Women's Fiction Research Articles

Between the Harem and Feminism: The Translation and Circulation of Arab Women Novelists

This article critically examines the translation and circulation of literary works authored by Arab women novelists in the 1990s, a period marked by an unprecedented surge in the translation of Arabic-gendered fiction. Through the critiques of Michel Hartman and Marilyn Booth, it aims to shed light on the intricate interplay between translation and gender. Moreover, it probes how the translation and distribution of Arab women's fiction are entwined with the complex politics of Orientalism and frequently shaped by the dynamics of white Western feminism. The study explores the opportunities and challenges encountered by Arab women writers to gain international recognition and the extent to which translation can serve as a medium for their voices to resonate across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Central to the analysis is an exploration of power dynamics inherent in the selection, translation, and promotion of Arabic women writers, taking into account the influence of Western literary markets and feminist discourses. By scrutinizing the contributions of translators and publishers, the research underscores how feminist principles shape the visibility and reception of Arabic-gendered literature on a global scale.

Kurdish women “bargaining with patriarchy:” The subversive woman in Ata Nahai's fiction

Over the past two decades, Women Studies has developed within Kurdish studies. Scholars from various disciplines, including sociology, history, and folk literature, have explored this field to shed light on the experiences and roles of Kurdish women. A less explored area remains literature, particularly fiction. This study focuses on Ata Nahai, a highly acclaimed novelist from Iranian Kurdistan, born in 1960, whose main female characters deviate significantly from the stereotypes of selfless mothers and loving submissive wives. Nahais short stories and novels depict women as subversive. Their subversion does not, however, bring about their emancipation, but highlights significant issues faced by Kurdish women, such as contradictory attitudes towards their own bodies, abusing other women and behaving inconsistently with their family members.

Robin Brooks, Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African and African Diasporic Women's Fiction

Robin Brooks, <i>Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African and African Diasporic Women's Fiction</i>

Empowering Self-Care: Caring Things in Alice Dunbar-Nelson's 1890s "New Woman" Short Fiction.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson is mostly remembered as a poet, activist, and ex-wife of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her volume The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899) has been largely overshadowed as a result. Yet, the collection contains a portfolio of heroines analogous and contemporaneous to the famed New Woman figure of the fin de siècle. In this article, I consider Dunbar-Nelson's heroines in light of their New Woman-esque agency and autonomy as they find remedies and power in objects and materials steeped in New Orleans's cultural heritage. Ceded neither social nor political self-governance nor domestic comfort, this article reads these transcendental, metaphysical objects as sources of self-care. With close analysis of "The Goodness of St. Rocque," "Tony's Wife," and "Little Miss Sophie," I argue that Dunbar-Nelson's protagonists exert influence over their lives, specifically in the negotiation of romantic relationships, through voodoo charms, Catholic candles, tarot cards, sewing machines, and knitting needles. Covering courtship, break-ups, and unhappy marriages, I demonstrate the ways in which these empowering spiritual objects respond to health concerns, including malnutrition and domestic violence, in turn, situating them as alternatives to patriarchal and historically racist medical institutions. Valorizing the cultural milieu of New Orleans and the customs of the Caribbean and European heritage, and thereby conveying Dunbar-Nelson's resistance to white and male supremacist ideologies in late-nineteenth-century Southern America, the article ultimately assesses the parallels with (predominantly white) New Woman fiction, through shared themes of fraught heterosexual dynamics and women's declining health.

Counter-discourses to social inequalities and urban modernity: Subaltern women in post-2000s Chinese science fiction

ABSTRACT The issues of resurgent class and gender inequalities, rapid urbanization, and huge regional disparity were a notable focus of many post-2000s Chinese science fiction, which vividly created images of subaltern females. This paper looks at how contemporary Chinese sci-fi authors seek social justice by representing the experiences of various subaltern women within the specific genre of science fiction. It argues that the images of socially and culturally marginalized women were used as effective tools for questioning the intersectional social inequalities in contemporary China. The works discussed in this article all problematize the nature and influences of urban modernity by revealing the intersections, tensions, and contradictions between subaltern women and the classed, gendered modernization process. The sci-fi realist portrayal of subaltern agency and gender struggle also helps to generate powerful counter-discourses to urban modernity and technological utopia.

Exploring Fearism in Literature: A Critical Study on Select Women Writers of the North East India

The present paper aims to study some of the prose fictions of the select Northeast women writers from a very new perspective in literary theory that is ‘The Philosophy of Fearism’. Fearism , propounded by Desh Subba ,is regarded as the first east-west dialogue, an emerging philosophy that deals basically with the issues of fear and its impact in human life. Mamang Dai from Arunachal Pradesh, Temsula Ao from Nagaland and Arupa Patangia Kalita from Assam have been so vocal female voices from this region and this paper will study some select works by them from a fearist perspective. Their works highlight the concern about ecology, social issues and the traumatic conflicts in human life; nonetheless, we can delineate these philosophical visions of Fearism in the portrayal of characters. Desh Subba, the founder of Fearism asserts that human beings go through fearmorphosis, they are being watched by panopticans and sometimes man himself scapegoat not only the innocent people, even the nature with arms and gun powder. This paper will study ‘Stupid Cupid’ by Mamang Dai, ‘The Curfew Man’ by Temsula Ao and Arupa Patangia kalita’s ‘The Girl with a long Hair’ and will try to interpret with this perspective because the characters dwelling in different situations are the victim of a fear Sisyphus, who are always under the multiple eyes of fear and this fear destabilizes their life being.

Women-Rabbi Fiction in the 21st Century: An Update

Women rabbis have been depicted in fiction for close to fifty years. In the second decade and then in the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century over a dozen fictional women rabbis appear as central or important characters in novels, short stories, and on the silver screen. Most of them make their first appearance. This article takes note of the authors of these works, and then looks at the characters themselves, contrasting their “fictional” experiences with the published experiences of “real-life” women rabbis. It discusses these fictional women rabbis in terms of their theology/sense of tradition; religious/educational backgrounds; gender identification; and where that information is dealt with in the storyline, how these women address some of the challenges facing women rabbis such as dressed for success; pay inequity; and matters of sexual harassment. This is followed by a section on how women regard success in the rabbinate. A caveat: the real-lived experiences of women rabbis, their definitions of success and their joys/concerns/issues/disquiets are not necessarily the subjects that concern writers of fiction that feature women rabbis as characters.&#x0D;

Delineation of Tagore’s women in fiction and films

Delineation of Tagore’s women in fiction and films

COMMODIFICATION OF ASIAN FEMININITIES IN CHA'S IF I HAD YOUR FACE

This research paper probes the postfeminist commodifying schemas of beauty politics that shape the identities of women in Asian fiction. It focuses on the transformative journey of Kyuri, an enchantingly beautiful Salon girl, as depicted in Frances Cha's novel, If I Had Your Face. Set against the backdrop of the vibrant metropolis of Seoul, South Korea, Kyuri's narrative represents the profound yearning of Asian women deeply immersed in the allure and sophistication of glamour and beauty. Employing Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth, this article examines the multifaceted experiences of the Asian women portrayed in the novel. Schemas of beauty industry lead them to commodified futures. In the highly competitive realm of beauty industry, the quest for physical perfection compels Asian women to undergo transformative facial procedures, seeking unrelenting pursuit of an idealized standard of beauty, perpetuated by the glamorous world and media. Repeated surgical interventions for artificial beauty standards ensnare them in a disquieting dystopian future. Xenofeminism celebrates the techno-material and antinatural bodies. In this paradigm, the characters in If I Had Your Face grapple with the unsettling and dehumanizing consequences of their pursuit of beauty: a dystopic future.&#x0D; &#x0D; Keywords: Xenofemism, Techno-material, Antinatural, Dystopia, Beauty Myth

Women in fiction: Bechdel-Wallace Test results for the highest-grossing movies of the last four decades.

Women in fiction: Bechdel-Wallace Test results for the highest-grossing movies of the last four decades.

Growing Together: Yang Shuangzi's Queer Adaptation of Taiwan's Colonial Fiction

Readings of Taiwan's Japanophone colonial-era fiction are typically influenced by politicised interpretations of Japanese rule (1895–1945) on the island and its significance to contemporary Taiwanese identity. Till recently, these discussions often marginalised colonial-era texts by Taiwanese women, initially due to limited translation during Taiwan's period of martial law (1945–1987), and later due to the fragmentary nature of these short stories. This article explores how millennial author Yang Shuangzi (1984-) overcomes the anticipatory politics of reception surrounding colonial-era fiction by adapting a short story by Yang Qianhe (1921–2011) through the lens of ‘Girls’ Love’ (GL), a predominantly online subculture made up of media (fanfiction, manga, fanart) portraying queer relationships between women and girls. By understanding the text as an adaptation, it is possible to explore how contemporary Taiwanese authors read and relate to colonial fiction, breathing new life into such texts through interpretations grounded in contemporary culture. In Yang Shuangzi's case, I argue that she not only emphasises Yang Qianhe's importance to Taiwanese women's fiction through adaptation, but that she also creates space for literary play and creativity. The article focuses on the process of adaptation to develop an argument about literary connection between generations of Taiwanese women, whilst also outlining how online subcultures can revitalise literatures caught in the back-and-forth of nation-state politics by establishing their own practices of language and form.

The British Lion’s Triumph over the Bengal Tiger: The Royal Combat and the Allegory of Imperial Dominance

This article shows how the allegory of British-tiger rivalry became a distinct feature in 19th-century British imperial visual culture to imagined imperial attitudes over India. After the second Anglo-Mysore war (1799) between the East Indian Company and the Tipu Sultan, in 1808, a visual description of lion-tiger bloodshed was issued as a medal by the East India Company to reward its troops. Such a description shows a lion, representing the British nation’s suppression over a Bengal tiger, the royal emblem of Tipu Sultan. After this, the same imagery served to be imagined and visualised the British dominance and control over ruthless and unwilling India. Moreover, in such an allegory, a fiction of dead white women was added to invoke nationalism among Britons. This raises a feminist issue of how this fictional image of victimised women fulfils the British masculine agenda of imperialism and nationalism while the women remain deprived.

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age

Gender Issues for Social Reformation in Contemporary African Women's Fiction

Gender Issues for Social Reformation in Contemporary African Women's Fiction

A Problem of Gender Representation: Adapting the Bechdel Test to Evaluate the Social Media Presence of Radiology Residency Programs

Social media serves as recruitment tools for residency programs, allowing programs to "brand" themselves in an era of virtual interviews. For female applicants, viewing their gender represented on Instagram may influence their pursuit of a program. Our study's goal is to quantify how female-presenting professionals are represented on radiology residency (RR) Instagram pages, as these are increasingly important platforms for resident recruitment. The Bechdel test is a well-known measure of the representation of women in fiction that requires at least 2 women speak to each other about a topic other than a man. We modified this test to evaluate the portrayal of female-presenting professionals on public Instagram galleries of RR programs. For a photo to pass our test, female-presenting persons are shown physically together, without male-presenting professionals, and in a professional setting. To compare gender depiction, a Male Bechdel Test was also used. RR Instagram pages were identified using the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database Access (n=87) and examined with an adapted framework approach to count female and male-presenting individuals in 1044 images. Results were assessed using paired t-tests and a chi-square with McNemar's test. Approximately 50% of the RR Instagrams passed the Male Bechdel Test while only 21.3% passed the Female Bechdel Test, a significant difference in gender representation (χ2(1)=13.255, P=0.022). Paired sample t-tests revealed that RR Instagram pages are significantly more likely to feature male-presenting professionals in a professional setting (P < 0.0001), feature them with other male-presenting professionals (P=0.001), and feature them without female-presenting professionals (P=0.003). Our results suggest female-presenting radiologists are under-represented on the Instagram profiles of RR programs. While this reflects the dearth of females in this field, programs may improve gender inclusion by more prominently displaying females on social media. This may assist in recruiting minority applicants.

Empire, Infrastructural Violence, and the Speculative Turn

Abstract: This essay analyzes the function of speculative fiction in the ecosystem of literary attempts to understand the imbrication of infrastructure with racial and colonial violence. While the task of making infrastructural violence apprehensible may seem more suited to realism (the literary mode designed to make legible "what is"), I trace a largely unrecognized strand in Johan Galtung's original theorization of structural violence to argue for the importance of "what is not": the potential realizations of human flourishing that are foreclosed by empire's infrastructural violence—potential realizations that can only be grasped through an act of speculation. I make this argument through a reading of Toni Cade Bambara's 1980 novel The Salt Eaters , which begins in a mostly realist mode that captures empire's violent distortions of Black and Native lives through infrastructural violence before transitioning into a more overtly speculative mode towards the end of the novel. Bambara's formal enactment of the speculative turn, I argue, evokes the potential realizations of Black and Native life that have been foreclosed by empire's infrastructural violence and entrains readers to see the world not just as it is, or as it could be, but as it might have been and might yet be. I close the essay with a discussion of the broader speculative turn in anticolonial Black women's fiction, suggesting that both the rise of speculative elements in more realist novels and the efflorescence of Black speculative fiction can be seen as deploying the affordances of speculation to capture the realities of colonial infrastructural violence in the US.

Subverting the Binary Oppositions concerning Female Agency in Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman

This study explores woman’s agency in Alameddine’s fiction, An Unnecessary Woman (2013) concerning the normative state of agency in a communal structure that controls women’s behaviors and wishes set by suppression. The current study uses the deconstruction theory of French post-structuralists Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, taken from a feminist perspective, which undermines gender dichotomies and interrupts “the unquestionable truth” in Western philosophy. In short, Rabih Alameddine’s fiction reveals the misconceptions about – and misrepresentations of – Arab women in contemporary Arab American fiction and disrupts the binary opposition which resembles the backbone of patriarchy.

The Path of African Women in Fiction: a Critical Analysis of Ngugi's the River between and a Grain of Wheat

The Path of African Women in Fiction: a Critical Analysis of Ngugi's the River between and a Grain of Wheat

PORTRET INTELEKTUALCA: FEMINISTIČKI ČASOPIS ŽENSKI POKRET (1920–1938) O SRPSKIM KRITIČARIMA I PISCIMA

The paper examines the role and reception of Serbian male literary critics and (literature) writers within the feminist magazine Women’s Movement (1920–1938). Regarding the critics, the magazine published two significant articles: one dedicated to the well-known Serbian critic Jovan Skerlić (1877–1914), and the other focusing on his successor Milan Bogdanović (1892–1964), also a notable critic. Both texts praise the im- pressionistic and relativistic qualities found in Skerlić and Bogdanović’s literary criticism. The paper argues that the praise stems from the potential the mentioned type of literary criticism has when it comes to the appreciation of women’s writing. Additionally, the paper highlights the impact of the broader political and artistic ideas of Jovan Skerlić on the Women’s Movement and its female contributors (some of whom were students of Skerlić). The second part of the paper analyzes the magazine’s articles about Serbi- an writers. Written predominantly with approval and from a feminist and emancipatory perspective, these texts primarily address the representation of women in male-authored fiction. It’s worth noting that Jovan Skerlić also approved the writings of most of the male authors mentioned in the Women’s Movement, emphasizing the emancipatory elements in their works. Through the texts about critics and writers, the Women’s Movement pre- sented a portrait of the male intellectual whose political beliefs and literary or scientific work align with the feminist goals. At the same time, the female critics and contributors in the magazine did not hesitate to criticize those intellectuals who demonstrated their reactionary views on women and feminist aims and battles.

Literary Representation of Women in South Asian Writings

This paper scrutinizes the portrayal of women in South Asian fiction by female writers who have been vocal and have been advocating the rights of women in general and the rights and position of Muslim women in particular. How society treats women at different phases of life: daughterhood, womanhood and motherhood have been the point of examination in this article. The paper employs the radical feminist perspective as a theoretical tool to examining the represented position of women in novels of Monica Ali and Taslima Nasreen who belong to Bangladesh but reside beyond the national territory. Ali’s Brick Lane and Nasreen’s My Girlhood have been undertaken as the primary texts to study about the depiction of Muslim women. Women are not inferior to men in any respect. However, through socialization, they are made to feel that they are subordinates to men and their lives are incomplete without the support of men. This feeling instead of capacitating women weakens their will power and ultimately they develop a psyche that men are superior beings and therefore, they must abide by the dictates of men in both personal and professional lives. Both of the novels portray women as daughters, wives and mothers who subordinate men and stay obedient to their counterparts to the extent they are devoid of their existence. When they realize their subjugated position and know the world around, they seek for their individual identity. Despite such portrayals of women’s subjugation and marginalization in patriarchy fueled by doctrines of Islam, some feminist critics including Hosseini assert that the pathetic condition of women in Muslim societies is because of political Islam. Therefore, the generalized view of Islam is questionable.