Patriarchal Hegemony Research Articles

The knowing mother: Maternal knowledge and the reinforcement of the feminine consuming subject in magazine advertisements

The caring mother is one of the most recurring images of femininity in post-war advertising. We examine how mothers are depicted as knowing consumers in advertisements in Australian Women’s Weekly and the United Kingdom’s Good Housekeeping magazines between 1950 and 2010. Our data suggest that although visual representations of maternal consumer knowledge change over this period, assumptions about the responsibilities of mothers endure in the family-related advertisements in these women’s magazines. There is a shift over time, however, from a representation of mothers as passive recipients of advice provided by external experts to a more active representation of mothers as experts themselves within both domestic and private spheres. We trace historically how the trope of the knowing mother works as a visual discursive device that helps to reinforce not just patriarchal hegemony, but a particular form of maternal hegemony. The hegemony of motherhood presents a particularly desirable/idealised femininity. However, this visual depiction also serves to gender the very way in which maternal knowledge is to be used. While maternal knowledge is depicted as changing from being merely intuitive or practical to subsuming the technique of knowledge or prescribed expertise; the purposes for which such knowledge is used remain firmly situated within the maternal/feminine realm of nurturing and caring consumption for the family. Despite shifts in discourse that appear to increasingly value mothers’ knowledge—there exists an enduring assumption that mothers should use their knowledge for domestic caring and consumption, ultimately reinforcing a heteronormativity of the use of women’s knowledge that subdues even expert knowledge for a domestic purpose.

Woman Stereotypes and Patriarchal Hegemony: A Feminist Stylistics Analysis of Iraqi Folk Proverbs

The present research examines the stereotypical representations of women and women's position in the discourse practices of Iraqi folk proverbs from a feminist stylistics perspective. Sara Mills' (2008) theoretical framework is adopted to analyze a sample of 315 proverbs drawn from written and oral sources. The analysis reveals that the sub-categories of woman in general and wife in particular are the most frequently targeted in Iraqi proverbs. Personal attributes are the most salient properties associated with Iraqi women compared to physical attributes. Women are generally represented negatively in the Iraqi proverbial discourse where proverbs are generally manipulated to disparage and denigrate women. The traditional ideals of hegemonic masculinity, patriarchal ideology and gender inequality are encoded in the discourse of these proverbs. That is, the institutionalization of male domination and the secondary position of women are grounded in the structure of Iraqi society. Finally, a number of conclusions are presented

“Earth's Complaint” and other SF Poems by Margaret Cavendish

159 SF POEMS BY MARGARET CAVENDISH REVIEW-ESSAYS E. Mariah Spencer “Earth’s Complaint” and other SF Poems by Margaret Cavendish Cavendish, Margaret. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: Poems and Fancies with The Animal Parliament. Ed. Brandie R. Siegfried. Toronto: Iter, 2018. xx+462 pp. $59.95 pbk. Of the commonly noted ancestors of modern sf, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, stands out as a singular example. While many genre theorists and historians recognize the Duchess’s contribution to the field, the focus has primarily been on her “science-fictional romance” (3) The Blazing World (1666).1 As Brandie Siegfried’s 2018 edition of Poems and Fancies (1653) clearly demonstrates, however, Cavendish was exploring scientific concepts from the moment of her first publication. Using the heroic couplet with iambic pentameter and generally short, single stanza verses, the poems included in Poems and Fancies offer “a witty, entertaining primer on the manifold parts and powers of nature: atomic motion and form, biological regeneration and disintegration, magnetic pull and repulse, planetary motion and tidal patterns” (2). Siegfried effectively provides us with Cavendish’s early sf poetry in a critical edition with fully modernized spelling and punctuation. The scholarly apparatus of this text is impressive, with its contextualizing footnotes and vocabulary glosses making the work fully accessible to modern readers for the first time. Prior to this publication, the only ways in which Poems and Fancies could be accessed—without visiting a special collections library—were through print-on-demand copies via Scolar Press and the digitized versions available through the subscription databases Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Literature Online (LION). Siegfried’s introduction competently explains the social and intellectual contexts for Poems and Fancies, while steering clear of academic jargon that might discourage the non-specialist reader. Her exposition is straightforward and her research is well documented, which is a necessity given that, as Siegfried notes, “Poems and Fancies took shape as a kind of intellectual cartography as Cavendish carefully mapped for herself a view of the scientific terrain” (7). It contains 270 poems divided into five sections with asides and dedications interspersed throughout, as well as a prose parable, The Animal Parliament. Building on Sara Mendelson’s work on The Blazing World (2016), Siegfried presents Cavendish as a creative scientific thinker, whose universe is full of “intelligent, self-organizing matter” (2). Indeed, much of her oeuvre can be read as extended thought experiments posing the question: What if all matter is sentient? With Poems and Fancies, Cavendish articulates for an early modern audience a secular world-view in which matter and the forces of nature 160 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) are self-directed. In her opening poem to the volume, “Nature Calls a Council, Which Is Motion, Figure, Matter, and Life, to Advise about Making the World,” she personifies each of these natural forces. While Motion, Figure, Matter, and Life remain subservient to Nature, they are imbued with their own agency and purpose: When Nature first the World’s Foundation laid, She called a council, how it might be made. Motion was first, which had a subtle wit, And then came Life, and Form, and Matter, fit. Nature began. “My friends, if we agree, We can and may do a fine work,” said she, “And make some things which us may worship give, Whereas now we but to our selves do live. Besides, it is my nature things to make, To give out work, but you directions take. (75) In this excerpt, Cavendish recasts creation with Dame Nature at center stage, positing a secular—and intentionally fictional—explanation for the creation of the world. She inverts the patriarchal hegemony of the Christian tradition through her gendering of the natural forces as female, thus beginning a long tradition of feminine influence in sf, which we see carried through to Mary Shelley and the pulp writers of the early twentieth century. Siegfried acknowledges that Cavendish’s poems “do not fit familiar literary categories such as pastoral, lyric, devotional, erotic, or epic, although they do make use of features from each of these poetic forms” (23). Instead, what I have noted is that Cavendish presents something altogether new. Of the...

Strange Love: Parajanov and the Affects of Late Soviet (Inter)nationalisms

Drawing on the function of flatness, stasis, and simultaneity in Soviet Georgian-Armenian director Sergei Parajanov's films, this article focuses on Parajanov's reimagination of the revolutionary avant-garde cinematic language of sensuous thought as an anti-colonial aesthetic project that echoes non-aligned trajectories. Parajanov's films perform Soviet Orientalism in drag, upending the lyric dimensions of an ethno-nationalist cinema as he recasts formalist poetic cinematic aesthetics through the defamiliarization of a queer non-Russian subject. Drawing on affect theory from the early Soviet avant-garde to the work of Gilles Deleuze, I argue that the sensuous materiality of Parajanov's films, focalized around the animism of objects and the dynamism of the static tableau, resists the distinction between matter and spirit. In this way, I argue that he also rejects a vision of liberal agency as a defining critique of Soviet nationalist patriarchal hegemony by instead focusing on the ways in which the material sensuousness of the cinematic image can upend the teleological evolution and assimilation of national form into Soviet content. This article thus takes up his films, in particular Ashik Kerib (1988), to trace alternative forms of feeling international across the Soviet south.

Subjectivation through the Name-of-the-Father: A Lacanian Reading of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily

This paper aims to interpret how the protagonist in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily is re-identified under her father and the public’s repression, and to apply Lacan’s theory of “Name-of-the-Father” within two functions: to love and forbid, to analyze how subjectivation takes place regarding a woman in a conservative American southern society. The short story begins with the whole town’s going to Emily Grieison’s funeral and “male” participants are especially stressed on possessing “respectful affection” for her. In such traditional society, it is a common phenomenon that women repressed by patriarchal hegemony live without subjectivity but in Emily’s burial rite, she is finally regarded a “fallen monument” instead of a desubjectivated individual. Emily even represents the “hereditary obligation and duty” in the town where simultaneously a black woman is not allowed to appear on the street without an apron. Due to the female protagonist’s surviving in such social background filled with sexism, the unusual outcome of Emily’s playing a representative “monument” among conservative southerners has aroused the significant issue that how subjectivation ultimately happens to a woman repressed by patriarchy.

Social Justice Feminists and Their Counter-Hegemonic Actions in the Post-World War II United States, 1945–1964

Building upon the theoretical framework of Italian activist and scholar Antonio Gramsci, and using historical and public administrative sources, this article argues that while social justice feminism as a social movement in the United States declined by 1940, former participants continued their counter-hegemonic actions after World War II. Facing a new political and cultural hegemony increasingly dominated by fears of atomic annihilation, Soviet domination, and domestic Communist infiltration, women progressives, such as Frieda Miller and Esther Peterson, developed new approaches to continuing their counter-hegemonic aims, particularly through reviving an alternative view of public administration. Miller and Peterson thus helped prepare the way for women's activism in the United States to shift from economic security to equal rights by the mid-1960s, thus establishing an increasingly effective counter-hegemonic effort against the continuing patriarchal hegemony.

Liberating possibilities of a new identity: A review of Christi van der Westhuizen’s Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa

In this article, Christi van der Westhuizen’s sociopolitical contribution in her publication, Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa , is reviewed. In light of the official end of apartheid in 1994, South Africans are attempting to define a new identity. Van der Westhuizen’s publication focusses on how the identity of white Afrikaans women, as both the oppressor and the oppressed, influences and contributes to the endeavour of a search for new identity. In deconstructing and re-imagining new identity, Van der Westhuizen deconstructs the ‘supporting scaffolding’ of Afrikaner identity and examines the impact of white patriarchal hegemony that silences the voice of women, sexual minorities and black consciousness. The review concludes with the emphasis on the transformative role of shame, that is, the willingness to expose the false sense of goodness that we had of ourselves, as pointed out by Van der Westhuizen. In this regard, the recognition of the intersectionality of people’s experiences becomes a key aspect of the endeavour of a search for new identity.

RECLAIMING FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY: A KRISTEVAN ANALYSIS OF SUBVERSION OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN SAM SHEPARD’S THREE MAJOR PLAYS

The study intends to examine three major plays by Sam Shepard – “True West”, “Fool for Love”, and “A Lie of the Mind” – to explore the underlying causes of women’s subjugation from Julia Kristeva’s perspective, which is adopted here as the theoretical framework. Kristeva’s views on the exclusion of women from the symbolic order to maintain a gender hierarchy will be utilized to pinpoint the reasons behind men’s violence towards women. Moreover, we shall examine the struggles of female characters to liberate themselves from the oppression of the symbolic order by resisting the demands of patriarchy. The findings suggest that female characters’ attempt to delimit the definition of female subjectivity and motherhood is in line with Kristeva’s promotion of a new interpretation of femininity/maternity. In the study, we have come to the conclusion that, in accordance with Kristeva’s theories, the attempts of women to follow their desire and reconstruct female subjectivity is the ultimate strategy to disrupt patriarchal hegemony.

VAMPIRE VERSUS THE EMPIRE: BRAM STOKER'S REPROACH OFFIN-DE-SIÈCLEBRITAIN INDRACULA

Much has been said aboutBram Stoker'sDracula(1897), the out-of-tradition exemplar of the Gothic which, perhaps, has had a more pervasive effect on our understanding of life and death, gender roles and identity, and sex and perversity than any other work of the genre. The vampire from the so-called dark ages has become a symbol standing for the uncontrollable powers acting on us and also for all the discarded, uncanny phenomena in human nature and history. The work, however, has usually been taken by the critics of Gothic literature as “a paradigmatic Gothic text” (Brewster 488) representing the social, psychological, and sexual traumas of the late-nineteenth century. Hence, it has been analysed as a work “breaking [the] taboos, [and in need of being] read as an expression of specifically late Victorian concerns” (Punter and Byron 231). The text has also been seen as “reinforc[ing] readers’ suspicions that the authorities (including people, institutions and disciplines) they trust are ineffectual” (Senf 76). Yet, it has hardly ever been taken as offering an alternativeWeltanschauungin place of the decaying Victorian ethos. True,Draculais afin-de-sièclenovel and deals with the turbulent paradigmatic shift from the Victorian to the modern, and Stoker, by creating the lecherous vampire and his band as thedoppelgängersof the sexually sterile and morally pretentious bourgeois types (who are, in fact, inclined to lascivious joys), reveals the moral hypocrisy and sexual duplicity of his time. But, it is also true that by juxtaposing the “abnormal” against the “normal” he targets the utilitarian bourgeois ethics of the empire: aware of the Victorian pragmatism on which the concept of the “normal” has been erected, he, with an “abnormal” historical figure (Vlad Drăculea of the House of Drăculești, 1431–76) who appears as Count Dracula in the work, attacks the ethical superstructure of Britain which has already imposed on the Victorians the “pathology of normalcy” (Fromm 356). Hence, Stoker's choice of title character, the sadistic Vlad the Impaler, who fought against the Ottoman Empire in the closing years of the Middle Ages, and his anachronistic rendering of Dracula as a Gothic invader of the Early Middle Ages are not coincidental (Figure 8). In the world of the novel, this embodiment of the early and late paradigms is the antagonistic power arrayed against the supposedly stable, but in reality fluctuating,fin-de-siècleethos. However, by turning this personification of the “evil” past into a sexual enigma for the band of men who are trying to preserve the Victorian patriarchal hegemony, Stoker suggests that if Victorian sterile faith in the “normal” is defeated through a historically extrinsic (in fact, currently intrinsic) anomaly, a more comprehensive social and ethical epoch that has made peace with the past can be started.

‘Earrings and shields’

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a global issue affecting women and girls in different parts of the world. Over 140 million girls and women have undergone FGM worldwide. In the UK, 130,000 girls and women live with the consequences of FGM (Reid 2014). In Kuria region of Kenya, 96% of women and girls have undergone FGM (Oloo et al 2010) despite its illegal status. FGM has been approached from the religious, medical and human rights perspectives but the linguistic perspective has not yet been considered. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper seeks to address the FGM issue from a linguistic perspective by analysing metaphors in female circumcision in Kuria Kenya. Focus is on how through discourse, gender inequalities are normalised and advanced within a sociocultural system and how this, in turn, contributes to legitimation of FGM. Findings show that metaphors function as discursive strategies for constructing and maintaining dominant patriarchal hegemonies and maintaining the status quo while reinforcing the perpetuation of FGM. I suggest that an understanding of the role of gender and discourse in FGM could influence efforts to end the practice and lead to positive change.

Theorizing an Africana Womanist’s Resistance to Patriarchy in Monyaise’s Bogosi Kupe

This article examines the resistance of an African woman to patriarchy in the Setswana novel, Bogosi Kupe. To illustrate this resistance, it analyzes a woman protagonist, Matlhodi, in this Setswana novel. The article contends that Matlhodi employs self-defining and authentic stratagems to counteract both patriarchal hegemony, and familial, cultural, and ideological hegemony. Employing Africana womanism and Africana critical theory, it argues that Matlhodi deploys her body, her clandestine love affair, her pregnancy, and her husband’s death as weapons to resist the patriarchal ethos foisted on her by her family.

Metaphor in the Construction of Gender in Media Discourse: Analysis of Metaphors Used to Describe Women in Nigerian newspapers

Metaphor in the Construction of Gender in Media Discourse: Analysis of Metaphors Used to Describe Women in Nigerian newspapers Umar Ahmed Abstract Scholars in linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis (e.g. Zubair, 2007; Mele, 2008) note how gender can be constructed through metaphor. These researchers further argue that metaphor is not just a mere rhetorical ornament or a literary device but rather, a powerful means by which people constitute their social identities and relations. In this paper I report an analysis of the complex and often subtle ways in which some female authors used metaphors to describe women in Nigerian newspapers. I also discuss the presuppositions and inferences associated with the indexing of feminine gender through metaphor, highlighting the role they play in the process. Drawing upon Lazar‟s (2005) notion of feminist critical discourse analysis, Lakoff and Johnson‟s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory and the pragmatic notion of presupposition, I analyze a total of 339 metaphors about women identified in the 100 opinion articles on gender in five Nigerian newspapers, namely: The Guardian, Daily Trust, New Nigerian, The Punch, and Vanguard from 1999 to 2014. The analysis demonstrates that Nigerian women still use metaphorical expressions, which largely kept in place a gender ideology, which upholds male dominance and female subordination. It also reveals that the underlying cognition of (some) Nigerian female authors of opinion articles indicate their consent to patriarchal hegemony. Hence, the study makes the claim that how one may perceive and describe gendred self in relation to others can be influenced or constrained by the dominant gender ideology in society. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijgws.v6n1a8

Probing Language and Patriarchy in South Africa

This paper focuses on the views of participants who were interviewed regarding codified meaning that is found in language. The paper addresses some of the arguments made by Feminist paradigms in de-constructing patriarchal hegemony that perpetuates itself in language and culture. The undergirding argument is that language can be used as a tool of oppression or liberation. The goal of this paper is to expose some of the de-humanizing aspects of language, and to foster a dialogue that aims at ending gender discrimination. The study used a qualitative research methodology to gather the viewpoints of the participants regarding some patriarchal epithets that may be found especially in Sepedi language largely spoken in the Limpopo Province, South Africa. Participants in this study were purposively sampled. The participants’ observations are that language is the backbone of power relations in every society. It is through language that some patriarchal belief systems continue to be perpetuated even in our...

Love, Sex and the Body in The Bell Jar and My Story:

This paper seeks to explore the themes of love, sex, and the body in The Bell Jar and My Story, two much-read autobiographical texts by Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das respectively, which reveal the writers’ feminist “self.” These books were published in the mid-twentieth century when women started fighting for their individual freedom by interrogating patriarchal hegemony responsible for delimiting women’s familial, social, economic, educational, industrial, and political rights. Both Plath and Das possess unconventional approaches towards love, sex, and the body. Their texts come out as threats to the patriarchal practice which pushes women to “stay at home, cook meals, clean house and bear children” (Lamb 1). For these poets, the woman’s body, which patriarchy mostly considers an object of sexual pleasure, is a significant tool for transgressing the dictums of patriarchy. The present study, therefore, aims at showing the themes of love, sex, and the body in the above mentioned texts as a means for the poets to interrogate patriarchal restraints and to create a new identity with self-esteem and self-worth. In this way, they refuse to accept the hegemonic role of oppression and assert their gender identity.

Pedagogical Relation and Gender: Reading Ibsen

This essay investigates the intersection between gender and pedagogical relation in Ibsen`s drama, finding in his representation of gender-inflected pedagogical dynamic between men and women the earliest modern prototype of the pedagogical relation between a hegemonic male teacher and a female student that has been frequently dramatized on modern stage. The essay discusses the pedagogues and academics played by fathers, husbands, and male companions in Ibsen`s plays, including Torvald Helmer`s pedagogical impersonation, to demonstrate the cultural complicity between pedagogical authority and patriarchal hegemony. This attempt to trace backward to Ibsen so as to locate the earliest model of the gendered pedagogical relations patterned in modern anglophone plays discovers that they appropriate the gender protocols of a certain formulaic assumption as represented and challenged by Ibsen―that men have a natural claim to pedagogical authority opposite women whose cultural status is associated with that of learners and pupils.

Situating Islamic feminism(s): Lived religion, negotiation of identity and assertion of third space by Muslim women in Pakistan

This paper reports the findings of an exploratory, qualitative study with Pakistani women to explore how Muslim women studying English in higher education contexts in Pakistan engage with feminist thought. The broader aim of the study was to capture the relationship between these women's ‘secular’ education and their religious (and secular) social identities as young, urban, middle class working women in a Pakistani higher education context. In particular, the study sets out to explore how Pakistani women at higher education institutions interact with and use ‘new’ forms of knowledges, particularly those dominated by western frameworks of intellectual thought and reasoning, in the context of their own potentially different social lives and self-identities as Muslim women. The findings show that the young women academics in addition to negotiating with the Western notions of Feminism also simultaneously challenge the indigenous patriarchal hegemonies and conservative religious discourses in their social context by attempting to rework notions of Muslim women's identity in Pakistan, envisaging what Bhabha has termed a third space.

Forgotten Heroes: Family Planning Cadres in Politics of Sexuality in Surakarta (1973-1998)

<p>This paper explains the role of cadres in family planning program (KB) at Surakarta. Family Planning program is the priority of New Order Government to reduce the rapid population growth rate. The program was initially difficult to be accepted by the community.<br />This is due to the values and norms of society that oppose birth restrictions. Therefore the government uses society approarch strategy by forming family planning cadres. This study uses historical method consist of heuristic, source critique, interpretation, and historiography. This research shows that family planning is a politics of sexuality constructed by the government. FP cadres became discourse knowledge agents of the New Order to achieve legitimacy. However, FP cadres consider that their activity is a service to the state. Their existence shows that women have great power in the social sphere amid patriarchal hegemony in Javanese society.</p>

Uncovering Rape Culture

This study examines the news content and experiences of male and female Indian journalists to explore and understand the influence of patriarchal socialization on newsgathering and reporting processes in coverage of the Delhi gang rape case of 2012. Findings suggest that many male and female journalists acknowledge the existence of sexist norms that govern rape-related reporting in India. Female journalists are more actively trying to change the ways that rape and sexual assault were covered historically, by employing non-traditional story angles. But while female journalists often experience the “sharp end of the deal,” some fail to acknowledge the influence of patriarchal hegemony because of their deep integration in the system that revels in their subordination in a male-dominated environment.

Suffrage Movement and the Subversion of the ‘Juridico-Discursive’ Power in the Victorian Period: Elizabeth Robins and The Concept of 'New Women'

This paper examines the socio-historical subversion of ‘juridico-discursive' power in the late Victorian period. It briefly investigates the rise of the British suffrage movement and highlights the role of ‘suffrage drama' as its social apparatus. The authors demonstrate how suffrage artists, especially the playwright/actress Elizabeth Robins, acted against the dominant patriarchal hegemony and were in frontline of social uprisings. It is argued that ‘Suffrage drama' as a ‘place of tolerance' functioned as an antithesis to the mainstream theatre and challenged the conventional dramatic forms practiced prior to its birth. Suffrage drama provided a space for women to have their collective voice heard in a social and political context in the early Victorian era. Elizabeth Robins, mostly acknowledged for enacting women heroines of Ibsen's plays, became an invaluable inspirational figure for suffrage women as she was the actress in whom the strong concept of the ‘New Woman' was incarnated.

Understanding standpoints on women through a patriarchal voice: A study of Ayinla Omowura’s music

ABSTRACTEvery society possesses preconceived standpoints on women and womens issues in its enclave and these standpoints manifest in diverse media of communication from time to time. Popular music is one avenue for communicating social realities. This article examines Ayinla Omowura’s song-texts in order to understand how the artist as a patriarchal voice interprets these standpoints. Six songs are critically analysed to consider specific women’s issues and how they were portrayed. Four themes, namely polygamy, prostitution, skin bleaching, and women’s submission, recur in the songs. Also, the artist thrives on the use of invective, curses, proverbs, and aphorisms imbued with metaphors as rhetorical strategies. In all, the artist’s commentaries on women’s affairs in his society reveal a high level of patriarchal hegemony that dominated his time. In his attempt to explain the psychology of women, he accommodates and lends voice to the manufactured consent for continued gender discrimination.