Patriarchal Constraints Research Articles

“The Fourth Language for all Females”: Women's Subversive Bodies in Assia Djebar's Fantasia, an Algerian Calcavade

This article aims to illustrate the dialogic significance of the trance dance, a discursive scene of women's bodily expressions, in the Algerian feminist postcolonial novelist and film director, Assia Djebar's Fantasia (1985). While Djebar's literary oeuvre has been subject to enormous critical readings, this essay focuses on Djebar's representation of the female body as a medium of subversive expression in the ritualistic trance dance. Following the critical lines of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and postmodern and postcolonial feminism, we contend that the trance scene is an uncanny, subjective space of women's collective voices that undermine patriarchal authority. Women's movement into the domestic sphere of the Harem is a retreat into the semiotic, imaginary order and an escape from the symbolic order that deprives women from their bodies and their expressions. Thus, we propose that the trance privileges the matriarch's body/signs over the phallocentric system of Arab, benign patriarchy, her unconscious over social consciousness, irrationality over rationality, the ritual over the real, and ultimately the feminine over the masculine. The dissident practice of periodic dancing gives a space for dancers to claim dramatic authority and agency over their bodies, that is, to empower themselves socially and psychologically despite the patriarchal constraints lurking over them.

The Awakening of the Locked Up Female Body in That Scorching Season of Youth

The dichotomies of 'self/other', ‘subject/object’, 'mind/body', ‘reason/emotion’ and 'materiality/rationality', having been initiated and systematized by Plato and Aristotle respectively, and accepted as ‘Cartesian Duality’ with the ideas of French philosopher Rene Descartes, have been gradually turned into strongly established binary opposition of ‘male/female’ by patriarchal societies. This transformation process deriving from female body and sexuality has defined and marginalized woman in accordance with androcentric terms and imprisoned her within patriarchal constraints. Women and women writers, aiming to subvert male hegemony, have been in a struggle for articulating the unspoken female body and sexuality, and giving voice to muted fellows with the required words and awareness. Erendiz Atasu, knowing all the difficulties and limitations as a woman and a woman writer in a patriarchal society, is one of those women writers seeking alternative ways to change women’s constructed submissive and secondary position. In accordance with those considerations, Atasu strives for transcending beyond long-established gender dichotomies emanated from primary ‘male/female’ opposition and emphasizes the significance of unshackling and de(con)structing the phallocentric discourses and unspoken taboos in regard to female body and experiences. In this respect, based on the theories of post-structuralist feminism, this study analyzes Atasu’s poetic work, That Scorching Season of Youth, and aims to prove how women can establish a new, female-oriented tradition that will allow, justify and acknowledge their female existence through the rejecting the constructed phallocentric discourses and hierarchical binary oppositions

Between patriarchal constraints and neoliberal values: Dimensions of job quality for intimate partner violence survivors

Scholars have established the difficulties inherent in proposals that employment may serve as a rescue route for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). However, they have paid little attention to the possibility that those who do strive for employment experience a clash between the prevailing neoliberal policy and the patriarchal culture dominant in their relationship with their violent partners. Based on 33 in-depth interviews with IPV survivors, this study used a grounded theory approach to follow women’s experiences in the personal and employment life domain. The authors propose that in order to understand employment in the field of IPV survivors, it is necessary to deploy a job quality perspective. Further, they found that a gendered conceptualization of job quality is required, one that is evaluated by three relational dimensions: employment spaces blocking IPV penetration, control over one’s own income and a sense of skill recognition. These relational dimensions show that in participants’ work lives, neoliberalism and patriarchy conflict with one another. Accordingly, the contradiction between these value systems must be taken into account in conceptualizations of their mutual reinforcement. The authors propose reconciling them by focusing on the challenging experience of women’s employment, from which the innovative meaning of job quality arises.

“I Shall Endeavor for Her Aims”: Women’s Alliances and Relational Figurations of Freedom

In oppressive cultures that marginalize various identity positions, a woman might find it difficult to imagine herself as autonomous or capable of self-definition. Forging alliances with other women offers opportunities for self-discovery, transformation, and autonomous agency. Considering Queen Elizabeth’s correspondence with Safiye Sultana and Phillip Massinger’s The Renegado, this essay argues that tropes of seeing, achieved either through material images or through vivid discursive descriptions, foster imaginative renderings of the possibilities of self-expression and agency. Both cases, one diplomatic and the other dramatic, demonstrate successful—even though temporary and politically motivated—alliances mediated through both patriarchal constraints and material markers of identity. Drawing on these epistolary and dramatic texts, this essay explores tropes of imaginative seeing, the materiality of identity, and physical spaces that enact women’s alliances invested in questions of women’s freedom across tributaries both political and dramatic.

Mother Nature in Silko’s Yellow Woman : An Ecofeminist Dimension

Abstract Ecofeminism is a term coined by Françoise D’Eubonne in her book Feminism or Death (1974) to show the affinities between ecology and feminism. Both women and nature are perceived as passive elements and like women who complain about patriarchal constraints, ecologists shed light on the impacts of human exploitation over nature which is affected by pollution. Some dimensions of ecofeminism are present in Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Yellow Woman (1981). The postmodern novel contains a female character who forges a link with the natural surroundings and is in a direct contact with some natural elements like plants and animals. What is specific about the heroine is that she escapes her matriarchal society and goes back to nature in order to reconstruct her identity. At the end of the narrative, the female narrator leaves the natural setting and goes back to her family to replay social roles. The present article sets out to study the importance of Mother Nature for the female narrator and to examine the affinities between Earth Mother and the female protagonist. The first part will offer a theoretical background about the basic principles of ecofeminism. Then, my analysis will touch upon the aspects of ecofeminism in the novel. However, the last part will focus on the way the narrator goes beyond her matriarchal culture and reshapes female identity.

The Contested Relationship Between Paid Work and Women’s Empowerment: Empirical Analysis from Bangladesh

The debate about the empowerment potential of women’s access to labour market opportunities is a long-standing one but it has taken on fresh lease of life with the increased feminization of paid work in the context of economic liberalization. Contradictory viewpoints reflect differences in how empowerment itself is understood as well as variations in the cultural meanings and social acceptability of different kinds of paid work. Research on this issue in the Bangladesh context has not been able to address these questions because it tends to use very restricted definitions of work and narrow conceptualizations of empowerment. This paper uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative data from Bangladesh to explore this debate, distinguishing between different categories of work and using measures of women’s empowerment which have been explicitly designed to capture the specificities of local patriarchal constraints.

Contextualizing Career Calling: War, Patriarchy and idiosyncrasies of local settings

In this study we consider context more centrally in research on career calling. Conceptualized as situational opportunities and constraints, we attempt to expand how we understand the influence of context on shaping a person’s career calling. Interviews were conducted with 40 successful women working in non-traditional gender careers in a context where female labor force participation ranks one of the lowest globally. Our results evidence that these women experience context in a manner that is laden with patriarchal, sectarian, politically unstable and challenging constraints. Our results also suggest; however that these same contextual factors serve as a “pushing force” leading these women to develop a calling that is other-oriented. Based on these findings, we contribute to existing conceptualizations of calling by providing an extended, contextualized and process-oriented analytic model of career calling.

Fluids, cages, and boisterous femininity: The grotesque transgression of patriarchal norms in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Abstract The article will show that in Nights at the Circus, Carter’s use of the themes of food consumption and excrement operate as both a grotesque means of emancipation from a feminine point-of-view, and a carnivalesque challenge to subversive patriarchal norms and deconstruction of arbitrary patriarchal hierarchies. By turning the simple act of eating into boisterous spectacle, and by handling a bottle of champagne and water hose in a disturbingly masculine manner, Fevvers transgresses the boundary between masculinity and femininity, sheds the patriarchal constraints imposed upon femininity, and thus achieves agency and emancipation. Since she is not able to acquire biological signifier of masculinity, she achieves the transgression of the binary entirely through the performative carnivalesque. The article will also discuss that the overflowing nature of grotesque femininity (both physical and behavioral) enables the female characters to speak and act at their own will, and thus performs as a means of critiquing Victorian patriarchal cultural norms.

Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic: Production and Reception ed. by Kyle Frackman and Larson Powell

Reviewed by: Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic: Production and Reception ed. by Kyle Frackman and Larson Powell Beth M. Snyder Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic: Production and Reception. Edited by Kyle Frackman and Larson Powell. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015. Pp. vi + 264. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1571139160. This volume joins an emergent body of scholarship that seeks to disrupt the reductive but enduring understanding of artistic creativity in the GDR as strictly regulated and productive only of art that acted as propaganda. Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic, however, is unique in its scope as the first English-language collection devoted solely to an exploration of art music in the GDR (and, to my knowledge, the first Anglophone collected work dealing exclusively with East German music of any kind). In a clear and concise introduction, editors Kyle Frackman and Larson Powell set out the aim of the collection: to accord East German art music the same consideration recently enjoyed by GDR literature and film by presenting musical works—that are only beginning to be accessible to wider audiences through recordings—as complex and worthy of scholarly attention. Frackman and Powell intend for the collection to begin a (re)evaluation of the work of East German composers free from Cold War biases, one that transcends a cultural studies approach to GDR musical creativity that treats musical works primarily as exemplifications of a given society's structures and tensions. In lieu of this, they advocate for a dialectical approach that synthesizes analyses of the political and music-historical contexts of the works with considerations of their Kunstcharakter. Though addressed in almost every essay in the volume, the musical heritage is the explicit focus of a handful of contributions. Peter Kupfer and Juliane Schicker analyze Wagner and Mahler reception, respectively, exploring the ways each composer's legacy posed a unique set of issues for GDR musicologists and politicians. Most interestingly, Schicker addresses the influence of the FRG on negotiations with Mahler's legacy, showing how reluctant East German critics were to contradict positive reviews of GDR concerts by West German journalists. Johanna Yunker's insightful essay examines Ruth Berghaus's Marxist and feminist reimagining of Mozart's Don Giovanni, exploring how Berghaus's choices recast the titular character as an antibourgeois figure instrumental in liberating the opera's women from patriarchal constraints. Martha Sprigge's excellent contribution goes behind the façade of the seemingly monolithic socialist ceremony of the state funeral to see the ambiguity inherent in the GDR's consecration of first-generation composer Hanns Eisler's life and music, and also contends with how his legacy was later reclaimed from the official government apparatus by an East German musical avant-garde. Essays centrally concerned with cultural policy include those by Tatjana BöhmeMehner, Lars Fischer, and Golan Gur. Much has been made in previous scholarship of fluctuations in state intervention in East German musical life across time; Böhme-Mehner's [End Page 688] essay expands our understanding by examining the fluidity of cultural policy on a geographical rather than temporal axis, convincingly demonstrating that one side effect of the GDR's highly centralized administrative structure was a greater degree of creative freedom in provincial towns. Fischer addresses cultural policy by examining GDR musicologist Georg Knepler's shifting relationship to official Marxist ideology. The greatest strength of Fischer's thoughtful examination is his subtle approach to the documentary evidence, reading Knepler's testimony both with and against the author's stated position. Gur's essay breaks with the aims set out by the editors, and he makes clear that he approaches composer Ernst Hermann Meyer's 1950 Mansfelder Oratorium with no interest in the Kunstcharakter of a piece that never transcends its status as propaganda. To my mind, Gur's greatest contribution in an insightful essay is his discussion of musical classicism in the GDR—a notion that did not signify (as it may for us) particular stylistic or formal musical traits so much as it denoted a heritage produced by a politically progressive bourgeoisie. The remaining essays focus on new compositions in the GDR. Jessica Payette adds significantly to an underresearched area...

Hindu Widows as Religious Subjects: The Politics of Christian Conversion and Revival in Colonial India

This article examines how the Maharashtrian Hindu widow and convert to Christianity, Ramabai Dongre Medhavi (1858–1922), and the students at her widows’ school, Mukti Mission, contributed to early twentieth-century social reform in colonial India. This article specifically examines the 1905–1907 religious revival at Mukti Mission and poses two main arguments. First, the revival constituted a rejection of the constraints prescribed to Hindu widows under an oppressive orthodox Brahmin patriarchy. Second, despite its contestation of patriarchy, the revival narrative adopted by the Mukti women was fraught with imperial and racial hierarchies, limiting the gains wrought by the revival’s resistance of patriarchal constraints. These limitations are evident in Ramabai’s critique of the US and British missionary discourses that questioned the legitimacy of the Mukti revival in imperial and sexist terms. These two arguments provide deeper insight into the role of the religious practices and identities of Hindu widows who converted to Christianity in the emergence of Indian feminism.

Tema majčinstva u ranim romanima Elene Ferante

The paper details an analysis of mother-daughter relations in Elena Ferrante's first three novels (L'amore molesto, I giorni dell'abbandono and La figlia oscura), by tracing changes in mothers' and daughters' perspectives. It is shown how networks of female relationships in the novels are based on the mother : daughter pair, only to end in interconnected matrilineal chains. The narrators themselves struggle to overcome patriarchal constraints, in order to find their own voice. By analysing mother-daughter relations, the paper aims to trace key points in Elena Ferrante's poetics.

Gender Inequality, Processes of Adaptation, and Female Local Initiatives in Cash Crop Production in Northern Tanzania

AbstractThis article contributes to development research, as well as research studying inequality in agricultural systems. We use empirical data from an ethnographic study in the village of Mamba, in northern Tanzania (2006–2009). This study analyzes the question of changing gender relations and the patriarchal constraints to collective action under market liberalization of cash crops. Our findings demonstrate that the shift to a market economy has influenced the nature of production relations, deepening inequalities in gender relations and the position of women. However, some women circumvent their disadvantaged situations through their association with various types of collective action groups or networks. In order to investigate the different impacts on women's lives, we analyze women's interest and motivations for these collective actions. We also identify the processes of adaptation to the new production relations through the coffee trade network and tomato cultivation groups, two local initiatives. We analyze the differences between these two forms of collective action and theorize on their different impacts on women's empowerment.

Colonizing Europe: widescreen aesthetics in the 1950s’ American travel film

This article uses textual methodologies adapted from postcolonial studies to explore the colonialist aesthetics of mid-century American cinema. It focuses on This is Cinerama (Merian C. Cooper, independent, 1952) and Three Coins in the Fountain (Jean Negulesco, Fox, 1954) – two films with early widescreen formats that engage with the techno-aesthetic tradition of the silent film travelogue, and that depict European space. These films confer power and metropole status not simply on the West but specifically on America, performing an imaginative act of appropriation of European space and culture. This is Cinerama engages with the long tradition of ethnographic cinema, mobilizing tropes of the racialized other in representing Europeans and constructing a mapping of European space that centres on the controlling gaze of the white American man. Three Coins deploys the colonial aesthetic tradition of the picturesque and its haptic corollary, the stroll, as a mode for managing the Italian landscape. It depicts a colonized Italian society in which both the white American woman’s sexual purity or ‘safety’ and her liberation from patriarchal constraints are paradoxically used to justify a ‘benevolent’ American imperialism. Because these films mobilize these colonial aesthetics in favour of a specifically American metropole, they trouble the notion that America and Europe constitute a single entity (‘the West’) within colonial discourse, manifesting rather the complicated and fraught power dynamics between the two that arose in the post-war period. The article thus makes a case for the centrality of the American film text both to studies of American imperialism and to studies of colonial aesthetics more generally.

Gender Equality, Economic Growth, and Women’s Agency: the “Endless Variety” and “Monotonous Similarity” of Patriarchal Constraints

ABSTRACTMacroeconometric studies generally find fairly robust evidence that gender equality has a positive impact on economic growth, but reverse findings relating to the impact of economic growth on gender equality are far less consistent. The high level of aggregation at which these studies are carried out makes it difficult to ascertain the causal pathways that might explain this asymmetry in impacts. Using a feminist institutional framework, this contribution explores studies carried out at lower levels of analysis for insights into the pathways likely to be driving these two sets of relationships and a possible explanation for their asymmetry.

Manuel de Jesús Galván’s Enriquillo: A novel look at the environment of marriage in the first colony

Manuel de Jesús Galván’s novel Enriquillo is typically read as arguing for the superiority of Dominican hispanidad over Haitian negritude. The current essay, however, treats a hitherto overlooked issue, namely that the marriages depicted in the novel reflect social responses to environmental conditions. The interplay of women’s choice in marriage and patriarchal constraints produces a society that is viable through time. Thus women’s choice in marriage is a previously unexamined aspect of foundational literature.

Getting over the patriarchal barriers: women's management of men's smoking in Chinese families.

Chinese family is a patriarchal power system. How the system influences young mothers' agency in managing family men's smoking is unknown. Applying a gender lens, this ethnographic study explored how mothers of young children in Chinese extended families reacted to men's smoking. The study sample included 29 participants from 22 families. Semi-structured interviews and field observations were transcribed and analysis was conducted using open coding and constant comparison. The findings indicate that young mothers' interventions to reduce family men's home smoking were mediated by gendered relationships between the mothers and the smokers. The mothers could directly confront their husbands' smoking, although they were more conservative about their men's smoking in the presence of other family smokers. They experienced difficulty in directly confronting senior family men's smoking but found ways to skirt patriarchal constraints, either by persuading seniors to stop smoking in subtle ways, or more importantly, by using other non-smoking family members as 'mediators' to influence senior men's smoking. While future smoking cessation interventions should support mothers in protecting their children from tobacco smoke, the interventions should also include other family members who are in a better power position, particularly the grandparents of the children, to reduce home smoking.

Marriage Migration, Patriarchal Bargains, and Wife Abuse

This article contributes to the literature on wife abuse by using the patriarchal bargaining framework, which highlights the issue of agency as women strive to achieve their goals within the constraints of family and culture. Study participants were recent South Asian immigrants to the United States. Narrative analysis revealed that patriarchal constraints in natal families, culture, and expectations of benefits gained through marriage influenced many of the women to migrate for marriage. When husbands enforced extreme patriarchy with abuse, women's personal efforts to contain abuse were largely ineffective. However, advocacy agency interventions did help some women break out of extreme patriarchy.

Subverting the Gaze, Seducing with the Bible: A Study of Oscar Wilde's Salomé

The present article engages with the eponymous character of Oscar Wilde’s “Salomé” and focuses on her subversion of the patriarchal rules, and on her attempts at seducing the prophet Jokanaan. Wilde’s “Salomé” becomes “an erotic symbol of daring, transgression, and perversity” (Sloan 112). She wants to look at Jokanaan, as well as to be touched by him and openly states her great desire for him, using the imagery taken from the biblical “Song of Songs” to express her passion. Moreover, the Princess skillfully adopts and reverses the male gaze to manipulate others and go beyond the patriarchal constraints at Herod’s court. She becomes aware that the only way to reach her goals is to look actively and evade being a mere object of the male gaze. The article shows that the imagery employed in the eponymous character’s speeches contributes to her portrayal as a seductress, also accentuating her rebellion, and analyzes how the Princess transgresses the patriarchal constraints through appropriating the male gaze.

Celebration of a girls journey from interior colonized to liberated self: Kashmira Sheths Keeping Corner

In twenty first century with changes in many facets of life books for children also have changed from simple stories that are rich in morals and traditions to those that reflect the new changing society. Children’s literature from India is not yet recognized around the world, but it is certainly spreading its wings. Writers of children’s literature produce books, both traditional and contemporary, that reflect Indian reality in content, style, visuals and production. Childhood is a very important period in the formation of character and for the emergence of a value structure in the life of a human being. This paper is focused on the presentation of a new girl by a children novelist Kashmira Sheth. Keeping Corner is the powerful and enchanting novel juxtaposes Leela's journey to self-determination with the parallel struggle of her family and community to follow Gandhi on the road to independence from British rule. The setting of the novel is before 1947 when India was struggling for independence from the colonizers. Freedom fighters like Gandhiji were struggling for getting ‘Purna Swaraj’ in India. In this research paper, it is discussed how the girls also faced ‘interior colonization’ from the patriarchy before independence. They were victims of different traditional evils like child marriage and child widowhood. The girls like Leela fight against the traditional customs and inequality of gender and tries to get ‘purna Swaraj’. Gandhi’s pursuit of freedom from colonial control is consistently shown to inspire Leela’s own pursuit of freedom from patriarchal constraints. Gandhi is struggling for freedom of the nation and Leela is struggling for liberation of self and women in general. Key words: Interior colonization, oppression, patriarchy, gender equality, new Indian girl.

Slaps at/for Dignity: Hope Keshubi's Rebellious Legacy of Social Transformation

This paper addresses two 1997 epistolary novels, To a Young Woman and Going Solo , by late Ugandan author Hope Keshubi, which offer a programmatic reading of Uganda's contemporary problems. Keshubi's primary agenda in these novels is to promote dialogue on the following social and political issues concerning women: sexual health, sexual maturation, domestic violence (wife battery and paternal abuse), subjugating traditions, discriminatory inheritance laws, and social relations between mistress and wife. This paper examines how Keshubi deftly works against patriarchal constraints on speech and actions, which have real and harmful consequences on the lives of Ugandan girls and women. Keshubi's texts show women they can triumph over discrimination and taboos, surviving physically and psychologically in the Uganda of the 1990s. This paper examines current denigrating literary reception of Ugandan women authors and asks why Keshubi did not experience demeaning reception a decade prior. In Keshubi's works, it is the private act of a female narrator writing to a female addressee that constitutes agency and her contribution to society, keenly shown in To a Young Woman and Going Solo , provides a new social vision of emotional transformation through prior unimagined dialogues. This paper presents hereto-unknown information about Hope Keshubi.