert Frost’s poem “For Once, Then, Something” (1923) anticipates, by virtue of its latent similarities to them, the theory of Deconstruction propounded by Jacques Derrida, and Reader-Response Criticism which developed through the work of a number of important theorists, one of them being Stanley Fish. The validity of the interpretation is tested by juxtaposing it, in brief, on Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a postcolonial, Feminist re-reading or re-writing of Brontë’s work, especially one of literature’s great enigmatic figure – Bertha Antoinetta Rochester/Mason – and one of the novel’s central character – Edward Fairfax Rochester. Indeed, Bertha had been readily interpreted by many lay readers as an obstacle, if not an outright antagonist, in the union of Jane and Edward before the publication of Rhys’ insightful novel that is a prequel to or provides the backstory of crucial characters and events found in Brontë’s work. Moreover, the researchers also launch an enquiry that seeks to understand whether Rochester has been disproportionately or undeservedly demonized, at least since the publication of Rhys’ novel. This inquiry, which stems from both the insight provided by the reading of Frost’s poem and a position put forward by Fish, (re)reads Brontë’s text to see if it provides any clue, opening, or hint for an alternative response by which Rochester can be rescued from critical opprobrium he is often subjected to, whether before or after the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea.

In his work, D. H. Lawrence has paid particular attention to the question of (in)visible alliances between the sexes, where the position of power and dominance often is not fixed but is negotiable and constantly in the process of (re)vision. My paper examines Lawrence’s experimentation with definitions and boundaries of public and private gender roles. Both The Rainbow and Women in Love are a good starting point for this inquiry, since the relationship between the male and female characters are problematized in a conscientious and distinctive fashion. Therefore, it is interesting to study the relationship between the characters and see how femininity and masculinity influence each individual’s gender identity, and as a result their gender performance. Additionally, Lawrence consolidates a feminine significance remarkably similar to the disruption, excess, and pleasure celebrated by poststructuralist French feminists as écriture féminine. These novels represent the disruptive power of feminine signification, both on personal and sociopolitical levels, and end with that power still in play. They get to the heart of the conceptual difficulties of gender differences, gender identity and gender performance. They also take on this feminist imperative to define the intensity and changes necessary in personal and cultural life of the modern age, manifesting and maintaining new and different possibilities for subjectivity. I use Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Judith Butler’s discussions on the concepts of femininity and the feminine subject. I also refer to their gender theories as foundational models to study the conflict and shift between the gender roles in the two-gendered system of cultural norms and ideals in the world of these two novels.

The dissociation of Dewi Ontrowulan from the pilgrimage site of Mount Kemukus and the participation of women in the sex ritual excite me to explore her myths. Surveying the various myths about Dewi Ontrowulan, this paper seeks to sketch the possibly dominant characterization of her. Besides her absence in providing blessings to pilgrims, her presence at the pilgrimage ritual greatly contributes to the brokenness of women’s bodies there. I apply feminist phenomenology to unveil the hiddenness of crimes against women. Reconstructing a liberating myth of Dewi Ontrowulan necessitates the de-stigmatization of her stigmatized character. A feminist re-reading on her myths hopefully also contributes to the liberation of these women from stigmatization.

In the wake of Caroline Walker Bynum’s essential studies on the crucial role food played in the lives of medieval religious women, significant attention has been given to the connection between premodern women’s spiritual practices and eating practices. However, the relationship between religious women and food is not limited to body manipulation, inedia or eucharistic frenzy. Indeed, recent critical work has provided accessible translations and critical apparatus necessary for an exploration of food and women’s religiosity that builds on Bynum’s rich foundation and examines the many ways in which women expressed themselves through food, both material and metaphoric. This approach not only allows students to engage with women’s writing through the familiarity and universality of food, but moreover reminds them of the real, living, breathing women behind the texts, thus opening the door to a feminist rereading of texts—not as proto-feminist themselves, but rather in the re-valuing of the substantial contributions of their female authors, who had subtle social awareness, public professional pursuits, and complex and varied relationships with God.

Reviewed by: Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic by Shatema Threadcraft Keisha Lindsay (bio) Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic by Shatema Thread-craft. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 207 pp., $38.39 hardcover. Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic is a groundbreaking text. Shatema Threadcraft demonstrates not only that black women experience intersecting race and gender-based oppression but also that how they do so is "embodied." By this, Threadcraft means that racism and patriarchy are coconstitutive in ways that severely limit black women's ability to "use the powers and capacities of the black female body freely and equally" (6). The tangible result of this disturbing reality, Threadcraft explains, is that black women experience a range of oppressions including, but not limited to, "coerced sterilizations," "racially biased child removal policies," and "systemic sexual violence as a weapon of racial terror" (8–9). Threadcraft further demonstrates that Platonic, Rawlsian, and other traditional conceptions of freedom and justice—as that which is material and is realized in the public sphere—neither recognize nor acknowledge the intersectional, intimate dimensions of black women's subordination. Intimate Justice is especially outstanding in three arenas. First, it provides a black feminist rereading of key moments in African American history. Thread-craft, in one such rereading, reveals that the race riots of the late 1890s and early 1900s were not about white hostility to black male soldiers or, more broadly, to many black males' "new status as agents of public authority" (78). The riots were also about racist whites' revolt against the many "newly liberated women [who] withdrew from the agricultural labor they had almost all performed within the plantation regime" and focused, instead, on caring for or "meeting the physical and emotional needs of the black body" (74). Threadcraft cites, as evidence, firsthand accounts of white male rioters' use of rape to coerce black women back to their "natural" role as servicers of whites' intimate desires, as well as fliers, produced by white male rioters, that demanded, "Negro women shall be employed by white persons" (72). Threadcraft reveals, second, that like "mainstream" political theorists, past and present black male scholars also ignore black women's embodied oppression at the crossroads of race and gender. The difficulty, Threadcraft [End Page 293] explains, is that these scholars' conceptualization of liberation focuses not on the intimate capacities associated with black women's subordination, but rather on "blacks' capacities for controlling their political and material environment" in the traditionally masculine public or "civic" sphere (27). One result is W. E. B. Du Bois's assumption that cultivating black people's capacity for reason—as opposed to, say, sexual autonomy—is most crucial in the struggle against racism. Another result is Tommie Shelby's failure to recognize that blacks in the "dark ghetto" are oppressed not only because of their "relegation to low-wage menial jobs within an advanced capitalist consumer society" (118), but also because many of them are victims of racist child protective services officers, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and other forms of intimate injustice. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Threadcraft uses black male theorists' silence regarding black women's intimate, intersecting oppression as a departure point for determining what an empowering, gender-expansive understanding of black liberation looks like. The answer, Threadcraft concludes, lies in melding Afro-Modern conceptions of freedom and justice—as the ability to participate in civic life and the radical redistribution of material goods, respectively—with a more comprehensive, feminist understanding of these terms. Threadcraft draws on the work of feminists Iris Young, Martha Nussbaum, and Nancy Hirschman to make the more specific case that black freedom and justice are attainable when black women can (1) exercise intimate capabilities—such as making emotional attachments and controlling the movement of their bodies—and (2) do so in social and cultural contexts in which they, rather than men, have the "final say over the meaning of [their] sexual, reproductive, and caretaking actions" (60). Intimate Justice poses two other important questions: (1) How do we recognize a black woman when we see her? And (2) how do we recognize black women's...

In her recent book, Are Lips Grave? A Queer Feminist on Ethics of Sex, Lynne Huffer offers daring call for reconsideration of rifts between feminist and theory in order to develop queer feminist ethics of eros (Huffer 2013, 44). Arguing that sexual ethics lies at fractured nexus between feminist and theory, Huffer seeks both to restore a claim to an feminism and to transfigure ethics as erotic living (22). This project is clearly staged in book's titular chapter, which provocatively brings together Michel Foucault's and Luce respective reformulations of sexual ethics with so-called antisocial theory of Leo Bersani and Janet Halley. To my mind, one of most invaluable contributions of Huffer's book is her reclamation of philosophy of sexual difference—a philosophy that many feminist and theorists alike have dismissed as irredeemably essentialist, conservative, heteronormative, and even homophobic, transphobic, and racist.1 For Huffer, however, Irigaray's … absence from theory is evidence of forgetting of her radical feminist practice as an always already method (2013, 42). Taking off from Huffer's feminist rereading of Irigaray, I want to further ethics by exploring relationship between ethics and sexual difference as it has been thought in European philosophy. First, I offer critique of conflation of queerness and negativity in antisocial theory and abdication of responsibility it ultimately entails. Following both Irigaray and Jacques Derrida, I then argue that sexual difference is wholly other (tout autre) to the ethical as it has been thought within phallogocentrism and, thus, I contend that justice demands fidelity to this radical otherness of sexual difference. Queerness, I suggest, names precisely this of ethical—that is, sexual difference itself—and, thus, ironically, both and feminist theory must struggle for heteros of sexual difference, beyond any distinction between she/he, hetero-/homosexual, friendship/love, or sex/eros.