Gendered Metaphors Research Articles

Is Dismissing Environmental Caution The Manly Thing to Do? Gender and The Economics of Environmental Protection

Many leading mainstream economists downplay the need for care and caution when advising on environmental issues. This essay discusses how gender metaphors and archetypes—which contemporary research indicate have strong effects on our thinking—contribute to such reckless policymaking. Within discussions of economic analysis and policy, the archetypal figures of The Hero, The Old Wife, The Fool, and the Wise Grandmother are seen to play roles. Achieving a balance of bravery and care in environmental policy would require reexamining and combatting deeply rooted sexist and ageist cultural habits.

‘He devours her with his gaze’: Maurice Leitch's Stamping Ground and the Politics of the Visual

This essay is a critical reappraisal of Maurice Leitch's 1975 novel Stamping Ground through theories of the gender, sexuality, and the visual. The novel will be read as a disruptive critique of hegemonic Unionist identity and the rural idyll in Northern Irish cultural discourse but, importantly, the limits of using gendered metaphors in the case will be considered. For, although this novel seeks to critique ideology built around a certain kind of masculine dominance it does so using tropes which will be deconstructed through theories of the body, sexuality, and the visual aesthetic. For Leitch, the Ulster countryside is recast as not the authentic space reconstructed by both Nationalist or Unionist ideology but rather as a nightmarish world of voyeurs, sexual assault, and bodily terror.

Painting in a Different Kind of Void

The reception of Forrest Bess's work has primarily portrayed the artist as a “visionary” without external influence. By doing this, critics have downplayed the historical and cultural moment of Bess's productions and, subsequently, the well-developed interpretive models available from the history of art. This essay positions Bess and his work within the New York School of painting and its critical discourses of gendered metaphors and heteronormative formal evaluation. Recognizing how the artist participated in the conventions of vanguard painting of this time period offers new insights into Bess's singular style. Bess's works reveal the blind spots created by the visual grammar of Expressionism in his attempts to figure his repressed same-sex desires.

Reconstructing gender ideologies of English loanwords in Chinese

This article explores how English loanwords appropriated into Chinese are not merely linguistic adaptations but need to be understood as ideologically influenced processes of nativization (i.e. Chinesization). It focuses particularly on how traditional gender ideologies are re-constructed through examining the following aspects of gender assignment in English loanwords: gender associations in personal names, gender metaphor, gender visualization, and gender markers. Based on examples of loanwords representing these aspects of gender assignment, we find that gender feature values often change as English words are nativized into Chinese, and further, we find that such gender assignments often strengthen rather than resist traditional ideologies of gender in Chinese.

Metaphors, women and translation

One of the main concerns of translation theory from the 17th century till today has been the problem of how to be faithful to the original text. Further, this concern regarding both the origin and the originality of the source text has given rise to numerous metaphors in connection with gender and sexuality. In this article I undertake an overview of the history of gender metaphors in translation as found in the writings of translators and theorists from all periods. Through the metaphors appearing in their texts, I examine how authors such as Gilles Menáge, Friedrich Schleiermacher and George Steiner perpetuate the patriarchal stereotypes, and how Gloria Anzaldúa, Jacques Derrida, Carol Maier, Maria-Mercè Marçal, Carolyn Shread and other authors seek to go beyond these stereotypes by forging new metaphors. I have made use of Derridian terminology to rename the three parts of the article: 1) The First Age or les belles infidels – the age of sexist and androcentric sexual metaphors; 2) The Second Age or the Derridian ‘double bind’ – the age in which Derrida presents a model of metaphor which, despite using sexual language, defends the woman and translation; and 3) The Third Age or the new metaphors – the age of non-sexual metaphors.

Whither or Wither Feminisms?

516 Forum:WjG/S Studies Notes Bonnie Zimmerman, "Beyond Dualisms: Some Thoughts about the Future of Women's Studies," in Women's Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics, eds. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Agatha Beins (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 31-39. The association did ultimately change its name and is now Women's and Gender Studies et Recherches Féministes (WGSRF). See Layli [Phillips] Maparyan, "Feminism," in Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies, eds. Catherine M. Orr, Ann Braithwaite, and Diane Lichtenstein (New York: Routledge, 2012), 17-33; Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Robyn Wiegman, "Dear Ian" [A Response to Janet Halley], Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 11, no. 7 (Spring 2004), 93-120. Whitheror WitherFeminisms? Sharra L. Vostral As a feminist scholar of science and technology, I often interrogate gendered metaphors found in the description of scientific processes. Although "whither" refers to "what place," I also think of its homo phone "wither" to describe a plant, for instance, when it becomes dry and shriveled. It might seem unusual to use botanical metaphors in describing feminism in the institution of higher education, but it is a useful exercise. Fortunately, there have not been institutional pressures to disband gender and women's studies at my institution, and threats of administrative mergers have come and gone, but I am mindful of these developments that level stressors on departmental well-being. FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Forum:W/G/SStudies 517 At the University of Illinois, feminism has not withered, but whether or not it remains pertinent to students is another question. Feminism has propagated throughout the university, but the tangled growth of gender and queer studies reveals some of its shortcomings. I currently hold a joint position as associate professor of gender and women's studies (GWS) and history, and I spent two and a half years serving as the chair of the GWS curriculum committee, charged with revising the undergraduate major, minor, the LGBT/Q (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/queer) minor, the graduate minor in GWS, as well as proposing the new queer studies graduate minor. This over haul has been no small feat and has revealed synergies, cleavages, and the changing face of feminisms on the University of Illinois campus. Courses on "women," it turns out, are prevalent. Across the humanities and social sciences, most departments have at least one or two (and sometimes more) courses with "women" in the title. I have sat on plenty of university-wide committees where the female chem ists are committed to a woman-focused version of feminism and hap pily support "women" as a category. I call this the feminist-stolon approach; like strawberry plants that shoot out runners to propagate, the idea that women should be represented in positions of power, in course offerings, and as campus leaders is obvious. The propagation of feminism in terms of equality has been successful and, for the GWS department, perhaps too much so. In the early days when the GWS program at Illinois was founded, the best way to ensure the availability of courses was to have them taught through long-standing, disciplinary-grounded departments. While this approach guaranteed course offerings and kept the pro gram viable, it held serious shortcomings for future departmental independence and growth, especially for new faculty jointly appointed to GWS. In essence, the program outsourced so many classes to other departments that managed their scheduling, staffing,and enrollments, that GWS could neither control some of the required course offerings nor claim women as a unique subject of inquiry and research. This is rather ironic considering the important institutional politics of sup porting such a program. The stolons dispersing course content about women stripped the department of gender and women's studies from an exclusive claim on the subject and other approaches, namely cri tiques of gender, took firm root. 5i8 Forum:WjGjS Studies This is not to say that courses on gender are exclusive to GWS, either. English, history, and — depending upon which professor is teaching the course—sociology, communication, and ethnic studies programs at the...

The politics of huanghua: Gender, metaphors, and privatization in China

This essay offers a discursive approach to studying privatization in China. Through an analysis of gendered metaphors and sexualized discourses against migrant women circulated during the privatization process of a state enterprise in Beijing, the essay examines how these gendered metaphors as a form of auto-communication reflects male workers’ energeia and representational agency and how gender was mobilized by male workers to contest the new labor arbitrage which prefers hiring cheaper migrant women and management’s prioritization of privatization over workers’ welfare. The analysis focuses on the way gender constitutes an organizing principle of privatization that displaces class tension onto the devalued laboring bodies of migrant women. The essay suggests that both language and gender can become resources for mobilizing people for or against privatization.

Brunelleschi's egg: nature, art, and gender in Renaissance Italy

Feminist historians of science and philosophy have shown that during the Italian Renaissance, the profound shift in the concept of nature - from an organic worldview to the scientific - was assisted by the gender metaphor that defined nature as female. In this provocative and groundbreaking book, Mary D. Garrard extends this analysis to the history of art and proposes that the larger shift was both anticipated and mediated by the visual arts. In case studies of such major figures as Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Giorgione, and Titian, Garrard examines the changing relationship of art and nature in the Renaissance, and shows how they were cast by artists and theorists as gendered competitors in a steadily escalating rhetoric.

Heteronormative Constructions of Romanianness: A Genealogy of Gendered Metaphors in Romanian Radical-Right Populism 2000–2009

The present article investigates the recent history of the Romanian national construct as a matrix for gendered metaphors at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as it is heralded by the main radical-right populist party the Greater Romania Party (Partidul România Mare, PRM). Focusing on the Greater Romania Magazine (Revista România Mare, RRM) – the party's main media outlet – the analysis is centered on the PRM leader's editorials during a well-defined timeframe in the recent history of Romanian radical-right populism, from the preparations for presidential elections in 2000, which witnessed Tudor's surprising runoff, through the subsequent presidential elections in 2004, and up to EU parliamentary elections in 2009, which enabled the PRM to send three representatives to the EU Parliament. The staunchly restrictive definition of the family, portrayed as the exclusive heteronormative domain of the Romanian male, has been developed in time with the help of the “nation is a family” and the “strict fat...

El sexo de las metáforas

The hypothesis that states metaphors are structurally determinant in our social relations, routines, and experience has been accepted broadly in the last decades. Moreover, metaphors are to be found in many different levels of scientific practices, and have a diverse set of functions in science. Therefore, they impregnate all scientific enterprise. In this work we examine selected gender metaphors used in biology. We show metaphors are effective precisely because its effectiveness depends on shared social conventions, kinship relations and, authority that, by convention, is given to those that use them.

Treatment of Pediatric OCD

Free AccessTreatment of Pediatric OCDKyle A. B. Lapidus and Andrew R. GilbertKyle A. B. LapidusSearch for more papers by this author and Andrew R. GilbertDepartment of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine. E-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:February 2011https://doi.org/10.1521/capn.2010.15.5.6PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Cited byCited by1. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): Gendered metaphors, blogs and online forumsOnline publication date: 1 August 2013. Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar Volume 15Issue 5Oct 2010 Information© 2010 Guilford Publications Inc.PDF download

Gender metaphors in Middle Eastern politics and the Arab receiver

This study is based on the assumption that politicians, in their struggle for power and hegemony, deliberately use metaphors in their discourse to encode meanings derived from the patriarchal view on the roles women and men play in society, and hence leaving strong ideological effects on different participants. The aim of the study is to explore the cultural grounds of these metaphors and their connotations in different political situations. The data were collected from different websites and newspapers, both print and online, in addition to personal observation and follow-up of political events in the media. The analysis was carried out within Danesi's framework of connotations, which draws primarily upon Barthes’ development of the sign and Lakoff's theory of conceptual metaphors. The data were analyzed through a semiotic approach of connotational interpretation. It has been found that political planners and decision-makers, depending on the receivers’ schemata of appropriate gender roles in relation to war, manipulate private and sharply gendered relationships in their discourse. One way of doing this is through metaphors that masculinize or emasculate the participants, both euphemistically to legitimize military actions, and dysphemistically to degrade the opponent.

Metonymic grounding of ideological metaphors: Evidence from advertising gender metaphors

This paper argues that ideological metaphors can be special cases of conceptual interaction between metaphor and metonymy, along with synecdoche. We focus on a specific type of ideological metaphor, advertising gender metaphors. Within a cognitive semantic–pragmatic framework we have described and analysed the strategies and complex conceptual metaphoric–metonymic/synecdochic patterns in a case study of 292 advertising gender metaphors taken from a corpus of 1610 advertising metaphors present in 1142 commercial ads published in British Cosmopolitan. Metonymy, along with synecdoche, has been shown, as far as the above analysis of advertising gender metaphors is concerned, to precede in all but one of the various types and subtypes of this concrete type of ideological metaphor. The existence of underlying patterns of metonymic (and synecdochic) motivation used for gender assignment is, therefore, proven and evidence is given for Taylor's view (1995:138) that all (ideological) metaphors may necessarily need underlying metonymisations. It also supports Dirven (1993), Croft (1993), Barcelona (2000a,b), Radden's (2000), Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (2000) and Geeraerts’ (2003) idea of a metaphor–metonymy continuum with the intermediate notion of metonymy-based metaphors.

Overtness-covertness in advertising gender metaphors

This paper aims at demonstrating that weak communication (overt and covert) can have an important influence on the choice, specification and interpretation of ideological metaphors in advertising. We focus here on a concrete type of ideological metaphor, advertising gender metaphor. We present a description of advertising gender metaphors, subtypes (cases of metaphorical gender, universal gender metaphors and cultural gender metaphors) and crosscategorisation in a case study of 1142 adverts published in British Cosmopolitan (years 1999 and 2000). We next assess “overtness-covertness” in the advertising gender metaphors in our sample. In considering this we also look at the conventional-innovative scale of these metaphors, and examine their discrimination against men and women. The intended value of this paper lies in its examination of both weak overt and covert types of communication in relation both to cognitive and pragmatic theorising of metaphor, and, more generally, to theorising advertising communication.

Gendered Language and (Unequal) Power: Deconstructing US-Latin American Relations in the Early Cold War

After visiting Latin America in 1950, George F. Kennan presented a report to the Secretary of State Dean Acheson on his impressions of the region and its significance for the United States in the early Cold War period. This framed much of US-Latin American relations in the early Cold War. This article attempts to determine whether a relationship can be established between notions of power attached to feminine and masculine roles in society and the power dynamics determining US-Latin American relations in this period. US-Latin American relations are analyzed from a gender perspective based on the premise that knowledge and language are socially constructed and influence the practice of diplomacy. The initial hypothesis suggests that because language conveys symbolic representations of power, that is, notions of a superior–subordinate relationship, US officials found it useful to use gender analogies and metaphors when discussing US-Latin American relations. Kennan's reports on the region as well as other US officials' documents related to US policy towards Guatemala in this period are analyzed to uncover notions of unequal power.

Instrumental Borders of Gender and Religious Conversion in the Balkans*

In this paper I look at religious identifications and affiliations in the Balkans as instrumental political resources for ascertaining hierarchical relations among social groups and individuals, with extensive use of gendered metaphors, referring to different categories of people as either effeminate or truly manly, and actual women often used as a currency of exchange.

Sun-pictures and shadow-play: Untangling the web of gendered metaphors in Lady Elizabeth Eastlake's ‘Photography’

In one of the first histories of photography, published in April 1857, Lady Elizabeth Easdake defmes key aspects of the medium's identity with recourse to an intriguing array of often contradictory gendered metaphors.1 The sun and its light, the active agents in photography, gain an undeniably masculine dimension in Easdake's ‘Photography’. Although Easdake acknowledges Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot as the inventors of their respective photographic processes, she privileges the sun as the distincdy masculine creative force behind both forms of photography: On the prepared plate ofDaguerre and on the sensitive paper of Fox Talbot the great luminary concentrates his gaze for a few earnest minutes; with the albumen-sheathed glass he takes his time more leisurely still; but at the delicate film of collodion — which hangs before him fmer than any fairy's robe, and potent only with invisible spells — he literally does no more than wink his eye, tracing in that moment, with a detail and precision beyond all human power, the glory of the heavens, the wonders of the deep, the fall, not of the avalanche, but of the apple, the most fleeting smile of the babe, and the most vehement action of the man.2

The Significance of Gendered Metaphors1

This article examines the roles of gendered metaphors in philosophical texts. Paul Ricoeur's detailed study of how metaphors constitute meaning provides the starting‐point for an evaluation of the feminist debate on the “maleness of reason”. It is claimed that Ricoeur's hermeneutical framework provides a broader analytical basis for the understanding of metaphor than Jacques Derrida's famous study of the metaphorical origin of concepts, which has been used by feminist thinkers (Lloyd, Irigaray) in order to unveil the impact of gendered metaphors. The author utilizes Ricoeur's idea that metaphors are part of a creative redescription of experienced reality. This redescription affects meaning also in cases where metaphors are not conceptually or theoretically constitutive. Looked upon from this perspective gendered metaphors do affect our understanding of philosophical texts, including for example conceptions of reason, even if these metaphors have not constituted the concept of reason. Recently some feminist scholars have questioned whether metaphors have actually excluded women from philosophy or science and suggested that instead of focusing on exclusion, feminists should focus on reinterpreting the philosophical canon and unveiling the considerable amount of women that have in fact all along been engaged in philosophical and scientific activities. In her conclusion the author agrees on the importance of rewriting the canon, but questions the implicated opposition between attempts to unveil gendered meanings and attempts to unveil forgotten women. Following Ricoeur, the author suggests that the project of rewriting a less male‐dominated philosophical canon is in itself a kind of redescription which thus affects our understanding of the very nature of philosophy.

Imagining the Matthean Eunuch Community: Kyriarchy on the Chopping Block

This article identifi es the eunuch saying in Matthew’s Gospel as a gender metaphor that suggests women in Matthew’s communit(ies) continued to experience the same equality in marriage and leadership roles as the women in Jesus’s Galilean basileia movement. The elevation of women’s status created tension within the Jesus movements, discernable by reading the eunuch logion in its larger literary and social contexts. By examining the eunuch saying and Matthew’s Gospel in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world—where kyriarchal structures determined gender roles and eunuchs symbolized neither male nor female—the author concludes that this Jesus saying challenged traditional male power rooted in kyriarchal marriage and households. The article consequently criticizes recent feminist historical-Jesus research that rejects the antikyriarchal and emancipatory nature of the basileia movement named after Jesus.

Netzwerk, Bruderschaft, Zelle Die Rolle von Geschlecht und Gewalt bei der Formierung neuer religionspolitischer Gruppen in ,Okzident' und ,Orient'

AbstractTaking as a starting point the reality of a worldwide return of religion in the cultural and political spheres, the article undertakes a comparative examination of the role of gender metaphors and performance in building of new religious groups as "imagined communities". These groups have increasingly taken the form of fundamentalist and Islamist networks, especially in non-European regions including the United States, and in the context of ,,new wars."