Gender Plays Research Articles

Children's Gendered and Non-Gendered Play in Natural Spaces

Children's Gendered and Non-Gendered Play in Natural Spaces

24. Gender and laughter: Comic affirmation and subversion in traditional and modern media.

Gaby Pailer: Introduction I. Gender - Laughter - Media: Theoretical Crossings Stefan Horlacher: Short Introduction to Theories of Humour, the Comic, and Laughter Andreas Bohn: Subversions of Gender Identities through Laughter and the Comic? II. Gender B(l)ending: The Comic Impact of Cross-Dressing and Body Alteration Jessica Hamann: Kiss a white Galathea, she will laugh and blush: Laughter, Blush, and Gender Roles in Gottfried Keller's Novella Cycle Formula for Love. The Epigram (1881) Beth Pentney: A comic turn, turned serious: Humour, Body Modification, and the Natural in Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She Devil Raluca Cernahoschi: From now on, I am Carmen: Imagining Cross-Dressing as Comic Protest in the Life and Work of Romanian-German Author Franz Hodjak Ulrich Scheck: Where No Woman Has Gone Before: Humour and Gender Crossing in Star Trek's Voyager and Enterprise Markus Hallensleben: To be educated is to become a Harlequin: Cross-Skinning as Carnivalesque Hybridity in Michel Serres, Hannah Hoch's Dada, and Orlan's Body Art III. Cross-Cultural Encounters: Race, Gender, and the Comic Gaby Pailer: Multi-Layered Conflicts with the Norm: Gender and Cultural Diversity in Two Comedies of the German Enlightenment Sabine Wilke: Indigenous Laughter: The Voice of the Other in Tales from the South Seas Gabrijela Mecky Zaragoza: Subverting the Pantragic Heroine: Nestroy against Hebbel Jakub Kazecki: Black and White in Color or Black Victory? The Comic Effect of Displacement in the Film Noirs et blancs en couleur (1976) by Jean-Jacques Annaud Karin Lornsen: The City as Stage of Transgression: Performance, Picaresque Reminiscences, and Linguistic Incongruity in Emine S. Ozdamar's The Bridge of the Golden Horn IV. Gender, Genre, and the Comic: Literature, Radio,Television, and Cinema Andreas Seidler: Moral Ideal and Physical Desire: Gender Roles, Sex, and Comic Elements in the Rococo Tales of Christoph Martin Wieland Birte Giesler: Social Satire, Literary Parody, and Gender Critique in French and German Fairy Tales of the Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friederike Helene Unger Ellie Kennedy: But I'm a Lady! Undoing Gender Bending in Contemporary British Radio Comedy Peter Stear: Mockumentalism: Re-Casting the Void in Contemporary British TV Comedy Christine Mielke: Couples and Friends: Comic Strategies and Social Structures in German and American Comedy Series Frank Degler: Affirmative Humour in Bully Herbig's Parody of Star Wars/Star Trek: (T)Raumschiff Surprise V. Comic Strategies: Gender and Laughter in Literature, Theory, Communication, and Art Susanne Bach: May I Laugh about Women's Lib? or: The Difficult Relationship of Humour and Feminism in Margaret Atwood, Caryl Churchill, and Helen Fielding Stefan Bornchen: Aletheia as Striptease: Gendered Allegories of Truth in Heidegger, Gorgias, and Barthes Volker Helbig: Judith Butler and the Problem of Adequacy, or: The Epistemological Dimension of Laughter Caroline L. Rieger: Comparing Same-Gender and Opposite-Gender Conversations: a Laughing Matter? Oliver C. Speck: The Joy of Anti-Art: Subversion through Humour in Dada List of Contributors

Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism. Susan J. Wolfson . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. xix+430.

<i>Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism</i>. Susan J. Wolfson . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. xix+430.

Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance Deirdre O’Rourke Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance. Edited by James C. Bulman. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008; pp. 255. $52.50 cloth. Inspired scholarship, the unearthed remains of Elizabethan playhouses, and Gwyneth Paltrow in breeches, have not quenched the desire to recreate the experience of Shakespeare’s theatre. In Shakespeare Re-Dressed, James Bulman offers a collection of essays that take a fresh look at one aspect of the Elizabethan theatre experience: cross-dressing. While the authors discuss early modern conventions, their primary emphasis is on the implications of cross-dressing in contemporary Shakespearean productions. The eleven essays, which explore contemporary cross-gender casting, cover both male and female cross-dressing, US and British productions, unisex and mixed-sex casts, actors’ processes, and audience reception. The greatest strength of Shakespeare Re-Dressed lies in the points of intersection between the pieces that reveal conflicting and complementary perspectives on its subject. In the volume’s first essay, Jennifer Drouin uses contemporary understandings of cross-dressing to complicate the convention in Shakespeare’s plays. She attempts to distinguish between “cross-dressing, drag, and passing” and the slippages between them, both within the fictive worlds of Shakespeare’s dramas and their reception in production. Although the lines between the three remain blurred despite Drouin’s attempts to clarify them, the discoveries she makes in the process are revelatory and useful. Roberta Barker’s essay “Acting Against the Rules” engages existing scholarship on the eroticism of the “boy actress.” She contends that “only in a situation in which both actors and audiences risk losing detachment by participating in a theatrical cross-dressing that they recognize as an active part of their own world could we truly remember the erotic significance of the Shakespearean boy actress” (70). For Barker, this situation is created not by the reconstructed Globe’s all-male performances or Cheek by Jowl’s As You Like It, but rather by an all-male school production of As You Like It that she attended. Bulman follows Barker’s essay with the first of two contributions to the volume, this one focusing on Cheek by Jowl’s production in 1991 of As You Like It in which he outs the production’s queer agenda. Bulman’s analysis of the production’s victimization of the flamboyant Jaques reveals that the interpretation was intended as commentary on the violent homophobia prevalent during Thatcherism. Orlando’s simultaneous embrace of his feelings for both Rosalind and Ganymede, coupled with Jaques’s queering, illuminated the production’s queer agenda, which, Bulman argues, led to the “queering of the audience as well” (88). Although audiences were probably unaware of their queering, Bulman’s insightful application of queer theory to contemporary all-male productions is intriguing. In his analysis of the same production of As You Like It, Cary Mazer argues for cross-dressing as a means of inviting audiences into the theatricality of gender. Like Drouin, Mazer distinguishes among types of cross-dressing by putting the camp of Charles Busch’s Psycho Beach Party in conversation with Cheek by Jowl’s cross-dressed performances. Drawing on Rhonda Blair’s work on cross-dressing, Mazer argues that actors who embrace the “not me” and the “not-not-me” of their characters allow audiences a double vision that is not only pleasurable, but also questions gender essentialism. [End Page 139] P. A. Skantze’s and Andrew James Hartley’s pieces both analyze selectively cross-gendered productions. Skantze examines Mabou Mines’s Lear, which boasted a mixed-gender cast, cross-gender roles—including a female Lear—and cross-dressed characters. Skantze’s project is to tease out the implications of this gender play, its interaction with race, and its impact on the universality of Shakespeare’s plays. Skantze argues that Mabou Mines’s production choices disrupt the supposed universals of Shakespeare’s King Lear by focusing the narrative on a particular woman. Skantze’s response to Mabou Mines’s work reveals the possibilities opened up by subverting the universal Shakespeare. Hartley’s work as dramaturg for the Georgia Shakespeare Festival’s The Tempest informs...

Manly Crafts: Mike Kelley's (Oxy)Moronic Gender Bending

Mike Kelley's 1987 assemblage More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid is a tapestry of tattered toys, handmade rag dolls, puppets, knit potholders, and stuffed animals sewn onto a matrix of afghan blankets mounted on canvas. The chaotic conglomeration of smiling faces and snuggly bodies offers a perverse surfeit of sappiness, a discomforting sense of hominess gone haywire. The work highlights the economics of gift-giving, in which pieces of thread and fabric are invested with deep emotional content—affection, adoration, sympathy, appreciation—to be passed on to friends, family members, and acquaintances, who are then indebted to return the favor. Offering too much sentimentality for one person to take, certainly more than can ever be repaid, Kelley's heap of discarded craft-items underscores the ubiquity of that system and the underlying social dynamics that sustain it.

Women in sport – gender relations and future perspectives1

Starting off from deliberations on the ‘nature’ and significance of gender differences and gender relations, I first of all present in this contribution my theoretical framework: a constructivist approach to gender. If gender is understood as a social construction, gender differences are not ‘natural’ but acquired and enacted, and also vary according to the particular social and gender order. Currently observable in many respects is a tendency towards ‘gender bending’ and gender play. This raises the question as to whether this dismantling and/or de-dramatization of gender differences in, as well as outside, sport is a sign pointing towards a new gender order. Or has gender enactment become more subtle? Have gender scripts shifted to other areas, for example to media sports with their focus on (hetero)sexuality? Which course will gender relations take in future, in as well as outside sport? In discussing the issues raised above, I will analyse the present situation and consider future developments with regard to sports participation, media sports and leadership in sport.

Actions that Speak: Gender Play and Power Sway in the Bible

Actions that Speak: Gender Play and Power Sway in the Bible

Faun Love: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson

In 1890 the lesbian aunt‐and‐niece couple, Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), better known as the poet Michael Field, met Bernard Berenson (1865–1959). Poems, letters and diaries explore the impact of falling in love with a man and they trace the elaborate gender play of their erotic friendship. By living imaginatively in and for art, each hoped to avoid the dreary materialism and sexual constraints of the time. As long as the three could create a wide range of both gendered and gender‐free positions, they felt imaginatively free—and aesthetically sexual.

Mouths Wide Shut: Gender-Quiet Teenage Males on Gender-Bending, Gender-Passing and Masculinities

Through individual narratives, three adolescent males of colour reflect on their fluid masculinities in relation to ethnicity, spirituality and sexuality. The self-described gender benders examine their complex relationships and hybrid identities, which cross the various boundaries of heteronormativity routinely legitimatised through peer norms and educational practices. They voice experiences and gender performances in context of the reshaping of the school’s official and unofficial heterosexist climate in which gender-bending males are often marginalised.

World of Maskcraft vs. World of Queercraft? Communication, sex and gender in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft

This article examines the construction, representation and commingling of gender identity in the online role-playing game (RPG) World of Warcraft. I show how players on German-speaking non-RPG servers blend gender by using linguistic markers of gender (like specific articles and suffixes) in an interchangeable way. Subsequent to this analysis, possible consequences for the online world as an opposition to offline reality and as a space for negotiation of gender identity are discussed. Focusing on different modes of communication while playing, I develop a more differentiated view on communication, sex and gender in online communities a view that goes beyond an assumption of simplistic, one-dimensional gender bending.

Getting to Know Judith Butler: Origins of Gender Play Situated in Contemporary Society

Getting to Know Judith Butler: Origins of Gender Play Situated in Contemporary Society

Preadolescent girls' and boys' virtual MUD play

Same and opposite-sex pairs of preadolescents interacted twice in a MUD, a virtual domain where they created characters known as avatars and socially interacted with one another. Boys interacted primarily through rapid scene shifts and playful exchanges; girls interacted with one another through written dialogue. Opposite-sex pairs lagged behind same-sex pairs in playful exchanges in part because the forms they used to interact with one another were somewhat incompatible with playful exchanges. Gender bending, defined as children creating an avatar of a different sex than one's own, occurred about 13% of the time. Even so, children still acted much the same way as they did when presenting themselves as an avatar of their own sex. The results suggest that MUDs are a useful virtual space for researchers to examine classic developmental questions about sex differences in play styles, social interaction patterns, identity expression, and modes of thought. At an applied level, MUDs can provide a virtual play space for preadolescent children to discover who they are, as well as a 21st century place to interact with their friends.

Gender bender in obesity

Gender bender in obesity

Review: Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression, by Linda A. Morris

Review: <i>Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression</i>, by Linda A. Morris

Of Female Husbands and Boarding School Girls: Gender Bending in Unoma Azuah's Fiction

While Azuah’s novel Sky-High Flames () is firmly grounded in the Igbo sociological context, comprising ancestor worship, the cult of a female goddess, polygamy, and the levirate, the novel taps into the practice of female husbandry documented by cultural anthropologists (e.g., Sylvia Leith-Ross and Ifi Amadiume, whose theories I reassess), previous West African literary attempts at representing lesbian seduction, as well relational nexuses within the boarding school system. Nigerian feminisms, I argue, need to make room for the material factors of “doing lesbian.” While pointing to this debut novel’s reluctance to allow same-sex desire to develop, I also comment on womanly relationality, such as Azuah’s displaced (auto)biographical vestment in her aunt’s story, as well as on moments of intimacy between women, which augur the new Nigerian novel’s capacity to comment on the economy of pleasures and on the way of constituting oneself as the moral subject of one’s sexual conduct.

The Male Muses of Romanticism: The Poetics of Gender in Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Eichendorf1

In German Romantic discourse generally functions as inspiration, source, and ground of poesy.2 This figuration appears to be metaphysical in nature: and feminine are troped as originary condition of possibility of Romantic self-definition and Romantic artistic production, and feminine descriptors shape Romantic conceptions of subjectivity and creativity. In scattered statements in Friedrich Schlegel's philosophical and aesthetic theory, for example, Der Geist ist d[as] ursprungl[ich] Weibliche (KA XVIII: 193, #796; emphasis in original), subject or I (das Ich) is feminine (KA XVIII: 334, #137), and woman's very essence is poesy (KA II: 269, #127); and in his autobiographical novel Lucinde title figure, who is both lover and mother to painter Julius, inspires his artistic creation. Similarly, in Novalis's Fichte-Studien self-positing ego defines itself in opposition to Muttersfare from whence it originated (Schriften II: 105, #1); subject or I is feminine (Schriften II: 261, #519); and in first of two dedicatory sonnets prefacing Heinrich von Ofterdingen dead beloved, das Urbild zartgesinnter Frauen, excites poet's metaphysical drive, functions as his muse, and safeguards his poetic (Schriften I: 193). Analyzing this female poetic ground from numerous theoretical perspectives, contemporary critics come to similar conclusions about primacy of feminine in Romantic poetic production: is idealized, unattainable other against which male poet defines himself in a gesture of wish fulfillment, priestess and source of enlightenment for male poet (Becker-Cantarino); and woman's voice are essence of Romantic poesy (Schlaffer, Kuzniar, Muller-Sievers); Romantic discourse is informed by a theory of feminine (Menninghaus, Roetzel); Romanticism itself is the discursive of Mother as source of discursive production (Wellbery on Kittler, Foreword xxiii). Clearly feminine forms an integral component of Romantic discourse, yet Romantics themselves programmatically question gender of their own poetic ground. To quote Friedrich Schlegel: Frauen werden in der Poesie ebenso ungerecht behandelt, wie im Leben. Die weiblichen sind nicht idealisch, und idealischen sind nicht weiblich (KA II: 172, #49), and his racy novel Lucinde is animated by a dizzying gender play in which a coded homoerotic aesthetic subtly debunks feminine ideal.3 Similarly, in fairy tale from Novalis's fragmentary novel Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, Hyacinth leaves his love Rosenblutchen and journeys to Sais on a quest for self-definition, and when he lifts veil of statue of goddess Isis, die Mutter der Dinge (Schriften I: 93), Rosenblutchen sinks into his arms. But in a famous distich to novel an apprentice lifts goddess's veil and sees that the mother of all things is not his beloved, but-wonder of wonders-himself (Schriften II: 584). In this instance, at least, metaphysical ground of Romantic project-presumed to be maternal, eternal feminine embodied in form of beloved-proves to be self-positing male subject.4 This essay examines figure of male muse in three canonical Romantic narratives that despite outward appearances likewise do not conform to a gynocentric paradigm and broaches a broad methodological question: Are contemporary theoretical approaches to Romanticism and gender studies shaping our readings of Romantic texts, predetermining woman's primacy and inflating woman's currency in Romantic poetics, and occluding important aspects of discourse on gender articulated by Romantics themselves? Motivating this open question is following observation: scholars cited above who argue for centrality of feminine to Romantic poetic all, in effect, concentrate on woman in constructing their textual analyses, and then conclude that woman grounds Romantic poesy. …

Atrazine Effects in Xenopus Aren't Reproducible

The widely used herbicide does not appear to be an amphibian gender bender, according to new studies.

Latin American Women On/In Stages (review)

172 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW la relación entre el fenómeno y su entorno social. Sostiene que cualquier intento de estudiar las manifestaciones artísticas / estéticas desvinculadas de la relación con dicho entorno anulan al sujeto enunciador y reducen la complejidad del acontecimiento. De esta manera, lo liminal importa como condición desde la cual se vive y se produce arte, y no únicamente como estrategias artísticas de cruce, siendo el actor un ente liminal entre el arte y lo real. Las experiencias de alteridad que promueve contribuyen a formar nuevas posibilidades de communitas, entendida ésta como un espacio otro, una anti-estructura en la que se suspenden las jerarquías y las relaciones entre iguales se dan espontáneamente, sin legislación. La otra columna que sostiene el estudio de Diéguez Caballero es la noción bajtiniana de la arquitectónica como acto ético y la forma estética de los actos éticos. Por ello trabaja con manifestaciones artísticas que pretenden mejorar la comunidad y relacionan al arte con la protesta, con la estatización de los gestos colectivos de resistencia y con las calidades de la memoria. María Natacha Koss Universidad de Buenos Aires Milleret, Margo. Latin American Women On/In Stages. Albany: SUNY P, 2004: 263 p. Margo Milleret’s Latin American Women On/In Stages convincingly puts to rest the misconception that women have contributed little to the history of Latin American theatre. From the original corpus of 120 woman-authored plays Milleret collected for her research, the study analyzes twenty-four plays by eighteen playwrights (b.1940-1960) from the following countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. If, as Milleret argues in her introduction, “Domesticating Drama,” the theatre constitutes a site where women have been “domesticated,” or, subjugated, then she also persuasively shows that female dramatists during the latter half of the twentieth century have made great strides in “domesticating” the theatre by making it a place where women’s spaces and experiences can occupy center stage. The plays included in this study showcase women on theatrical stages and their constantly evolving identities in different stages of life. Accordingly, the book is organized along the contours of a conventional female life cycle; Chapter 1 looks at male-female relationships during women’s formative years, Chapter 2 focuses on mother-daughter relationships during the child rearing years and Chapter 3 examines aging during middle age and menopause. Each chapter includes comparative close readings of the plays through the lens of a wide range of theories about gender from the social sciences and the theatre. In Chapter 1, for example, Milleret uses research on marriage and family and theories of theatrical space treat the themes of romantic love, sexual politics and gender bending in the context of heterosexual love relationships. She argues that plays byAna Istarú, Inés Margarita Stranger, Consuelo SPRING 2008 173 de Castro, LeilahAssunção, Sabina Berman, Estela Leño, and Thais Erminy critique patriarchal male-female relations and show how reclaiming the domestic space of the home is paramount in asserting female identity and equitable gender relations. Concepts from female developmental psychology and scholarship on the cult of motherhood in Latin America frame Milleret’s argument in Chapter 2. In this section, she scrutinizes the intergenerational mother-daughter relationship as another site of female socialization. Milleret contends that in plays with rebellious daughters by Isis Baião,Ana Istarú, Thais Erminy, and Rebecca Bowman, “patriarchal mothers” impose traditional gender roles and the mother-daughter relationship is ultimately destructive, whereas in dramas by Pilar Campesino, Maria Adelaide Amaral, Susana Torres Molina, and Diana Raznovich, older mothers and daughters find ways to renegotiate their relationship and to expand their definitions of female social roles. Chapter 3 charts new terrain by identifying a group of plays that stage the taboo subjects of aging and sexuality. Milleret studies societal messages about aging and physical appearance in works with middle-aged protagonists by Lidia Rebrij and Isis Baião, the playful search for new identities by women who refuse the sexless stereotypes of postmenopausal femininity in plays by Mariela Romero, Leilah Assunção, Gabriela Fiore, and...

"Oficius de su raza y sexo" (Occupation Appropriate to Her Race and Sex): Mayan Women and Expanding Gender Identities in Twentieth-Century Guatemala

For many indigenous women of Latin America, their association as bearers of culture hindered their ability to efficaciously engage in national society. Yet their subordinate position as females in patriarchal communities conversely afforded them more freedom than men to negotiate their gender norms, rights, and obligations. Based on archival documents and oral histories, an examination of quotidian Mayan life in early-twentieth-century highland Guatemala reveals competing gender codes. Mayan women's efforts to expand their autonomy ranged from cross-dressing to wielding tools traditionally reserved for males. While these activities loosened the reins of gender limitations, they were not necessarily harbingers of improved lifestyles. Often women who transgressed gender identities experienced more oppression than liberation. Against the backdrop of Guatemala's effort to count itself among the world's modern nations by instituting liberal reforms and championing the ideas of positivism, these gender negotiations seem at once both appropriate and radical. When dictators Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920) and General Jorge Ubico (1931-1944) sought to impose order and progress, they assumed patriarchy was immutable; in contrast, contemporary Mayan gender benders exposed its organic nature.

Real Boys Carry Girly Epics: Normalising Gender Bending in Online Games

Players in online games frequently choose the opposite gender when they select an avatar. Previously, this has been attributed to a player's unconscious sexual anxieties and the need to experiment through the anonymous location of the avatar. However, this paper argues that the development of choice in games, where players have frequently selected the female form for ludic reasons, means that this choice has become normalised through a historical process. The avatar is frequently considered as a tool, with gender regarded as a freely admitted aesthetic pleasure. The player does not see this as a site of tension, or seeks to absolve this tension publicly as an act of appropriation typical to Jenkins¹ textual poachers. Overall, the act of gender switching is not considered deviant within gaming; more, it is embraced as a common practise with historical precedents to support it.