Feminist Texts Research Articles

Virginia Woolf and Feminism

A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) by Virginia Woolf is considered as one of the first feminist texts. In fact, gender problems are raised in nearly all her works whether it is his novels or numerous essays. Woolf’s attempt to claim equal rights for education, her attempt to ‘kill the angel of the house’ and give analyses of the works of women writers (The Brontë sisters, Jane Austin, Dorothy Richardson) to show that a woman-writer is capable of creating a worthwhile work of art, all represent her as an ardent fighter for woman’s rights. The articles gives analyses of these different facets of Woolf’s feminism in order to show that although her liberal ideas and humanist worldview strongly felt the injustice of the patriarchal society, she also well noticed the faults of the radical feminism.

Is Ibn al-‘Arabī a Feminist?

Muhyiddīn Ibn al-‘Arabī is a very significant figure from 7th/13th-century Andalusia who made a paradigm shift in Sufism. He constructed a metaphysical doctrine and wrote about many issues including femininity and gender. His thoughts about the metaphysical state of women and femininity caused his approach to be interpreted as a source for Islamic feminism. He advocates for spiritual equality between men and women because of sharing “humanity” and asserts that women can attain the highest level of sainthood (qutbiyya). For his views on women’s imamate, testimony, and veiling, he is portrayed as a pro-woman thinker by some contemporary scholars. On the other hand, calling a great master “feminist” or at least “pro-feminist” is unacceptable for orthodox Muslims because of the pejorative connotations of feminism in mainstream Islamic thought. By explaining feminism through main feminist texts, and critically analyzing Ibn al-‘Arabī’s approach to gender through his works and books about gender issues in his philosophy, this paper attempts to introduce Ibn al-‘Arabī to gender scholars and feminism to Islamic scholars, and discuss his approach to women and gender.

Traffic in Asian Women

Traffic in Asian Women

Intersectional Feminism in Irene Salami’s Sweet Revenge

Feminism has become a major topic of discussion and research in African drama over the years. Playwrights as well as critics have written numerous works on different aspects of feminism in Africa, Irene Salami’s Sweet Revenge. But the burden of the African feminist ideology and the different ways it is reflected in the African feminist dramatic texts (the different dimensions of feminism) have not gotten the needed critical attention. This caught the attention of the current study. The study used a literary qualitative and analytical approach, with the primary play texts chosen for the study being critically analysed using feminism as the guiding theory. The study concludes that the play chosen for the study is a feminist text because it deals with the burden of the woman. Beyond this portrayal, the play deals with the place of women and their responses in different ways, thereby attending to the different strands of feminism. The study concludes that the only way to wholly appreciate the play is by connecting the various strands of feminism in their appreciation. The study recommends that there are new emerging approaches to feminism, such as "burial feminism," “snail sense feminism and that these approaches should be studied alongside the existing strands using intersectionalism.

Arguments vs emotions: Argumentative models as a tool of ideological confrontation in the mass media

The article analyzes the texts covering the special military operation (SVO) of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine in the modern media discourse. The question of language strategies and tactics used in media texts belonging to authors professing different ideological positions is considered. By means of linguistic-stylistic, functional-grammatical and comparative analyses, it is concluded that in the texts, on the one hand, pro-Russian-minded, and on the other — liberal-minded journalists and bloggers, different argumentation methods are chosen as language strategies. As a result of the study of texts devoted to the topic of SVO, the author of the article comes to the conclusion about the predominantly reasoned nature of the speech of pro-Russian authors and, conversely, about the predominantly evaluative and hypothetical, i. e., in general, the emotional type of speech in the texts of liberal-minded authors. It is argued that the main method of argumentation of “pro-Russian texts” is the factual method, whereas the main methods of argumentation in “liberal texts” are evaluative and hypothetical methods. Special attention is paid to the question of the place and role of argumentation in texts representing new knowledge. In this regard, the problem of logical and cognitive actions relevant to substantiating truth in scientific communication is considered. Based on a comparative analysis of the logic of argumentation in journalistic and scientific communication, a conclusion is made about the similarity of communicative and cognitive strategies of science and quality journalism. The description of argumentative actions representing the position of journalists and bloggers belonging to the liberal wing of the media sphere allows the author to speak about the low-quality nature of liberal journalism.

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity

Social Media and Women Empowerment: A Digital Feminist Analysis of “Watch Us Rise” by Watson and Hagan

This research study aims to explore the role of digital media in women empowerment in the context of Watson and Hagan’s novel Watch Us Rise (2019) by keeping in view Mendes, Ringrose and Keller’s work Digital Feminist Activism (2019) as a model framework. This study finds out different ongoing aspects of digital feminism and efforts of young feminist activists for women’s rights. Mendes, Ringrose and Keller (2019) claim that young feminist activists are using digital media as a platform to fight against rape culture by using different hashtags. This research study aims to find out different opinions and feelings of feminists regarding digital feminism. In this particular research study, it is described that Watson and Hagan (2019) have also used different hashtags in their work which are labeling Watch Us Rise (2019) a digital feminist text. In order to determine the role of digital media in women empowerment, Watson and Hagan’s (2019) work has been analyzed from digital feministic perspective. The findings of the research reveal that digital media is empowering women by providing them digital space and online support.

30 Years Later, Re-Examining the “Pretty Soldier”

December of 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of Naoko Takeuchi’s Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon (Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon) manga (1991-1997), and March of 2022 will mark the 30th anniversary of Toei Animation’s Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon anime (1992-1997). The series follows Sailor Moon as she defends Tokyo and the galaxy against alien enemies. While there seems to be controversy over whether Sailor Moon can be read as a feminist text, Sailor Moon still maintains its status as a feminist and queer magical girl series. Although there has been some scholarship on the magical girl genre and gender roles in manga and anime, there has not been much written about Sailor Moon specifically. As an influential series that is still relevant in pop culture, further analysis of this text is necessary to identify its feminist and queer nature. Despite being three decades old, Sailor Moon still maintains its status as a feminist and queer magical girl series. My argument is that on the surface, the Sailor Moon franchise appears to be a heteronormative and an (arguably) antifeminist series with traditional heterosexual relationships and gender stereotypes, but upon closer examination, the manga and anime series subvert patriarchal and gender stereotypes in both obvious and discrete ways.

Buried in the desert and lost in the city: Gothic spaces in Egyptian feminist writing

ABSTRACT This article considers the non-diasporic Egyptian feminist literary encounter with modernity through Gothic spaces. The dissociative relationship to fearsome spaces demonstrates that there is no symbolic place for women in Egypt’s (patriarchal) modernization. Egypt is often depicted as a woman, and Al-Samman’s work on the wa’d al banat motif – the daughter who is erased through burial – is used here to explore Egyptian feminist texts’ rejection of the conflation of space and subject in the patriarchal symbolic order. These spaces are read as Gothic through what Luce Irigaray calls “dereliction” and the Warwick Research Collective’s theorization of “combined and uneven development”. The article considers Gothic “bewildered” spaces in the palatial home and the city in Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze, a forest in Nawal El Saadawi’s The Fall of the Imam, and Bedouin estates and the desert in Miral Al-Tahawy’s novels The Tent and Gazelle Tracks.

Along the Wayside, Fall 2022

Along the Wayside, Fall 2022

La fortune éditoriale du Nakaz de Catherine II en Europe du XVIIIe siècle

The Instruction of Catherine II (the Nakaz, 1767) represented an original attempt of the Russian supreme power to introduce certain ideas of the European Enlightenment into the practice of national legislation. The ‘philosophical’ origins of the Nakaz, which incorporated broad borrowings from Western eighteenth-century thinkers, ensured the empress’s work a place among the most liberal texts of the Russian Enlightenment and promoted its spread beyond borders. In the last third of the XVIII century more than thirty editions of the Nakaz in several languages – German, English, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Greek and Latin – circulated in Europe. Such editorial activity attested the great interest of the public opinion in the reforms announced by Catherine II at the beginning of her reign. Nevertheless, the Nakaz translations were not without consequence to the original text, having caused its modifications. An additional point is that most of these translations were initiated or supported by the people connected with Russia by their functions or by their interests.

“Domestic Houseflies” and “Giant Cucumbers”: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Literary Criticism and Women Writers of the Long Eighteenth Century

ABSTRACT Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) is frequently considered the single most influential work that helped establish feminist literary criticism as a discipline. It continues to be a key feminist text today: scholars avidly debate how Woolf's criticism instigated, but also thwarted and distorted, the study of women's literary history. Apart from A Room, Woolf also engaged extensively with women's literary history both in her fictional and non-fictional writing. I argue that it is important to put A Room in dialogue with both Woolf's early essays about eighteenth-century women writers and her writing about literary history and aesthetics. Re-reading A Room in light of this is a useful exercise because it helps us understand that Woolf's feminist literary history project is not solely based on women's economic entrance into the literary marketplace, but that, for Woolf, literary aesthetics played an important part in women's inclusion or exclusion in literary history. In examining Woolf's conception of women's literary history of the long eighteenth century, this essay sheds new light on the close entanglement of aesthetics and feminist politics in Woolf's writing.

‘It was quiet’: the radical architectures of understatement in feminist science fiction

“Poisonless:a bare city, bright, the colours light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet.” The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974) This is how Ursula K. Le Guin describes the city of Abbenay in The Dispossessed. It is modest and unassuming. It is quiet. This architectural restraint is jarringly at odds with predominant portrayals of the science fiction city. As noted by Graham (2016) and Hurley (2008) the future city has become synonymous with rapid vertical urbanisation, closing off alternative urban visions and the possible futures they contain. While there is a growing call for the study of sf by scholars in the spatial disciplines such as Abbott (2016), Collie (2011), Hewitt and Graham (2015) and Kitchin and Kneale (2002), the unassuming, everyday spaces of feminist sf are often lost in the shadows cast by the dystopian high rise. As Le Guin argues, these passive and participatory utopias become visible only when we ‘adjust to a dimmer light’ (1989). In response, this paper lingers in shared spaces of sf which are possible examples of what Washida Imarisha terms ‘visionary fiction’ which is sf that ‘has a relevance towards building new, freer worlds’ (2015: 4) including; N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1979) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). By imaginatively inhabiting the utopian enclaves within these feminist texts it is possible to explore geographies of alterity – to adjust to the dim light and learn to cherish the quiet.

The Haunting of Flat Texts: Liberal Discourse and the Elision of Labour

ABSTRACT Using a method informed by hauntology, this article reads the discourse produced by two activist-influencers – Jordan Peterson and Clementine Ford – who currently define the liberal tradition’s reactionary and progressive boundaries. Locating consistent elisions of a rich concept of labour in the work of these representatives of contemporary liberalism, this article contends that a rich and multifaceted concept of human labour has historically been absent in liberal discourses. Indeed, it claims that it is by eliding labour’s conceptual plurality and political possibility that liberal discourses proceed and proliferate. Contemporary discursive ecologies contain multiple sites of reception, and the textual logic of social media often structures more traditional liberal texts. Despite this, long-standing structural elisions continue to constrain what liberal discourses can express. These elisions explain the inability of liberal discourses to adequately account for our current social conditions. Nor can these discourses imagine a future in which we achieve collective emancipation from the intersecting economic, environmental and epidemiological crises that haunt the present. This article argues that human labour – including and even especially the labour of care – is the liberal tradition’s foundational elision.

‘Failed Feminism’

In Vinegar Girl, a 2016 fictional adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, Anne Tyler exhibits an ambivalent treatment of the female predicaments left by William Shakespeare: while she invests her modern version of Katherina with linguistic and intellectual independence emblematic of female resistance to patriarchal disciplines, she somehow acquiesces in the fixed familial place and the stereotypical images of women in the monolithic patriarchal system. When the novel was introduced into the Chinese mainland in 2017, the Chinese publisher, out of commercial concerns, advertised it as a highly feminist text through the delicate manipulation of the translation of its title and a series of paratextual manoeuvres, to the detriment of the novel’s ambiguous complexities of gender issues. The marketing strategies nevertheless backfired on one of China’s social media platforms and rendered the novel a relatively ‘failed’ feminist text against China’s unique market and media background in the last decade.

Beyond the Horizon

Beyond the Horizon

Feminist Çeviri Aktivizmi: Türkiye’de Cinsiyet Eşitliği Anlatılarının Alıntısallık Üzerinden Yeniden Çerçevelendirilmesi

The feminist movement that flourished in the 1980s in Turkey was widely influenced by the Western second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. As a matter of this influence, translations/translators played an essential role in importing feminist epistemes mostly from the Western context into Turkish. Women’s Circle’s translations and the translated articles that were published in periodicals such as Yazko Somut the 4th Page catalyzed the dissemination of feminist ideas that would enable the transformation of hegemonic notions of women’s rights, gender roles and gender equality that were prevalent in the society at the time. However, aside from full-text translations, feminist activists often opted for more implicit ways of cross-cultural exchanges by making citations from foreign sources in the indigenous texts that they wrote for a local readership in Turkey. This study aims to problematize the translated citations embedded in indigenous feminist texts published in the 1980s from Mona Baker’s socio-narrative perspective (2006a), disclosing that feminist activists contested and reframed the hegemonic narratives on women and gender roles in Turkey by bringing in subversive counter-narratives, elaborated by prominent feminists, through these translated citations in a much more covert yet no less effective way than full-text translations. In this regard we examine Fatmagül Berktay’s article “Eşitliğin Ötesine…” (1985) that was published in the heyday of the new feminism in Turkey, contesting the long-established notion of gender equality through the translated citations it makes use of. Regarding citations as a mode of “translation activism” (Baker, 2006b; Tymoczko, 2010), we argue that these citational chains are shaped by and shape in turn the feminist positionality of the translator/writer to the past narratives and the newly emerging feminist narratives in Turkey.

Феминистская концепция материнства Адриенны Рич: материнство как личный опыт и как социальный институт

This article discusses the concept of the American “second wave” feminist, writer and poet Adrienne Rich, who had a strong influence on the American feminist tradition of understanding motherhood. Rich describes motherhood through personal experience and as a social institution. The work of Rich is known for its provocative nature, as well as for its depiction of prosaic motherhood experiences and personal details. The book has become a classic feminist text, and motherhood has become an integral issue of feminism. Rich combines examples from literature, research and real-life evidences in her text; she describes the experience of motherhood, from the period of childbearing to the growing up of children. A. Rich also talks about the hatred that mothers feel towards their child and the depression she personally experienced while raising three children. The author concludes that being a mother is one aspect of female identity, and not the only one. Instead of dismissing the problems of motherhood as unimportant, Rich delves into the problem of the crisis or loss of identity of a woman as a mother and the problem of that overwhelming sense of inadequacy that many mothers feel when raising children. The purpose of this article is to describe the main ideas of the American feminist A. Rich regarding motherhood as an experience and as a social institution. The scientific significance of the work is in the fact that A. Rich problematizes the fact that women themselves, being mothers, write little about their experience of motherhood and therefore the vast majority of knowledge and visual images of motherhood come to us through patriarchal culture as a collective or individual male consciousness. Adrienne Rich offers a feminine perspective on the fulfillment of motherhood when it is perceived as critical and problematic. The value of this study is in an attempt to comprehend the influence of A. Rich’s concept of motherhood on the feminist analysis of motherhood as a female practice and as a social institution

Decolonizing the Home at Home in the Pandemic: Articulating Women’s Experience

Feminism bears the promise of liberation of and equality for women. Reading and teaching feminist texts, within the academia and in activist spaces, has provided the opportunity to explore what it means to become and be a woman. This article explores the experience of teaching a course on women’s writing at the undergraduate level during the COVID-19 pandemic. Normally, a course on feminist writings is an occasion for self-reflection, thereby providing an opportunity to establish a dialogue between the domestic and the public. Such dialogues took place in secure institutional spaces such as classrooms or conference halls, without the intrusion of the domestic. However, as the teacher–student interaction shifted to an online mode during the pandemic, all the participants in this dialogue, including the instructor and the students, found themselves in domestic spaces, with family members listening. The article chronicles the anxieties of a woman instructor, as she teaches feminist texts from home to learners who are sitting behind computer screen in their homes and the possible impact of feminist ideas on the domestic spaces of all participants.

Liberal Feminism: Emphasizing Individualism and Equal Rights in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You

Liberal feminism is the emerging mainstream feminism that spotlights gender inequality and women’s liberation within the context of liberal democracy. The aim of the study focuses on the perspectives of liberal feminism using prominent ideas of liberal thinkers in Meena Kandasamy’s award-winning novel When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017). The methodology of the study includes concepts of liberal feminism in the text, and it is substantiated and explored using the ideologies of notable liberal thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and The Subjection of Women. The protagonist’s transition from a submissive to a self-liberated persona strengthens the novel’s credibility as a liberal feminist text. The paper also attempts to show that the concepts of liberal feminism very well appear in the selected text.