Ideas Of Femininity Research Articles

The Great Goddess: An Evolution from Cosmogony to Cosmology

Hindu Religious thought has always been deeply concerned with the ‘idea of femininity’. Hindu beliefs and practices have identified the feminine both in the material world and the divine world. The history of the development of goddesses from the early Vedic period to contemporary worship plays into certain debates and discussions about what it means to have a certain concept of divinity in a tradition. This paper aims to understand the historical and thematic development of The Great Goddess/Devī/Mahādevī as the source of ultimate cosmic powers. To reach my aim, I have divided this paper into two major sections: First, the analysis of the iconographies of twelve major Goddesses (starting from the early Vedic period to the Pūrāṇic and Epic Tradition), namely, Uṣas, Rātri , Pṛthivī, Aditi, Sarasvatī, Vāc, Nirṛti, Śrī-Lakṣmī, Pārvatī, Dūrgā, Kālī, and Mahādevī (the lengthiest section of the paper). Second, I have traced (with the help of the analysis from the first section) the cosmogonies associated with these twelve individual goddesses to project a final single goddess who is the cause of this Cosmos. The Early Vedic Goddesses are depicted as ‘givers, helpers, mothers, nurturer figures’ but gradually in the Pūrāṇic and Epic Tradition they are partially involved in the process of creation, as the śakti of their male counterparts. Finally, the Devī-Māhātmya and Devī Bhagavata Pūrāṇa delineate the picture of an independent goddess, The Great Goddess/Devī/Mahādevī. This Great Goddess emerged as the embodiment of śakti, prakṛti, and māyā, therefore is the cause of this universe.

Gender-based stereotyping in the Spanish artisan sector

Throughout history, certain stereotypes associated with the idea of feminine and masculine have been consolidated and maintained, framed within a binary sex/gender system. With the passage of time and the inclusion of women in the workplace, such stereotypes have been extrapolated to the latter, resulting in inequalities in access to certain positions and professional development. Although significant progress has been made in workplace equality, some professions continue to be characterized by a particular polarization, and within the artisan sector, this is reflected in specific trades. In this sense, this research aims to determine whether there are gender stereotypes in the Spanish artisan sector, the degree of presence of men and women in the various craft trades, and what elements facilitate this polarization. A survey of 547 craftspeople, and a review of the statistical data on the working population in Spain for the year 2020, reveals a perpetuation of gender segregation depending on the craft trade, along with an ageing sector, and continued stereotyping in the generational replacement in the Spanish craft sector.

Embracing femininity: failure of the tomboy trope as an ideal arc for female roles in mainstream bollywood

ABSTRACT The contribution of cinema towards culture building exists within a complicated symbiotic dynamic. Just as films reflect the beliefs, anxieties and social realities of the cultures they exist in and are produced by, they also continue to alter, shape, and solidify certain beliefs. The idea of femininity has long been boxed into categories conveniently adhering to patriarchal notions of gender dynamics. Despite the expectation from art to challenge certain established systems, the commerciality of mainstream Bollywood often makes it subject to certain obligations of appeasing a mass audience without unsettling comfortable and regressive beliefs. One can observe a pattern in several fan favorite commercial hits wherein an initial challenge of femininity through tomboys as female leads is eventually stunted by restoring order and letting conformity prevail. I would like to explore the concept of a “tomboy” and its connotations in feminist discourse. Moreover, I will contextualize this concept within the social frames advertised by Bollywood, citing specific films like Karan Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Farah Khan’s Main Hoon Na to name a few, and how the industry becomes a femininity-defining cultural institution that creates as well as sustains gender stratification and toys with the politics of aesthetics.

Freedom and Agency in The Second Sex

Freedom and Agency in <i>The Second Sex</i>

Reading Little Women after the Italian 1970s: The Influence of Postfeminism on Lidia Ravera’s Reinterpretation of the Classic

Published in two volumes between 1868 and 1869, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott follows the classic coming-of-age structure for female characters as developed in nineteenth-century literature. Although the story is first introduced as that of a family, it instead follows each protagonist on their individual journey towards social recognition, which, for the young March sisters, is gained with marriage. From this perspective, girlhood is a transient stage of life, routed towards the achievement of economic (and emotional) stability.Since its first publication, Alcott’s classic has been widely discussed and subjected to many reinterpretations in literary form, as well as in film and theatrical dramatisation. In this article I focus on the novel Bagna i fiori e aspettami (1986), a rewriting by the Italian author Lidia Ravera composed in the aftermath of the feminist struggles of the seventies. The novel, set in Italy during the eighties, offers the opportunity for the author to integrate the representation of girlhood with the language and images of mass culture. As Carol Lazzaro-Weiss points out in her study on the female Bildungsroman (1993), «women writers are creating new themes and plots and […] they do so by recombining, challenging, and exploiting old structures to their purposes» (18). Bagna i fiori e aspettami offers a good example for studying such literary manipulation. This essay shows how Ravera’s main character anticipates a new idea of femininity which – leaving behind political instances and reflections on gender essentialism – embraces a more individualistic and certainly more problematic approach to female agency influenced by postfeminist discourse (GREER 1999; HOOKS 2000; GAMBLE 2001).

The Masculine and The Feminine in Arabic and the Illusion of the Unnecessary Proliferation of Words

This research investigates masculine and feminine in Arabic, aiming at highlighting the formal and semantic limits set by Arab linguists for each of them. Two further issues constitute the aim of this research: the first: the reality of the formal indicators of feminization, and the extent of their conformity with reality, The second is to explain the cause of the existence of these formal signs and to refute the idea of classical linguists that they came to restrict the proliferation of words. This research aims to clarify these elements associated with the idea of femininity in Arabic, and to indicate whether the masculine was originally feminine or not? And spot some formal masculinization as signs of femininity. The research reached a set of results, most notably that the formal signs of the feminine were not strict to the extent adopted by the classical Arab linguists; some Arabic signs of masculinization are not addressed by the classical linguists. It also concluded that the issue of unnecessary proliferationof words was not a suitable cause for the presence of signs of femininity, as the language is not incapable of generating words, nor burdened by it.

Trans-Mediation of Gender in Elia Kazan’s Adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire

Elia Kazan is among the first directors who adapted Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) for the cinema. Kazan’s film adaptation was almost faithful to the original manuscript by sticking to Williams’s words and sentences. However, even if one ignores the cultural and historical contexts, the alterations that take place in the process of trans-mediation cannot be disregarded, since the telling mode in the text changes to the showing mode in the media. With this hypothetical basis, the present study aims to detect the possible alterations in the adaptation of the play to examine gender roles in both texts. Using the ideas of Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation (2013), the authors have studied the verbal signs in the play together with the verbal and visual codes in the movie to assess how the film adaptation has incorporated the ideas of femininity, which are the main concerns of the play, too. The results of the study suggest that the alterations from the literary text to film have contributed to the development of female identity.

Social circus in aerials: Female experience, muscularity, pain and trust

Women are often asked to conform to a rigid set of heteronormative ideas of femininity within a culture that values women based on appearance. Historically, the female aerialist’s muscularity challenged traditional stereotypes of female inferiority, displaying nuanced representations of femininity. Current research in social circus indicates that participation in circus activities can increase participants’ self-confidence and self-belief. This participant-based research explores a group of eighteen to thirty-five-year-old women’s experience of learning and performing aerial circus skills integrated with training in digital media production within a social circus context. As a circus performer and instructor this research emerged from over ten years of practitioner experience. The central aim of the article is to explore participants’ experiences of aerial circus training with a focus on strength, muscularity, pain and bodily markings as having the potential to challenge traditional notions of femininity, and ideas of embodied trust and capacity as a result of developing an informed relationship with one’s body. The article draws on participants’ voices and experiences based on observation and interviews. The findings add to our understanding of female experience of social aerial circus. Participants spoke of increased self-confidence as a result of what their body can achieve as opposed to focussing on self-perceived lacks. Working within participants’ concept of empowerment, aerial circus training offered participants a notional form of liberation, where through physical practice they were able to explore changing gender roles and embody ideas of self-reliance.

Influencia de la Ilustración española en la conceptualización y la educación de la mujer en el Durango del siglo XIX

Este trabajo es una versión corta y modificada del contenido del primer capítulo del libro La educación femenina en Durango, siglos XVIII y XIX (actualmente en prensa), donde se presenta una explicación socio-histórica del proceso de visibilización de las mujeres de Durango, a través de las lentas e incipientes formas que asumió su educación en el espacio local. Lo anterior se realizó tomando como base el análisis de la discursividad masculina oficial en voz de las autoridades del gobierno estatal, quienes expresaron su idea de la feminidad desde los resabios socioculturales heredados del Antiguo Régimen, que consideraban a las mujeres como seres inferiores a los varones dada su diferencia biológica de género y su supuesta incapacidad intelectual para el estudio de las ciencias, las artes y la cultura.

“I couldn't live without my factory now” The recruitment of women into the workforce in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s

This paper provides a gender analysis of the recruitment campaigns aimed at bringing women into the workforce in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. This period was noteworthy for the intensity of the recruitment campaigns and for the image of the female worker, which contrasted markedly with traditional ideas of femininity. In later years as the campaign lost its intensity the discourse construction more often reflected other images of the new socialist woman, particularly in terms of their private lives. Methodologically, this is a cultural-historical study based on gender analysis and critical discourse analysis. The sources are largely made up of periodicals from the time and instructional pamphlets for women, as well as archive material from the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and mass organizations for women.

Marguerite Wilson and other ‘hard-riding … feminine space eaters’: cycling and modern femininity in interwar Britain

ABSTRACT This article charts the growth of the sport of women’s cycling in Britain during the inter-war years. It does so with reference to contemporary media sources and specifically the popular periodical Cycling. It examines this development in the context of how emerging ideals about the new modern women jostled with traditional notions of femininity in interwar Britain. Women’s cycling both challenged and complemented ideas of femininity, although how much and how many women engaged in these debates is unclear. While there is a growing historiography on cycling in the Victorian period, the interwar period has been largely under-researched by historians. This article will begin to fill this gap. In addition to the development of sporting bodies and clubs, it highlights the career of Marguerite Wilson. Wilson was the first full-time female professional cyclist who rode for bicycle companies to advertise their products through her pursuit of records such as Land’s End to John O’Groats. Wilson herself embodied the rise of a competitive female body who through her record-breaking exploits contributed towards a narrowing of gender differences.

Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 30s by Kristine Alexander

Reviewed by: Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 30s by Kristine Alexander Stephanie Spencer Alexander, Kristine – Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 30s. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017. Pp. 283. When the pupils of Eleanor Brent-Dyer's fictional Chalet School ask their headmistress permission to start a Girl Guide Company in Jo of the Chalet School (1926), she observes "the Guide movement gives you a big outlook, and strengthens one's idea of playing the game" (p. 261). Support for the movement in a series that focused on shared values between girls of different nationalities demonstrates both the universal appeal of the movement and its popularity. It was taken as axiomatic in the series that the addition of a Guide Company enriched a community and promoted values of international citizenship, thrift, and female domesticity. The rapid rise in the popularity of the Guide movement after its foundation in 1909 by Robert Baden-Powell by the 1920s had generated a membership of more than a million girls in more than 40 countries. The emphasis on international cooperation also reflects the peace aspirations of the League of Nations after the First World War. Although such aspirations were compromised after 1945, the Guide movement retained its popularity despite profound changes in constructions of girlhood. Kristine Alexander examines the movement at the height of its popularity and also goes some way to explaining the tenacity of its appeal in the post-war world. Alexander's meticulous research focuses on Canada, Britain, and India and analyzes the organization using a range of sources, including scrapbooks and diaries from those involved in the day-to-day activities. It offers an introduction to the movement and a detailed exploration of the emphasis on housekeeping, motherhood, and matrimony, alongside preparation for citizenship and international sisterhood. Alexander teases out the tensions inherent in the racial and classed hierarchies that can make the topic an awkward one for examining concepts of girlhood in the mid-twentieth century. It complements research by Tammy Proctor and Sian Edwards and reflects the increasing interest in the Guiding phenomenon in histories of youth culture. The book is sustained by a "multi-sited ethnography" that explores girls' agency and the way that they interacted with ideas of femininity that both transcended nation and were a product of racial and class hierarchies within their borders. Alexander offers an insight into the problems associated with researching organizations that have been the subject of criticism for promoting and prolonging imperial mentalities. She discusses the gatekeeping by the archivists of the organizations and the deliberate culling of material that might have compromised the carefully constructed representations of universal sisterhood. Five thematic chapters focus on familiar aspects of Guiding that are nuanced by regional differences. Unsurprisingly a chapter is devoted to the promotion of homekeeping, [End Page 663] mothercraft, and matrimony, detailing ways in which girls interacted with the gender conservatism associated with the movement. She argues that Guiding also created space for those who rejected traditional ideals. One of the strengths of the book is that the movement is not seen in isolation from contemporary events; membership in India was complicated by issues of child marriage with many girls leaving between the ages of 12 or 13. Alexander emphasizes how in Canada and Britain the emphasis on self-discipline and the drawing out "natural" mothering instincts counteracted concerns over the irresponsibility of the "modern" girl as she emerged in popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Women in Canada, Britain, and India were increasingly enfranchised over the period, and Alexander discusses the preparation for active citizenship that was inherent in Guiding. Citizenship is understood as a set of practices rather than the rights and responsibilities model identified by Alfred Marshall. She draws out the tensions between models of training that effectively promoted a "familial and tolerant British dominated global empire" (p. 85) and local assertions that Guiding was fundamentally non-political. Alongside the emphasis on intellectual education for citizenship, Guides were encouraged to be prepared to deal with a wide range of accidents to counteract assumptions of female weakness in the face of adversity. Alexander uses diary entries...

Femininity, Masculinity, and Sexuality in Morocco and Hollywood: The Negated Sex

Femininity, Masculinity, and Sexuality in Morocco and Hollywood: The Negated Sex

“I'd failed to produce a baby and I'd failed to notice when the baby was in distress”: The social construction of bereaved motherhood

• Pregnancy loss research has tended to mainly focus on the psychological impact of stillbirth • Pregnancy advice and ideas of femininity can have a deleterious impact on a women's experience • The experience of bereaved parenthood is a socially constructed one

A New Woman’s Exile in Buenos Aires: Grete Stern’s Photomontages between Feminism and Popular Culture

The focus of this article will rely on the work of the photographer Grete Stern, who had to flee Germany in 1933 due to her Jewish background, and later emigrated to Argentina. Special attention will be given to her photomontage series Sueños (Dreams) for the women’s magazine Idilio, which the artist produced between 1948 and 1951, and which played an essential role in the modernization of Argentinean photography. Moreover, today these photomontages are known for having had a fundamental influence on the dissemination of psychoanalysis in Argentina, as well as on feminist art in general. As these photomontages were published together with the psychoanalytic column “El psicoanálisis te ayudará” and negotiated different aspects of psychoanalytic theory, they were often interpreted within the tradition of surrealist photography.[1] In this article, however, I would like to propose an alternative, perhaps complementary reading of these images and embed Stern’s Dreams in a broader context—the context of her experience as an exile in Argentina, the context of the magazine, and the context of Peronist visual culture. As I will argue, this allows these photomontages to be read as multilayered aesthetic, political, and feminist interventions in a time when more and more restrictions dominated artistic practices in Argentina. In the following, I will provide an insight into Stern’s formation and work in Germany, and the ideas of femininity that influenced her art before and after emigration. After that, I will discuss the politically enforced changes in the field of Argentinean visual culture. And finally, I will analyze Stern’s photomontages in the context of the magazine and their impact beyond, on the modernization of photography in Argentina.

RISING AWARENESS AND SELFHOOD IN KATE CHOPIN’S ‘THE AWAKENING’ AND ‘THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK’ BY DORIS LESSING

The postmodern idea of the self as fragmented and decentred in contrast with earlier traditions’ idea of a rational, stable and autonomous self has great implications in the positionality of the woman in patriarchal discourse. This study applied a close reading of The Awakening and The Golden Notebook based on ideas from the new French feminist’s theories of Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray that indicate that the woman whose patriarchal discourses of Freud and Lacan placed outside the Symbolic, outside language has the resources to re-position and write herself as a subject. The paper used the ‘ signification process’ by Kristeva, supported by ideas from the discourses of Irigaray and Cixous, to trace the woman’s progress through abjection into destabilising patriarchal representations of the female and rewriting herself. The female protagonists destabilised their entrenched representations, re-invented their own idea of femininity and affirmed The Awakening and The Golden Notebook as L’ecriture feminine (feminine writing). Article visualizations:

Entangled expertise: Women’s use of social media in entrepreneurial work

Social media platforms are important to self-employed cultural workers as a means of reaching markets and promoting the entrepreneur’s brand identity. But beyond self-branding, how are notions of expertise negotiated by individual cultural entrepreneurs and how does this relate to gender? This article addresses issues of identity and professionalism for women cultural entrepreneurs by focusing on their use of Twitter. Given the well-documented gender and ethnic inequalities in cultural industry work, what does women’s use of Twitter tell us about the nature of women’s professional identities within neoliberal economies? We argue that online platforms are an important space for self-employed cultural workers and that within this context, ideas of femininity and entrepreneurship are entangled. The article concludes by discussing the value of examining social media spaces as a means of exploring the presentation of women’s expertise in a post-feminist era.

Jack’d, a Mobile Social Networking Application: A Site of Exclusion Within a Site of Inclusion

ABSTRACTUser-generated smartphone applications have created a new level of virtual connectivity for gay males, one in which users can create profiles and meet other users as nearby or as far away as possible. For those within close proximity, the other users can be considered their “virtual neighbors.” Although the applications are theoretically designed to be places of inclusion and not exclusion, where any gay male with economic means can download an application, many profiles have been created that exclude other users. Through an examination of profiles on one such application, Jack’d, exclusion is found in the way users celebrate and reinforce ideas of traditional masculinity and denigrate and reinforce stereotypic ideas of femininity embodied by some gay men. Jack’d, and other user-generated smartphone applications, can be read as virtual neighborhoods where one is excluded based on their gender performance.

“Someone to Check Her a Bit”

Identifying the earliest examples that document partition in Bombay cinema, this article delves into the relationship between a historic trauma and physical comedy through the star performance of Meena Shorey in a trilogy of romantic comedies, Ek Thi Larki (Once There Was a Girl, 1949), Dholak (Drumbeats, 1951), and Ek Do Teen (One Two Three, 1953). In these films, the female protagonist wrestles men, scales walls, drives tractors, and makes a spectacle of herself, demonstrating a complete disregard for received ideas of femininity. Informed by her multiple marriages, irreverent religious conversions, switches in national location, and a disavowal of the “partition serious,” Meena's image in these comedies served as visual innuendo for the abducted woman. Adapting the trope of a piteous partition figure to explore the possibility of feminine liberation, the Shorey comedies bring about a radical cinematic recovery through the laughter-inducing abandon of their star comedienne.

Holly Grout.The Force of Beauty: Transforming French Ideas of Femininity in the Third Republic.

Holly Grout.<i>The Force of Beauty: Transforming French Ideas of Femininity in the Third Republic</i>.