Women Readers Research Articles

Reading an Other

ABSTRACT The Resisting Reader by Judith Fetterley is a groundbreaking critique of the American literary canon that put together two major critical movements of the 1970s—feminist criticism and reception theory. Fetterley demonstrated how canonical American texts are “designed” to “immasculate” women readers, to compel them to identify with a male point of view, one of whose tenets is the designation of woman as other. Fetterley inspired the author to examine how women read women's texts and to formulate a theory of careful, responsible reading that does justice to the communicative project embodied in the text.

Reading the Digital Muslim Romance

AbstractThis article considers the practices of social formation on the online self‐publishing platform Wattpad. Interactive and interfaced with other social media, Wattpad was founded in 2006 by Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen to facilitate self‐publishing by well‐known and emerging authors alike. Wattpad is popular among Malay readers and authors in Malaysia with stories clocking up millions of reads each. Most stories are aimed at women readers and preoccupied with themes of love and romance. However, this article turns its attention to the much‐read Wattpad stories about forced marriage and romantic Islamic masculinity, the kinds of affordances Wattpad provides for Malay language authors and their readership, and the reading publics they cultivate. This article frames Wattpad as an archive of affect for vernacular religious engagement that mirrors the alternative spaces that women occupy as digital labourers and as agents of religious knowledge. It shows that digital spaces are affective spaces as much as they are domains that replicate and rewrite sharia‐compliant gendered and religious relations offline.

Millennial Dark Ladies

The Dark Lady evoked in Shakespeare’s Sonnets has been the subject of numerous speculations since the Victorian period. Several male writers and critics – George Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris, A. L. Rowse and Anthony Burgess, for example – have undertaken extended imaginative explorations of this alternative woman. More recently, the Dark Lady has become a central figure in millennial novels by women writers, designed primarily for a female reading audience. This article considers what’s at stake by placing this imaginary woman at the heart of Shakespeare’s artistic inspiration, and what this tells us about the meaning(s) of ‘Shakespeare’ for contemporary women writers and readers.

The Perils of Reading Fiction: the Female Quixote and the Thai New Woman

AbstractBritish literary history routinely associated women with reading fiction, especially the novel. This association seemingly threatened male hegemony and cultural authority. It led, therefore, to the portrayal of the woman reader as a female quixote who was prone to misreading and being misled by what she read. This representation became popular during the rise of the novel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the New Woman's emergence at the fin-de-siècle. Similar developments took place in Siam/Thailand where the birth of fiction, the advent of the woman reader, and the New Woman's rise roughly coincided in the late 1910s and early 1920s. By examining San Thewarak's novel Bandai haeng khwam rak [Stairways to Love] (1932), this paper demonstrates the trope of the female quixote's invocation to describe the emerging Thai (New) Woman reader and the threat that she embodied that had to be managed and controlled.

DEPICTION OF WOMEN IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN AND BRITISH FICTION

It was time of nineteenth century when women writers used to have male pennames for publication. Theme of marriage and society were prevalent in both American and British society. It was a microcosm of its own as women readers used to write about their life through the eyes of women writers. This phenomenon is historical as it stands between Mary Wollstonecraft, arguably the first feminist thinker and Virginia Woolf, arguably the most famous one. Changing times in the second half of nineteenth century was affecting the sensibility and religious clutches on society. It was also affecting notions of patriarchy. Writings of the time ought to reflect that. However, author also presumes a gender of her or his own before writing. That makes her or his gendering of character political and biased. But honest portrayals are important for examining depictions of women in a particular time. This paper aims to analyse two popular writers of the age, a female and a male, to understand the changing notions regarding patriarchy. American novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) have been written important social novels like novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Her novels features cast of female characters from the contemporary times. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a British writer writing detective fiction who used to portray his contemporary society. He also uses female characters in her stories. This paper aims to study works of both novelist employing methodologies of close reading and comparative literature to see how depiction of women in nineteenth century America and British fiction changes and what are the reasons for it.

Informal Adult Learning: Advertisements in Women’s Magazines in Turkey

This study examines the visual and verbal content of advertisements in women’s magazines published between 1980 and 1990 in Turkey. Based on content analysis, we established the categories of products and services, age, body parts, women’s roles, clothes, and locations. We determined the five most frequent words employed in all grammatical or lexical forms: beautiful (güzel), to live (yaşamak), new (yeni), skin (cilt), and young (genç). By examining the data through informal learning, the study looks at how consumer-oriented values were taught informally to women readers during a period when Turkey underwent integration with the neoliberal global economy. We argue that the advertisements in women’s magazines were effective both in terms of disseminating the dominant values of the era and in causing women to informally internalize the consumer-oriented values required for the development of the desired female subjectivities of an emerging neoliberal society.

Sandra Bland at the cross: A womanist reading of Mark 15:40-47

How do women who lack power and privilege experience the cross? How do women who lack power and privilege view privileged men at the cross? How do such questions probe issues of Jesus’s death in the Markan passion narrative? This article employs a womanist hermeneutic of “gazing” to interpret differently the complexity of women in close proximity to death while interrogating one particular woman’s close proximity to death in contemporary memory: Sandra Bland. Particularly, a womanist hermeneutic of gazing coupled with a womanist hermeneutic of suspicion provides a liberating space for nuanced engagement with the women who gaze upon Jesus’s crucifixion from afar. Recognizing specifically that the Gospel of Mark uses the Greek word βλέπω ( blepō) to identify “seeing” as a metaphor for belief, how does a womanist understanding of the Greek term θεωρέω ( theōreō, which the gospel writer uses sparingly) crack open the text for contemporary audiences? Engaging issues of power, privilege, and death in relationship to the “gaze” of Mark 15:40-47, this article highlights that the women who attempt to anoint Jesus’s body in the Markan narrative, because of their gender in the highly charged testosterone environment of a militarized imperial execution, have more “skin in the game,” different from the privileged position of men in the text. What happens when women are confronted with men who exhibit high levels of masculine testosterone and masculine identity? Like Sandra Bland, they are closer to death. Accordingly, thinking through the women who go to anoint Jesus with contemporary women today means that women who are often closer to death must continue the analytical work of “gazing”, as found in Mark 15:47 to the point that returning the “gaze” produces change for those closest to death (e.g., black and brown bodies close to militarized imperial violence).

Reading Themselves Sick: Consumption and Women's Reading in the Early Republic, 1780–1860

Reading Themselves Sick:Consumption and Women's Reading in the Early Republic, 1780–1860 Carrie N. Knight (bio) Sickness is the mildew of life. It mars the fairest hours of enjoyment. In the morning the spirits are refreshed—the heart is rife with ambition. Herculean obstacles cower beneath your touch. But a little exertion & fatigue spirits Ambition and all are gone and you wonder at the power that could have nerved you to make the effort which has now prostrated your strength. The fever mantles your cheek… pain in your side and chest and these are the precursors of a restless sleepless night. You change your position for ease but pain also changes—a dry hard cough breaks the monotony of a midnight hour and leaves you exhausted. —Middlesex Diary of Adaline Lindsley, August 26, 18411 When Adaline Lindsley set her pen to the diary she kept between 1840 and 1843, she was participating in a tradition that subsequent historians have used to piece together a picture of women's lives in the early republic that would otherwise be lost to time. Lindsley's diary is typical in its record of the daily encounters and occurrences that colored her life in Middlesex, New York. In other respects, however, it is strikingly singular. The diary reveals a woman of considerable literary proficiency, both in its style and manner of writing and in its record of Lindsley's prolific reading. The diary is also a narrative of disease. Adaline Lindsley was dying of consumption.2 Some would have said her reading was the cause. Consumption is essential to any discussion of life in the early American republic. In the second half of the eighteenth century, its presence first among colonists and then among citizens of the new nation was ubiquitous. Some historians have attributed this prevalence to population growth and commercial expansion, a theory supported by a peak in cases around 1800 in Atlantic coastal cities.3 And yet, little scholarship has been devoted to its study within this period. This inequity is the result of diverse factors including an early ambiguity surrounding the disease, skepticism or outright derision of illness narratives, and a historiographical bias toward the disease as it affected European populations—the last a consequence of the relative [End Page 37] dearth of disease narratives or pathology treatises produced in America relative to those produced in Britain and France at the time. In addition to these impediments, scholars have not sufficiently addressed how consumption in early America might have been differently understood and therefore exist as a separate disease from its European counterpart. Susan Sontag has sensitively observed that tuberculosis constitutes a set of cultural metaphors that evolve over time and space. Her observation supports the idea that the disease reflected the concerns and values of early republicans. These concerns and values confronted observable differences between life in America and elsewhere, as well as imagined differences rooted in feeling and sentiment. Difference was a volatile construct used to assert a national identity alternately set apart from and intimately linked with a European past. Citizens of the early republic grappled with how to reconcile these differences, to turn back or to look forward, choosing instead to fashion a hybrid culture responsive to a rapidly evolving national and global identity. The American response to consumption followed a similar trajectory, taking many of its cues from earlier European conceptions of the disease while shaping it to its own needs. Consumption and the marketplace were early partners in this process. By the late eighteenth century, the marketplace was a preeminent ground for testing America's hybrid identity. Regulation and policing of material consumption were conspicuously tested as forms of dissent and individuation as evidenced in earlier pre-revolutionary consumer boycotts of British goods.4 Proscriptive discourse against the consumption of foreign goods, particularly the tragic novels of Samuel Richardson and others British and French writers, persisted well into the early republican period, focusing its harshest criticism on the corrupting influence of such goods upon the polity, despite or perhaps in consequence of their continued popularity among American consumers.5 Janice Radway reminds us that "'to consume'… was originally understood to refer to fire...

Rethinking and Re-viewing Data

Rethinking and Re-viewing Data Melanie Bigold, Marie-Louise Coolahan, and Betty A. Schellenberg the three projects we describe here seek to expand the ways in which we understand women's relationships with texts by theorizing and applying robust methodologies to the study of early modern women's book ownership, eighteenth-century women's libraries, and women's compilation of manuscript verse miscellanies. This work challenges assumptions and biases in book history—in particular, the perceived absence of evidence in terms of both the texts themselves and the textual and intellectual labor involved in their production. One of the most exciting aspects of women's book history is the variety and scope of "new" source materials hiding in plain sight in libraries and archives around the world. Although many of these items remain inaccessible to scholars for various practical reasons (location, time, and funds are always factors), often the primary barrier is conceptual: the simple perception of a lack of evidence. In fact, we have found plenty of material when searching for women-created manuscript verse miscellanies and the records of women's libraries and book ownership. The sheer numbers of manuscript or textual witnesses involved have, however, made it difficult to assess and analyze the material. We have all struggled with the problem of genre, because of both the lack of defining conceptual parameters and the idiosyncrasies of surviving witnesses. Each of our studies aims, therefore, to make some of these "new" forms of contemporary evidence accessible to more systematic study and interpretation. Such data-driven work has the potential to transform histories of reading. Like many of our colleagues in this special issue, we believe that careful framing and processing of the quantitative data is a necessary groundwork for qualitative analyses. This calls for preliminary theorizing and categorizing. We have found ourselves [End Page 165] questioning the nature of our sources (when is a book not a book?), the utility of genre designations (what does "literature" mean to the Countess of Hertford versus the Duchess of Northumberland?), and measures of popularity (why does the canon of manuscript poetry collections differ from that of print?). Recovery and making visible are important processes in women's book history; however, it is equally critical to establish standards and contexts of comparison for what is recovered. We need to build data sets large enough to allow comparison if we are to address the many generalizations and questions that pertain to women's reading, curating, and adapting of literary and popular texts. But in order to do this, we need to identify, locate, and create typologies of various genres of sources. For example, because the catalogs, book lists, wills, and inventories that are witnesses to women's book ownership and libraries use variable generic frameworks, they reveal and conceal different data. Quantitative research also asks us to assess more precisely various forms of qualitative agency in the communications circuit, whether of book collector or reader, consumer or curator, copyist or adapter. This type of work reveals that women's book history is not a "narrow" or "niche" pursuit; rather, it contributes to and intersects with scholarly understandings of class, gender, literacy, geography, generations, and communities of reading. It helps us chart the continuities and evolutions in the circulation of ideas and in economies of culture more broadly. Finally, it continues the fundamental work of book history in breaking down disciplinary boundaries as well as textual categories, such as the literary versus the popular or ephemeral. Perhaps most importantly, we also encourage the sharing and networking of data and materials for further work. Scholars of book history are sitting on innumerable files and spreadsheets that are never made public. Such valuable intellectual labor deserves more credit and could have more impact if it were easier to access, cite, and share. One of the greatest benefits of the Women in Book History symposium that gave rise to this special issue was the generosity with which everyone shared their types of evidence, their working files and databases, their failures, their successes, and their best practices. The material evidence for an expanded women's book history is waiting on the shelves of archives and libraries around the...

Teaching Women Writers in a "Great Books" Program

Abstract: This piece discusses the integration of women writers into a "Great Books" curriculum at a public university in Canada. I consider how the relations among my students, me, and the texts of early modern women have changed over the past twenty years as those texts have become part of the canon. I argue that the availability of high-quality teaching editions and my university's Learning Management System (LMS) have transformed both my students' encounters with female authored texts as well as the kinds of academic labor that I need to undertake to facilitate undergraduate learning. Where I once spent a good deal of time establishing frameworks within which women's writing had value, I now provide much more specialized guidance often helping students grapple with the material idiosyncrasies of early modern texts. Today, my students view women's writing as integral to the curriculum and are far more eager to embark on in-depth research projects. At the same time, these positive developments have often obscured the ways in which patriarchy shaped women's reading and writing, and I have had to underscore the conditions that restricted women's textual agency. My students and I reflect on the implications of teaching women's texts as "great books" and about the kinds of changes we need to make to make the curriculum more racially diverse.

Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit Chelsea Foxwell (bio) Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan. By Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2019. xvi, 315 pages. $75.00. Aesthetic Life is an expansive study of the concept of feminine beauty and of the bijin (beauty or beautiful person) in Meiji literature. Arguing that Meiji [End Page 536] authors treated the concepts of beauty, Japan, art (in the broader sense of media, including literature), and women as interrelated problems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit traces the bijin (a term that in the modern period applied almost exclusively to women) through literary works, journalistic essays, pictures, and ephemera such as postcards and photographs. Seven chapters underscore feminine beauty as a subject of central symbolic importance if not national obsession in literature and thought from the 1880s through the end of the Meiji period. The author begins by considering Meiji Japanese consciousness of mid- to late nineteenth-century Western fantasies about Japanese women. It shows how by 1889 Japanese writers began to define the bijin as "a woman perfect in spirit and appearance," a prognosis that assumed mastery of both "Western morality" and "old morality."1 From roughly this date onward, the works of critics, novelists, magazine and newspaper writers, department store and advertisement copy writers, and others reflected a flurry of activity to articulate the characteristics of the bijin. As Tomi Suzuki has written, "In the mid-1880s, both the 'reform of fiction' and the 'reform of women' began to be discussed seriously and widely."2 Aesthetic Life gathers a diverse range of literary and popular writing to show that these discourses were not merely occurring in parallel but were deeply intertwined. Magazines and advertisements marketed to women, massreproduced pictorial or photographic idols and advertisements directed toward men, and literary novels and short stories addressing both sexes show that the bijin, like the Western Orientalist construct of the "geisha girl" analyzed in chapters 1–2, was a leitmotif that stretched beyond discourses of femininity. The quest to define the bijin was part of the broader Meiji search for new ideals which sought to define or redefine almost every aspect of national customs, beliefs, and cultural forms. In seeking to understand why the bijin was so pervasive, the book points to the many literary and visual constructs, starting with those from the West, whereby idealized images of women also functioned as articulations of an ideal Japan, past, present, and future. The discourse on women and bijin in this sense transcended the sphere of gender. Even so, gender is nonetheless essential to understanding how women—in particular, women defined as visually enticing—were objectified to the extent that they could serve as stand-ins for the nation. In her first two chapters, Lippit emphasizes that nineteenth-century European and U.S. writers established the "geisha girl" in particular and "Japanese women" in general as literary and cultural figures that facilitated [End Page 537] the Western objectivization and trivialization of Japan as a feminized object of Orientalist male enjoyment. In doing so, these writers were engaging in an already established trope whereby Western Orientalist representations of the East simultaneously asserted fantasies of the West's dominance over the East together with "fantasies of men's limitless power to enjoy the bodies of women."3 It is well established that the hegemonic attitude of Europe and the United States toward Japan and Asia, which led in art to "interpretations of Japanese perception and expression as childlike," also invited the Western feminization of Japan as another means of expressing and emphasizing Euro-American dominance and masculinity.4 The rhetorical device of the work of art (such as a painting, photograph, or sculpture) concretized the arrangement by visualizing the literal objectivization of Japan and of Japanese women, doubling the image of masculine Western appropriation of the feminine Japan. In Aesthetic Life, we see Japanese authors inherit and at times speak back to the Western Orientalist discourse of a feminized Japan. However, we almost never hear how women readers and writers in Japan intersected with this discourse...

Women Readers and Writers in Medieval Iberia: Spinning the Text by Montserrat Piera

Reviewed by: Women Readers and Writers in Medieval Iberia: Spinning the Text by Montserrat Piera Miguel García-Fernández Piera, Montserrat. Women Readers and Writers in Medieval Iberia: Spinning the Text. Brill, 2019. ISBN: 978-90-04-40037-5. Montserrat Piera nos ofrece una obra en la que la mayor parte de las escritoras estudiadas y los textos analizados son bien conocidos por los medievalistas y, muy especialmente, por quienes nos interesamos por la historia de las mujeres y la historia de la literatura bajomedieval ibérica. Pensemos en autoras como Leonor López de Córdoba, Constanza de Castilla, Teresa de Cartagena o Isabel de Villena, o en obras como Libre de les dones de Francesc Eiximenis o Triunfo de Amor de Juan Flores. Sin embargo, nos encontramos ante un estudio novedoso, inteligente y sugerente, en el que se presentan un buen número de informaciones y reflexiones metodológicas de gran interés para abordar el tema de las mujeres ibéricas como lectoras y escritoras al final de la Edad Media. Precisamente, la creación de un [End Page 249] modelo metodológico e interpretativo que permita explicar mejor la relación de las mujeres con las "textualidades" en las que se vieron inmersas y que contribuyeron a crear y dinamizar es una de las grandes contribuciones de esta obra, en la que se redefinen conceptos y se dialoga con las categorías de análisis propuestas por otros autores en sus estudios culturales y de género. A pesar del título—que podría sugerirnos estar ante una monografía de síntesis, a modo de estado de la cuestión—nos encontramos realmente ante un estudio interpretativo de primer nivel en el que se (re)sitúan en su contexto histórico y cultural las lecturas y los escritos de las mujeres medievales y se contribuye a redefinir el papel de estas en los ámbitos de análisis planteados, lo cual, por otra parte, no hace sino evidenciar la importancia de la participación y la iniciativa femeninas (su agency)—también en relación con sus resistencias—en el seno de la sociedad medieval. El sugerente subtítulo evoca la recurrente metáfora utilizada por la autora sobre la relación de las mujeres con el hilado y el tejido de textos (algo que, sin ser inédito o innovador, resulta ciertamente oportuno), planteando desde el "Prefacio" lo que se pretende con esta obra: I will put forth a new paradigm to represent premodern reading and … I will study women's writing or more precisely, women's textualities, as a process of spinning and weaving not only words but also experiences, social practices, emotions and, ultimately, affectus, understood here as the embodiment of the ability to affect and be affected. (ix-x) Estos prometedores planteamientos finalmente han cristalizado en un estudio que satisface las expectativas del lector y que, como pretende la autora (11), va más allá de ser un trabajo de historia de la literatura para conformar un estudio de historia cultural—o de historia social de la cultura, ya que analiza los textos y las autoras en su contexto de producción físico, intelectual y social—, en el que se contribuye a redefinir la relación de las mujeres con los artefactos culturales a los que tuvieron acceso, que consumieron o que crearon. Al mismo tiempo, se plantea la revisión de algunos planteamientos tradicionales—y también de otros formulados desde los propios estudios sobre las mujeres—que, directa o indirectamente, pueden condicionar la interpretación de algunas actuaciones y textos femeninos. Por ello, nos parece especialmente relevante el conjunto de propuestas y afirmaciones que se anuncian a lo largo del libro: desde la confirmación de la posibilidad de escuchar las voces femeninas a través del análisis de unas fuentes medievales que, de todos modos, no dejan de presentar una serie de problemas en cuanto a su recopilación [End Page 250] y estudio (3), hasta la necesidad de cuestionar hasta qué punto se infravalora el papel social, económico y cultural de las mujeres medievales al seguir planteando su posición como "marginal...

Serpent’s Tongue: The Byronism of Lamia

John Keats’s Lamia was shaped by interrelated anxieties that troubled the poet throughout 1819. These anxieties centered on the cultural power of women readers but ramified to include Lord Byron as well. Borrowing the story of Lamia from Robert Burton but also presenting his serpent-heroine as a metonymy for the western canon, Keats uses his poem to lament the parodic feminization of canonical norms on the Regency literary scene. Yet this cultural debasement, he suggests further, must also be blamed on Lord Byron, who has made himself Regency England’s star poet in part by theatrically catering to the ladies. My essay invokes Regency criticism of Byron as an audience-manipulating poseur to argue that Lamia’s amatory career restages Keats’s ambivalence about Byron, allowing Keats to seek a broader readership through an experiment in Byronic role-playing while also indicting Byron for his insincerity and cynicism.

Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Representations of the Oberammergau Passion Play: Heredity, Eugenic Theatre, and “Epic Selection”

The Oberammergau Passion Play became internationally famous in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1840s and 1850s and through the early twentieth century, English-speaking foreign tourists from Ireland and the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and even Australia published a surprising number and variety of accounts of travel to the village and attendance at the Passion Play. Professional and amateur historians described the production as an evolutionary throwback or curious hybrid of ancient Greek and medieval theatre, regarding it as an object and event of antiquarian interest. Foreign female travelers attended the play in impressive numbers, and their accounts provide insight into contemporary women's readings of theatre, travel, spirituality, gender inequality, gendered spaces, and cultural difference. Protestant writers reflected uneasily on the play's communication of spiritual truth by means of images. And all of these accounts, whether published in the popular periodical press or as monographs, in turn encouraged increasing numbers of travelers to make the same journey—represented sometimes as a religious and sometimes as an artistic pilgrimage—to the isolated Bavarian village.

Зал архитектора В. И. Собольщикова в Публичной библиотеке (1917–1960 гг.)

In 1860–1861 according to the project of V. I. Sobolshchikov, the first specialized reading room for 250 seats was built with additional rooms for artists and women readers. Until the beginning of the XX century. Sobolshchikov’s reading room was the main one for the readers’ classes. This article reveals the history of the hall in 1917–1960. Over the years, it was called differently: the Exhibition hall, the Hall of catalogs, the Special reading room for scientists, the Scientific reading room of biomedical literature. And only on April 22 1960, in honor of the 90th anniversary of the birth, the hall of the architect V. I. Sobolshchikov began to be called Leninsky

Tricksters and female warriors: womanist interweavings from Oríta to Wakanda

Túndé Kèlání's The Narrow Path (2006) may be read as prefiguring the emancipatory, womanist project of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018). Hence, a broad understanding of the black struggle in Black Panther as encompassing an African presence propels this article's womanist reading of Túndé Kèlání’s The Narrow Path, from the Nigerian film industry, alongside Coogler’s film. The article uses images of the trickster deity, Èṣù, and the warrior woman to respond to Ananya Kabir’s call that Black Panther demands an interpretive model which excavates the layers of signification that make Afro-Futurism the arena where the African diaspora and the African continent confront each other. Both films reveal how women, marginal to patriarchal power structures, may come to possess an ambivalent agency rendered visible in their transformation of marginality through rhetorical, and technological weaponry.

Older women using women's magazines: the construction of knowledgeable selves

AbstractWomen's magazines are widely read in Canada. The popularity of such magazines is significant because critical gerontologists, primarily drawing on content analyses of the magazines, often argue that these publications convey problematic messages about ageing. This article broaches the subject of women's magazines and ageing from a different vantage point, that of the older woman reader herself. This audience-centred research draws on 21 semi-structured interviews with Canadian women over the age of 55. The study examines what older women say about the ageing-related content of women's magazines, along with what they say about how, when and why they read these magazines. Findings illustrate that participants are aware of the inadequate and unrealistic representations of older women in women's magazines. Nonetheless, they value the publications as a source of practical information on a variety of topics and as a light and undemanding source of entertainment and relaxation. The study reveals how participants assess and deploy magazine contents and characteristics in ways that contribute to, and are informed by, their lives and identities as older women. Against the broader cultural context of ageism, using and talking about women's magazines enables the participants to position themselves as knowledgeable and informed on a variety of topics and in multiple interactions, both in explicit reference to the magazines themselves and more generally in their lives.

Writing and Democracy in the Early United States

Writing and Democracy in the Early United States

Feminist Futures of American Studies

This article reflects on the long-term and recent developments in the interdisciplinary field of American studies and its imbrications with its cultural and political contexts. Pushing back against premature assertions of feminism's obsolescence, I argue that scholars and teachers of American studies and media studies must take the popular seriously―popular film and television as well as popular political movements. Given the growing demand from students for a deeper and more sustained engagement with intersectional feminism, the article works through some short case studies to urge even the confirmed feminists to rethink and refresh their approaches to teaching and performing scholarship to best provide students with the theoretical tools to strengthen and define their feminism as a discipline as well as an attitude. Inspired by the popular 2014 movement, "The Year of Reading Women," the #metoo and #timesup phenomena, and the popularity of and backlash against celebrity feminism of Beyoncé and others, this article weaves together academic and pop-cultural sources such as Sara Ahmed and Roxane Gay to underscore our responsibility to maintain, nurture, and contribute to the progress made by previous generations of feminists.

Patriarchal Opression in Kim Ji-Yeong, Born 1982 By Cho Nam Joo: A Feminist Literary Study

Patriarchal culture always brings gender oppression and unfairness. Ironically, this culture is preserved from generation to generation. The patriarchal culture of South Korea revealed in the novel Kim Ji-yeong Born in 1982 was analyzed using feminist literary studies with the viewpoint of women readers. This patriarchy lead to a great deal of oppression experienced by Kim Ji-yeong as the main character of the novel and her mother. This gender oppression will possibly continue to the next generation. Kim almost rarely expressed what she wanted to convey for all the injustices that occurred in her life. Her voice disappeared in the middle of misogynistic life. The method used in this research was a descriptive qualitative approach by taking the Kim Ji-yeong Novel by Cho Nam-joo which has been translated into Indonesian as the primary source. The results signify that Kim and women in South Korea basically do not want to be be marginalized. They need to be supported and respected for their role in getting the same rights in work, household, education, social culture and politics.
 Keywords: patriarki ; misoginis; feminis; ketidakadilan gender