Feminist Reading Research Articles

A Feminist Reading of Hemingway’s Works—“Cat in the Rain” as an Example

A Feminist Reading of Hemingway’s Works—“Cat in the Rain” as an Example

A Feminist Reading of Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is one of the representative feminist writers in the United States. Her novel Herland constructs a utopian society for women and breaks binary opposition between men and women. This thesis analyzes from two different perspectives -- space and environment, and ideology in a woman-dominated country to reveal the ability of females’ deconstruction of dualism and reconstruction of equality rebuild between people and nature, and between men and women with subjectivity and agency of women. On the other hand, by comparing patriarchal ideology in reality and feministic thoughts in Herland, this thesis also aims to reveal the advancement in this feminist utopia, thus indicating the practical significance of the novel as a social criticism by creating a female dominated utopia to explore the ways to solve the various social problems in patriarchal United States.

“Their Time, Their Moment, Their City”: A Critique and Black Feminist Reading of Harlem

This article analyses Tracy Oliver’s comedy series Harlem (2021) through the lens of Black Feminism. Invoking combined traces of Living Single (1993-1998) and Sex and the City (1998-2004), I contend Harlem aims to fill in the representation void that has erased Black women from mainstream comedies that are reduced to the white experience as it also aims to transgress the stigmatizing image of Black women in mainstream popular culture. In this manner, Oliver’s Harlem addresses several aspects of the Black female experience and shows the gendered racism Black women endure, such as racial stereotypes, medical mistreatment, or white women’s tears, among many others, prioritizing social accuracy and racial sensibilities through comedy as it follows the lives of four Black women in the neighborhood of Harlem in the twenty-first century.

Gift or Weapon? Reproductive Decision, the Phenomenology of Pregnancy, and Alien Language in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival

Abstract This essay analyzes Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film, Arrival, and elucidates its strikingly original meditation on the ethics of reproduction and the relationships between and among embodied maternal subjectivity, language, and temporality. Drawing on deconstructive theories of language and relationality as well as on the writing of scholars working at the intersection of reproductive biology and feminist philosophy, the essay argues that Arrival uses some of the generic features of science fiction cinema (alien encounter and time travel) to articulate a feminist and posthumanist philosophy of relation and care. Focusing on the film's language of risk, danger, contamination, and even social disintegration, Arrival prompts us to consider how a particularly suggestive account of the maternal-fetal relationship, and of the process of fostering and becoming a relationally determined being, simultaneously engages with the fraught question of reproductive choice and reproductive justice in our contemporary moment. Meditating on the film's visual, sonic, and conceptual representations of the “placental wall” and of the “parasitical” structure of pregnancy, the essay shows how Arrival parallels feminist readings of the materiality of pregnancy that deconstruct the self-possessed or “virile” subject of patriarchal individualism.

Feminist Reading of Leila Aboulela’s “The Ostrich”

The marginalized and oppressed women in Sudan, alongside the subaltern women living on the margin, are depicted in the current work. “The Ostrich” by Laila Aboulela shows the protagonist’s life of Sumra both in Khartoum, Sudan, and London in the UK. Sumra represents Sudanese women struggling hard to find their place in a patriarchal society. The structure of this article can be articulated in two arguments; the empowerment of patriarchal supremacy and the power of tradition implanted in Sudan and most third-world countries to marginalize and silence the role of women so that they can never be heard. Although women have got their studies at universities, they are still marginalized and have no full right to decide for themselves. Appropriating the analytical descriptive approach, the current study aims to demonstrate the marginalization and oppression of women in Sudan.

Love as Enlightenment and Enlightenment as Love: Reading Feminist Hermeneutic of Reconstruction in Vanessa R Sasson’s Yasodhara and the Buddha

Exercises in feminist theology outside Western contexts and outside of discourses of theorisation can prove to be enriching to address the disconnection between secular and religious feminisms. One way to address this disconnection is to locate the intersection between secular and religious feminisms in the space of fiction. While mytho-fiction about the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, has been around for quite some time and has been extensively analysed for its critique of religion and diversity of representation of heroines, the feminist hermeneutic of reconstruction is only now witnessing a resurgence in Buddhism. This article focuses on Buddhist Studies scholar Vanessa R Sasson’s debut novel Yasodhara and the Buddha for its blending of feminist consciousness with the Buddhist ethos of love. It is hoped that this exercise will be found meaningful in understanding women’s experiences of and attitudes towards religion.

The Liberating Transformation of Jesus from Greek-Roman Imperialism

This paper offers a postcolonial feminist reading of John 7:53-8:11, which focuses on the imperialistic background behind the text. The issue is that the violence experienced by the women in the text is not solely influenced by patriarchal culture. The aim of this paper is to analyze the background of the text more deeply, particularly the influence of the Roman Empire during that time. The method used is the postcolonial feminist hermeneutics developed by Musa W. Dube. The new perspective offered is that women are not deserving of violence, neither by culture nor by the binding imperial system.

Breaking the plaster: Making do with the fragility of the body

AbstractDrawing on a personal experience with temporary impairment following a foot bone fracture, I here reflect on forms of marginalization fragile bodies face under normative social and organizational structures. Combining reflexive narratives, poetry, art‐making, diary notes and open questions I ask myself and the reader, with feminist literature insights inspiring my thinking and writing, I seek to problematize taken for granted assumptions around usability and accessibility of objects and spaces in society and organizations. I discuss learnings I derived from this experience, developing their relevance for broader social, academic and political debates. Namely, I argue for the importance of rethinking embodied fragility as agility from which ableist environments might learn new practices. I also discuss slowness as well as engagement with embodied research methods, feminist reading and writing as redemptive getaways for making sense of embodied trauma in ways that resist social and epistemic norms that augment inequalities.

A Feminist Reading of the Group

Mary McCarthy is an important feminist writer. The Group, as one of her most famous novels, sparked the heated discussion of the theme of women’s self-liberation. This paper will analyze feminism of this novel from two spheres. The first is the public sphere which includes education, employment and politics. They have received higher education. They are devoted to make contributions to the society and realize their own value. The second is the domestic sphere which includes sex and contraception, marriage and child-rearing. Although having got married, they are not willing to abound themselves in family life. They seek their position in the community and the family actively.

The Cambridge Companion to Genesis ed. by Bill T. Arnold

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Genesis ed. by Bill T. Arnold Bradley C. Gregory bill t. arnold (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Genesis (Cambridge Companions to Religion; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Pp. xiii + 372. Paper $36.99. One of the challenges in assembling a "companion"-style volume is deciding whether the chapters should primarily aim for broad, even coverage of topics so that the volume represents a status quaestionis of current scholarship or whether chapters should primarily pursue narrower forays into current avenues of research. Bill Arnold's excellent volume on Genesis, which brings together an impressive group of scholars, represents a hybrid approach in which the earlier chapters incline toward the former and the later chapters incline toward the latter. The four parts of the volume essentially concern (1) the nature and formation of the text; (2) the world behind the text; (3) the world in the text; and (4) the world in front of the text. The volume begins with Bill T. Arnold's, "Introduction: Genesis and the status quaestionis" (pp. 1–8), which is mostly an overview of the chapters that follow. Next, part 1 deals with the "Composition and Structure of Genesis." In "Genesis in the History of Critical Scholarship" (pp. 11–52), Jean-Louis Ska gives an overview of how interpreters have made sense of Genesis. While the title might suggest beginning with figures like Baruch Spinoza and Richard Simon, Ska helpfully gives an overview of the interpretation of Genesis in antiquity and the Middle Ages in order to show how modern approaches to Genesis grew out of earlier hermeneutical currents. Importantly, giving an overview of the history of interpretation here allows the essays in part 4 to pursue more particular aspects of reception history. Jan Christian Gertz's chapter, "Genesis in Source and Redaction Criticism Today" (pp. 53–73), traces the developments of the documentary, supplementary, and fragmentary approaches to pentateuchal sources, especially as they are found in the Genesis narrative, in the wake of the collapse of the post-Wellhausenian consensus. In "Genesis in Form and Tradition Criticism Today" (pp. 74–98), Christoph Levin shows how determinative kingship ideology was for the formation of the traditions in Genesis. He also suggests that the best description of the genre of Genesis is "torah," that is, "normative religious writing," or a "Jewish national epic" (p. 91). Part 1 concludes with Michaela Bauks, "Rhetorical Features and Characteristics: The Literary Function of Genealogies, Itineraries, and Other Etiologies in the Book of Genesis" (pp. 99–118). [End Page 363] Part 2 ("Social World of Genesis") begins with Alice Mandell's chapter, "Genesis and Its Ancient Literary Analogues" (pp. 121–47), which gives an overview of the various methodologies and approaches in comparing Genesis to the literature and culture of other ancient Near Eastern societies. Because she provides an overview of the comparative method, her treatment is actually wider than the title might suggest. Next is John H. Walton's "Genesis and the Conceptual World of the Ancient Near East" (pp. 148–67). In setting Genesis in the context of ancient Near Eastern understandings of creation and humanity, views of the divine world, and stories about ancestors, Walton cautions that scholars should not overly emphasize either similarities or differences. In "Family, Clan, and Tribe in the Book of Genesis" (pp. 168–87), Naomi A. Steinberg applies kinship studies from the field of anthropology to understand the values and networks of family relationships that are pictured in Genesis, recognizing that these may represent ideals instead of actual practice. Complementing Steinberg's chapter is Sarah Shectman's essay, "Women's Status and Feminist Readings of Genesis" (pp. 188–208). Noting that women play a larger role in Genesis than in most other books of the Hebrew Bible, she surveys the critical role these figures play in the narrative, particularly in terms of relational power, as well as how this has been productive of feminist interpretations of many of the Genesis stories. Part 3 ("Themes and Literary Motifs of Genesis") opens with Brent A. Strawn's "From Imago to Imagines: The Image(s) of God in Genesis" (pp. 211–35). Strawn shows that "the image of God" is not a...

Note from the Editor

Editorial| April 01 2023 Note from the Editor: Producing Film History Jennifer M. Bean Jennifer M. Bean Jennifer M. Bean is the Robert Jolin Osborne Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and adjunct associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her publications include A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Duke University Press, 2002), Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s (Rutgers University Press, 2011), and the award-winning Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana University Press, 2014). She is currently at work on a multimedia collection of essays on queer feminisms, affect, and early US cinema as well as a more traditional book study, Junking Modernity: Early Cinema and the Question of History. On January 1, 2020, she assumed the position of editor in chief of Feminist Media Histories. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2023) 9 (2): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer M. Bean; Note from the Editor: Producing Film History. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2023; 9 (2): 1–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search It is June 2022. I am sitting in the middle row of a plush theater on the campus of Columbia University in New York City, surrounded by curators, collectors, scholars, artists, and educators gathered from diverse corners of the world. It is the final day of archival screenings at Women and the Silent Screen XI (WSSXI), a biannual conference organized under the auspices of Women and Film History International. The pianist flexes his hands while our hosts—Janes Gaines and Hilary Hallett—introduce a three-hour program composed of partially extant martial-art, espionage, and adventure films featuring gutsy female protagonists from Denmark, China, France, and the United States. I glimpse a technician near the edge of the stage helping Chonghwa Chung, lead researcher from the Korean film archive, set up for his presentation to follow the program. In the aisle behind me voices murmur in conversation, something about “queer kisses” in early cinema,... You do not currently have access to this content.

Just fundraising? Campaigning gendered inequalities in changing CSO fundraising markets in Finland

Civil society organisations (CSOs) often communicate global gendered inequalities simplistically from a fundraising framework to Global North audiences. While the stereotypical and racialising portrayals of women and girls in the Global South have been widely criticised, the diverse perceptions and experiences of development professionals regarding contested campaigning practices have been less discussed. Furthermore, literature has focussed on the Anglo-Saxon world, while the complex relations between gendered representations and neoliberal fundraising have been less studied in the Nordic context, where the marketisation of development apparatus is a fairly recent phenomenon. Drawing on a poststructuralist critique of development apparatus and postcolonial feminist reading on representations of the Global South, this article investigates how CSOs discursively frame gendered inequalities in their fundraising campaigns. By examining three fundraising campaigns in Finland, we demonstrate how CSOs are not only turning towards the use of a technical and neoliberal gender discourse, but doing so within an unforeseen advertising framework, in times of right-wing populist politics and a collapse in development funding. Basing our findings on qualitative data, we argue that CSOs are pressured to create simplified knowledge on gendered issues, which has provoked critical views not only from activists, but also from within CSOs.

The pandemic as gender arrhythmia: Women’s bodies, counter rhythms and critique of everyday life

AbstractIn this paper we build upon recent organizational research drawing upon the work of Henri Lefebvre, and feminist engagements with his theory of “Rhythmanalysis”, to examine how the COVID‐19 pandemic disrupted women's everyday lives and the impacts on their relationship with work. Drawing upon interviews with 38 women from diverse socio‐cultural backgrounds living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we describe the pandemic as an “arrhythmia”, a radical rupture to the familiar rhythms of their everyday social and working lives. We describe how the pandemic arrhythmia was felt in and through bodies (i.e., sleep, weight), and how women responded by creating counter rhythms (i.e., hobbies, exercise, food) as strategies to support their own and others wellbeing. Furthermore, radically disrupting linear repetitions of everyday work, social and family life, the pandemic prompted many to reflect differently upon how pre‐pandemic rhythms shaped by the social, economic and gendered structures of neoliberalism were causing various forms of alienation (i.e., from their own health and wellbeing, meaningful social connections, ethical and sustainable working practices, and from pleasure). For some women, the pandemic arrhythmia was a puncturing of their normalized time‐space gendered routines, leading to critique and transformation to their everyday work‐life patterns. Engaging a feminist reading of rhythmanalysis, this paper brings into focus how neoliberal gender regimes are reconstituted and disrupted in the rhythms and routines of women's everyday lives. In so doing, we highlight the potential in feminist engagement with arrhythmia to extend understandings of the gendered politics of everyday life during and beyond pandemic times, and the value in such approaches for organizational scholars interested in understanding the gendered rhythms of daily life and their effects on relationships with work.

Beyond Patriarchy

Le Voile de la Peur (Veil of Fear) by Samia Shariff (2006) is the French autobiography of an abused Algerian wife who describes her forced “illegal” migration to Canada in search of asylum. Shariff’s testimony has so far been seen as the life narrative of an oppressed female fugitive fleeing Islamic “misogyny.” In this article, I offer a more complex assessment that sees Veil of Fear as a border text that unveils the paradoxes of a globalized and yet heavily policed world. My exploration of Shariff’s autobiography emphasizes the contradictions of globalization, which call for borderlessness while policing the mobility of citizens of poor countries. My transnational feminist reading of Shariff’s clandestine journey highlights the intersectional nature of the oppressive forces that torment Algerian women and the wrongness of reducing the problems of Muslim female asylum seekers to patriarchy. My investigation of the difficulties which Shariff faced in migrating to Canada generates a reading of the unauthorized crossing as a bodily act through which paperless women challenge local gendered and global spatial hierarchies.

An imaginative geography of linear gender: Bathrooms, locker rooms and cis vulnerability

The wave of anti-trans bathroom bills since 2015 has raised awareness of the importance of bathroom politics for trans people. Long before this, feminist scholars have argued that bodies and spaces are simultaneously forced into a gender binary through the regulation of gender-segregated spaces such as bathrooms. In this article, I offer a trans feminist reading of the media events and rhetoric of the Christian right opposing trans access. I analyse the opposition of the Christian right towards trans access to gender-segregated spaces as an imaginative geography of linear gender. As I argue, the Christian right builds an imaginative geography of a threatened, White ‘cis America’ through rhetorical devices. Vulnerability attached with micro-level spaces across the United States is evoked through the figure of the child, ‘women and children’ and the predator. Through these rhetorical devices, bodies and spaces are imagined simultaneously. These figures work as powerful ‘stopping devices’ for anyone bending the straight line of linear gender. These stopping devices can mobilize cis bodies around a defence of a conservative gender order, legitimize a ‘protective’ control over cis girls and women, make living in the social world even harder for trans people, all the while envisioning an exclusionary ‘America’.

Verzet en maagdelijkheidstechnieken

Resistance and Techniques of Virginity: A Feminist Reading of The Confessions of the Flesh What is the feminist relevance of Foucault’s posthumously published Confessions of the Flesh? This question is part of a larger debate on the usefulness of the later Foucault in conceptualizing resistance against patriarchal power relationships. This paper follows those who argue in favor of the feminist potential of his concepts of freedom and care for the self, in particular the notions of ascesis and askesis. I argue that resistance against gendered norms is explicit in his discussion of counter-conduct (1978), which he links to late-medieval mysticism and to excessive, physical experiences. Both the gender-component and the excessive corporeal experiences disappear, however, from his later concept of askesis, which suggests that Foucault’s omission of women coincides with a displacement of the suffering body as a site of resistance. In the second part of this essay, I argue that this thesis is complicated by the recently published Confessions of the Flesh, and its lengthy discussion of early-Christian virginity. I conclude by commenting on the historiographical limits to recuperate moments of resistance.

Book Review: A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere

Book Review: A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere

Rewriting the Quixotic Novel in Charlotte Lennox’sThe Female Quixote

ABSTRACTCharlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote is a gender-bent version of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and its protagonist Arabella believes the world is like her romance novels. While most critics see the novel as a triumph of reason over romance, this article argues that it is in fact a rewriting of the quixotic genre: rather than awakening to reason, Lennox’s quixote instead molds the world to her romantic expectations. Building on Jodi Wyett’s feminist reading of the text, this article uses both the methods and impact of Arabella’s “mimetic influence” (in Aaron Hanlon’s words) to demonstrate her narrative agency and ultimate success. By resisting genre norms, the novel also resists the social expectations those norms rely on. In Lennox’s hands, the quixotic genre becomes a demonstration of the power of idealistic fiction and the imaginative women who read it.

Woman in Beauvoir's Concept: A Feminist Reading

The purpose of this paper is to present the French existentialist philosopher Simon de Beauvoir's feminist viewpoint against traditional patriarchy, which is a social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line. It also tries to present her traditional analysis how woman has been unreasonably victimized by man in the society. Beauvoir shows with great erudition that man's dominance has been secured through the ages by an ideological power; legislators, priests, scientists, and philosophers have all promoted the idea of woman's subordination. Hence, Beauvoir concludes that feminist must break this type of patriarchal power to change man at the level of theory, but without entering the theoretical domain on man's terms; however man and woman should live together for a happy life by enjoying equal right and power.

Uma Justiça do Trabalho feminista e antirracista é possível?

Abstract This article aims to examine the historical context in which labor law arises and the discourse that underlies it. The objective is to demonstrate how labor rights, despite the social commitment, reproduces a rationality attached to a white and masculine view of the world. It is also analyzed how much this rationality compromises the jurisdictional response to different conflicts involving different bodies. It demonstrates how actions such as the Protocol for Judgment with a Gender Perspective signed by the National Council of Justice have the merit of shedding a light on issues whose potential for a change in rationality cannot be neglected. It proposes, however, to go further, encouraging the creation of spaces for the academic discussion of sensitive topics and the resignification of legal institutes, from a perspective contaminated by decolonial, anti-racist and feminist readings.