Representation Of Female Body Research Articles

Conflicting Framings: Commoditisation of Female Body in Film and Challenges of Insecurity in Nigeria

Gender inequality is central to women agitation and has remained the most engaging debate in contemporary academic discourse. Feminist writers, (whether in film, or literature) continue to present conflicting ideological frames that often criticize normative gender identity and establishing new orientations. Film, unlike literature, has a way of presenting reality in most captivating manner. Such is the case in Emen Isong’s The Banker (2015), a Nigerian drama film, invoking “Laura Mulvey’s “politics of male gaze” as stated in her Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. The paper notes that objectification of female body of the lead actress, is meant to satisfy sexual pleasure of the male clients; an act considered as a marketing tool in Nigerian Banking industry. The director’s penchant for dancing between “marketing commodity” and commoditisation of female body”, creates a conflicting communication duality. Using two theories, Media Representation and African Womanism, the paper explores gender dynamics in representation of female body as well as its implications on female identity in social institutions. Research Methodology is qualitative, with focus on critical analysis. It concludes that such representation poses not just identity crises for the female gender but also great security challenges as people learn more from media.

Healing the female body

Using narrative, reader-response and social feminist approaches, the study takes a discourse analysis of looking into representations of female bodies within the Jewish-Christian healthcare and Greek Hippocratic healthcare and how such surface in the representation of female bodies in Mark’s healing stories. The study finishes by looking into comparable biases found in some African communities. The gospel of Mark contains some of the early Christian memory concerning Jesus as folk healer and this study selects narratives in the gospel of Mark whereby Jesus dealt with illness pertaining female patients. Instead of dealing with all narratives whereby Jesus healed a female patient, the focus will be on the story concerning the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law and the story concerning the haemorrhaging woman. The underlying question is – what were the socio-cultural ideas concerning the female body and how do such ideas surface in the healing stories? The study hypothesises that, besides being stories that reveal Jesus’ Christological powers or power as folk healer, the healing stories are site to investigate social cultural frameworks concerning illness and gender.

The GIRL Curriculum: Co-Constructing Learning About Body Image Through Empowering After-School Programming

From a young age, girls experience many influences that may negatively impact how they view their bodies. Many girls are subject to teasing by peers and feel pressure to conform to gender norms. Moreover, the media perpetuates an unattainable and unrealistic image of women, referred to as the ideal female body. Since peers and the media are prominent influences, researchers have implemented curricula as interventions to help girls navigate perceptions of their bodies in a healthy way. Building on prior research, the GIRL curriculum was developed as a semi-structured, co-created curriculum that aimed at engaging girls in critical analysis of media’s representation of female bodies in society. Furthermore, the GIRL curriculum aimed to help girls identify and navigate their possible perceived barriers to physical activity. This curriculum was developed as a response to a lack of resources available for teachers, after-school personnel, and others who work with young girls to engage with the girls about issues of the body in a physically active setting. This program article focuses on the development and implementation of the GIRL curriculum and provides insight, through qualitative analyses, into how a curriculum could help young girls improve their understanding and perception of their bodies and feel empowered. A copy of the co-created curriculum is presented. The researchers urge future practitioners to co-create the curriculum with their participants in order to create opportunities that would allow young girls to view their bodies in a more positive light and feel empowered through a variety of activities.

African Cyborgs

African feminist writers argue black female bodies should be understood as interactions between materiality and the symbolic constructions of the body embedded within a given culture. They caution that an overemphasis on corporeality and embodiment denies subjectivity to black women. Responding to such concerns, contemporary African cultural and creative practitioners offer alternatives to continuing objectification and bodily stereotyping. In this essay I am particularly interested in the alternative visions of black female bodies presented in African speculative and science fiction film – visions which, I argue, engage colonial histories and local traditions in order to imagine a future inclusive of empowered female protagonists. I explore how the fictional configurations and cyborg imaginations of African sci-fi deconstruct and subvert the fixity, corporeality, fragility and captivity of the black female body. Drawing on African feminism and feminist science fiction in particular, I attempt to construct a theoretical framework through which to approach the representation of female bodies in sci-fi film from Africa. In the work of filmmakers such as Cameroonian Jean-Pierre Bekolo (Les Saignantes, 2005 and Naked Reality, 2016), Ghanaian filmmaker Frances Bodomo (Afronauts, 2014), Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu (Pumzi, 2009) and South African filmmakers Michael Matthew (Sweetheart, 2010) and Amy van Houten (Elf, 2015), we find female-centred fantastical narratives that recast African women as futuristic cyborgs. Reminiscent of Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism of the late twentieth century, these filmmakers adapt the genres of fantasy and sci-fi to speculate about alternative African pasts and futures.

„Muutume masinateks“. Tehnoloogia ja soolistatud kehad ameerika modernismis / “We Twiddle … and Turn into Machines”: Technology and gendered bodies in American modernism

„Muutume masinateks“. Tehnoloogia ja soolistatud kehad ameerika modernismis / “We Twiddle … and Turn into Machines”: Technology and gendered bodies in American modernism

Sports, physical practice, and the female body, 1980–1989: women’s emancipation in Romania under communism

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the promotion and practice of physical exercise and sport in relation to social class and the shifting roles of women in communist-governed Romania during the 1980s. Since sport played a central role in communist ideology, especially as a means of maintaining a healthy and growing workforce, the government encouraged physical activity through gymnastics at work (in the form of “production gymnastics”), in public wellness centers, and at home. In this study, the authors trace societal shifts related to changing policies and laws through corresponding shifts in the representation of female bodies engaged in sport and exercise by the media. Content analysis of Romanian magazine and newspaper articles published during the 1980s reveals how group physical exercises, such as maintenance gymnastics, were promoted to working-class women and how images of women became increasingly feminized and sexualized, thereby reinforcing new norms of feminine beauty.

Regulated and liberated bodies of schoolgirls in a Finnish short film from the 1950s

This article focuses on the bodies of schoolgirls as visualised and represented in a short film of Finnish secondary schools for girls in the 1950s. The film, Oma tyttökouluni (My Own Girls’ School) was released in 1957 and was screened in cinemas in advance of feature films. Although the short film was made in a documentary style, it also includes some filmic elements of a fictionalised narrative. This article explores the representations of schoolgirls’ bodies in the visual narrative of the film and examines how the imagery is interwoven with the social contexts and atmosphere of the 1950s and the tradition of Finnish short film production. The paper discusses how the filmic elements create an image of everyday life in schools and the visualised bodies of the schoolgirls. It examines how the film’s representations of female bodies and girlhood in the school context construct the imagery of middle-class values, acceptable appearances, and manners. In addition, the film depicts the sites where the female bodies were liberated from the choreography of schooling and the normative rules and routines of the school. The paper argues that the harmonious style of the film lacks contradictions and contains the ideological connotations and middle-class values of the Finnish postwar secondary schooling that girls received.

Parodies of Female Flesh in the Fabric Sculptures of Tamara Kostianovsky

Tamara Kostianovsky creates three-dimensional sculptural forms with repurposed clothing, fabric and needlework. It is argued that these sculpted textiles become meditations on flesh. Her works that depict carcasses and body parts, in particular, explore the paradoxes of embodiment in order to speak to issues of gender, trauma, and migration. In this article, the author describes a number of ways in which Kostianovsky has parodied canonical works of fine art by Manet, Goya, and Botticelli as well as the eroticized anatomical illustrations of Gautier. The five works on which she focuses here metabolize their diverse quotations such that they engage with restrictive tropes and conventions that operate in representations of female bodies and subjectivities. Sculpted clothing reads as flesh, flesh as meat, and meat as a symbol for conscious embodiment and a vulnerable and violated mortality. They thus become a parody of the dualistic moralism of the memento mori, as well as the phallocentric hypocrisy of the idealized Venus. The author also explores how Kostianovsky’s controlled and ferocious stitching makes visible the suturing of identity, the cartography of violence, and the conscious and unconscious scarring that writes bodies into the landscapes that produce them.

“Modest Desires and Defiant Gestures”: Representing Female Sexualities in Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish: Tales out of Entebbe and Violet Barungi’s Cassandra

This article examines how Doreen Baingana in Tropical Fish: Tales out of Entebbe (2005) and Violet Barungi in Cassandra (1999) engage with aspects of female sexuality such as eroticism, desire, and sexual agency. I explore how these writers set these modes of being in intersectional relation with various patriarchal institutions. I focus on the different degrees of co-option and coercion, containment and escape associated with representations of female bodies and sexualities. In particular, I investigate how the authors’ portrayal of female sexual agency contest at the same time as they reproduce received, normative “truths” about female sexualities.

Gothic Matters: Introduction

Text Matters, Volume 6, Number 6, 2016 DOI: 10.1515/texmat-2016-0001Agnieszka Soltysik MonnetUniversity of Lausanne, SwitzerlandOnce considered escapist or closely linked to fantasy, the Gothic genre (or mode, as scholars increasingly call it) has recently begun to be explored for its material concerns and engagement with real-world matters. This issue of Text Matters features essays that develop this line of inquiry, focusing on how the Gothic attempts to matter in concrete and critical ways, and mapping its rhetorical and aesthetic strategies of intervention and narration, affect and inuence. The pun in the title of this volumeGothic Mattersis intended to acknowledge both the material concerns of the Gothic as agenre and the continuing relevance and value of the cultural work performed by the Gothic, i.e. why it matters.The Gothic is the brainchild of the eighteenth century, an eminently modern aesthetic mode, obsessed with the cultural changes that were re-mapping Europe and North America. Born in the wake of the rst global warthe Seven Years War (also known as the French and Indian War) the Gothic quickly became associated with violent and sensational plots, an aesthetics of emotional extremes, graphic depictions of bodily injury, and nally, revolution itself. De Sade famously linked the Gothic to the political violence of the era when he suggested that Gothic novels were the necessary fruits of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe. More recent observers and scholars of the Gothic have noted its inherently political and reformist bent, often tackling controversial social issues such as the social control of women, aristocratic privilege and class power relations, as well as traditional institutions including the church, the prison and the family (cf. Ledoux). The body was inevitably at the center of these explorations: its pain, discipline and control at the heart of the Gothics critical concerns.If revolutionary politics were the most obvious cultural context for some observers, the larger tectonic shifts in epistemology and moral judgment were also at stake. Changes in science, in political philosophy, and cultural values all impacted the Gothic, bringing with them afascination with cultural relativism, the complexities of social justice, and anew self-awareness about history. The Gothic staged and interrogated these questions with its narratives of cultural otherness, excessive revenge, and repressed or Gothic Matters: IntroductionAgnieszka Soltysik Monnet buried crimes that reverberated throughout family lines and local legends. Inherently sceptical of the Enlightenment values that nevertheless underpin its critiques of traditional institutions, the Gothic interested itself in alternative epistemologies such as folk culture, family legends, and rumors. Agenre of the forgotten, unspoken and buried, the Gothic gave voice to characters that normally had no voice or weight in society. Although often subversive, the Gothic was not inherently or inevitably so, and more conservative or even paranoid and reactionary formations exist, most notably what critics recently have come to call the Imperial Gothic, which uses the rhetoric of monstrosity to depict racial and colonial others.Nevertheless, the most interesting cultural work of the Gothic is linked to its creative explorations of the non-normative aspects of human life, such as the body in its queer, raced, gendered and physical materiality. It is no coincidence that many of the following essays focus specically on the body and its subversive materiality. The volume opens with two essays that take up the issue of the body specically within the context of the French Revolution. The rst, by Agnieszka owczanin, examines representations of female bodies in Matthew Lewiss The Monk and argues that they serve as interventions in the debates around revolutionary violence taking place in England at the time. …

“Sick woman” or “half woman”? Breast and cervical cancer, emotional script and representations of female body in a mediterranean area of Italy

The proposal aims to highlight the semiotic elements of the discourse that refer to the symbolic ones of representations, and that transform the therapy in an exercise of professional dominion aimed to modify the perception of the self of the female patient through the subversion of specific emotional script. The mapping of the emotional scripts of shame and modesty, in their performative evolution, will be useful to demonstrate how and through what relational strategies the medicalization performs a gender violence which leads to exclude and self-stigmatise the sick woman, considered a “half woman”. The reflection that has its incipit in the ascertainment that the female body has been and keeps being a means of “male dominion” and object of “symbolic violence” as well as physical, and favors unexpected articulations related to a female body affected by breast or uterus cancer with often devastating effects on the woman’s self-perception. This proposal provides a reflection on the effects of experience of female cancer in the emotional sphere and in the gender relations of 36 Italian and stranger women. The research aims at discussing the role of medical therapy as a social practice of male domination that imposes a traditional representation in which female beauty is equivalent to the physical integrity and full functioning of specific attributes sexed (uterus that creates, breast that feeds). The focus of research is an analysis particularly focusing on the transformations of perception of body as Körper and the emotions which, cross-sectionally, constitutes the self-perception of Leib.

Mother revolution: representations of the maternal body in the work of Tori Amos

AbstractThe pregnant or maternal body is conspicuously absent within popular music. The dominant representation of female bodies – sonically, visually and spatially conceived – is that of a sexualised body, available to men and existing under the male gaze. The figure of the pregnant, maternal or motherly body is marked as Other – not desirable and therefore not marketable. Looking at the work of Tori Amos, I demonstrate how she makes the maternal body both audible and visible through a number of musical and extra-musical strategies. Theorising the maternal body in a series of overlapping stages – from the pregnant body to the maternal body, through liminal stages such as miscarriage and birthing – I highlight how Amos uses the figure of the maternal body not only to challenge dominant tropes of sexuality, but to create an embodied space where normative conceptions of ‘mother’ and ‘mothering’ can be troubled.

Types and Beauties: Evaluating and Exoticizing Women on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Columbian Exposition

ON THE MIDWAY PLAISANCE OF THE 1893 Columbian Exposition, outside parameters of White City and just a short jaunt from iconic Ferris Wheel, stood a theater patronized by old men and wicked youths who watched, in a bleary-eyed ecstasy, Oriental athletes of stage as they danced, toyed with cigarette, and by their smiles gave a Persian Parisian charm to anomalous entertainment.1 Colorful descriptions of Midway Plaisance heavily populated souvenir books commemorating Chicago Worlds Fair. Filled with photographic portrait types, landscape scenes, and ebullient commentary, souvenir books simultaneously reproduced and shaped experience of fairgoer (See Figure 1). As a cultural text constructed by and for a white, masculine American subject, souvenir book reveals objectives and weaknesses of hegemonic projects in United States during nineteenth century. In particular, representations of female bodies on Midway Plaisance illuminate intersecting discourses of race and gender.As a combination and juxtaposition of White City and foreign villages of Midway Plaisance, Columbian Exposition functioned as an expression of national identity. Hegemonic forces in Chicago and United States at end of nineteenth century shaped imagining of nation, and Exposition served as a powerful tool for their project.2 Robert Rydell asserts that Worlds fairs propagated ideas and values of country's political, financial, corporate, and intellectual leaders and offered these ideas as proper interpretation of social and political reality.3Alan Trachtenberg identifies powerful perpetuators of national as established, propertied, and wealthy elite who aimed to subsume subaltern under banner of 'peace, prosperity, progress and patriotism.'4 Indeed, Chicago business interests and financial leaders who lobbied to bring fair to city elected Exposition's board of directors. In turn, fair's administration used White City to showcase a grand vision of American and human progress.5While operating as mechanisms of hegemony, expressions of national unity like Columbian Exposition nevertheless belie internal contradictions. Lauren Berlant cautions that a national still inherits tensions that exist in national space. Although political legitimacy depends upon the cultural expression of national fantasy, narratives of national identity mask inherent conflict.6Indeed, numerous domestic tensions plagued last decade of nineteenth century. Lingering cultural and economic differences between North and South frustrated post-Reconstruction politics. Rural America engaged in widespread political mobilization as Populist movement gained ground. Meanwhile, labor skirmishes erupted in United States cities; Chicago itself would serve as site of infamous Pullman strike year following Fair. The social climate was further exacerbated by racial anxieties surrounding influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. To top it off, a severe economic depression overcame United States very year of Columbian Exposition.7 Economic instability, racial anxiety, and political uncertainty contributed to a contentious national environment.Frank Ninkovich contends that domestic issues and United States' uncertain role in international arena combined to create significant identity crisis during 1890s. The resulting anxiety took form of hyper-aggressive nationalist public opinion known as jingoism.8 Trachtenberg similarly argues that late nineteenth century elites in business, politics, and culture were working to win hegemony over dissident but divided voices of labor, farmers, immigrants, blacks and women.9 The ruling class during final years of nineteenth century, therefore, fashioned dominant narratives of national identity as a way of dealing with nation's internal tensions. …

Representaciones del cuerpo femenino por fotógrafas españolas: una mirada feminista

This article aims to disseminate the research conducted for the doctoral thesis “Representations of female body by spanish female photographers: a feminist viewpoint”. The research conducted allowed the gathering of photographs of the female form, taken by female Spanish photographers from 1980 to 2011, analyzing the meaning of the images, iconology and feminism that these classes of images of the female form portray. The photographs represent a personal and truthful image which for them is the female form; from how they feel, how they interpret them and how the female body has ceased to be a “passive object” to be that established as a” subject” in context. They reject the icon of a “female body”, created and exhibited from a patriarchal perspective. They break away from archetypes imposed thereby creating a new representation of what their body symbolizes.

Per una retorica dell’assenza. Fascinazioni giapponesi nell’ultimo romanzo di V.V. Nabokov

The concept of absence seems to be crucial in Vladimir Vladimirovic Nabokov’s poetics. Indeed, not only it is thematically present in his novels and poems, but in certain cases it performs a structural function. His last, unfinished work, The Original of Laura (Dying is fun) (2009), makes a perfect case. Reading this novel concentrating on the full-empty opposition interestingly reveals a typical nabokovian strategy, i.e. evoking the full through emptiness and segmentation. Drawing from these premises, this paper focuses on the representation of female body in The Original of Laura, investigating the productivity of rhetorical figures, with particular reference to asyndeton. In this reference frame the role of Japanese aesthetics is discussed.

Textual Body in City Space: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Representation of Female Body in Contemporary Photography and Its Social Meaning

Textual Body in City Space: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Representation of Female Body in Contemporary Photography and Its Social Meaning

A Content Analysis of Female Body Imagery in Video Games

The 150 top-selling video games sold in the U.S. across nine platforms were content analyzed to study representations of female bodies. All human females in the games were captured via screenshot and body parts measured. These measurements were then compared to actual anthropometric data drawn from a representative sample of 3,000 American women. The results show that female video game characters at low levels of photorealism are systematically larger than the average American woman whereas female characters at the highest level of photorealism are systematically thinner. This study also found that games rated for children featured females that are thinner than characters in games rated for adults. These findings are discussed in terms of cultivation theory.

Fashion Images of the France Posters of the Late 19th Century

This article analyzed fashion representations in France posters, especially the late 19th century France when mass consumption cultures arose. That was analyzed by consumers' sexuality supposed in advertisement contents. Female models mainly figured in posters of the late 19th century France made a role to promote consumption, in which female models were emphasized on fashion, for example, erotic robe, unusual hair style and etc. Posters' type in this period were categorized in three types by presenting style of female body and fashion style. The first were targeting female consumers, and that posters represented bourgeois fashion styles and life styles to clear consumers' social status and to present women's consuming power. The second case was targeting male consumers, and that posters figured female models such as available products. In this case, poster artists emphasized female models' sexualities and used fantasies against eroticism of the legs and feet. And third case was targeting female consumers and males', in this case, two different aspects were required to appealing to consumers. One was to use a female sexuality to appeal for male consumers, the other was to modify female models as transcendental being such like a muse admirable and mysterious, through fashion styles for female consumers. In the late 19th century, female body and fashion were spectacular elements in visual arts specifically. This study clarified representations of female body and fashion in the late 19th century posters according to poster's contents and target consumer's sexuality. This was one of the aspects characterizing early advertisement media.

Memorial boxes and guarded interiors: Edith Wharton and material culture

In Edith Wharton's works, references to architecture, interior decoration, painting, sculpture, and fashion abound. As these essays demonstrate, art and objects are for Wharton evidence of cultural belief and reflect the values, assumptions, and customs of the burgeoning consumer culture in which she lived and about which she wrote. Furthermore, her mediations about issues of architecture, design, and decoration serve as important commentaries on her vision of the literary arts. In The Decoration of Houses, she notes that furniture and bric-a-brac are often crowded into a room in order to compensate for a lack of architectural composition in the treatment of the walls, and that unless an ornamental object adequately expresses an artistic conception it is better removed from the room. These aesthetic standards apply equally to her construction of narratives and are evidence of a sensibility that counters typical understandings of Wharton as a novelist of manners and place her instead as an important figure in the development of American literary modernism. Essays in this collection address issues such as parallels between her characters and the houses they occupy; dress as a metaphor for the flux of critical fashion; the marketing of Wharton's work to a growing female readership; her relationship to mass culture industries such as advertising, theater, and cinema; the tableaux vivant both as set piece and as fictional strategy; the representation of female bodies as objets d'art; and her characters' attempts at self-definition through the acquisition and consumption of material goods. Many of Wharton's major novels - The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree, The Custom of the Country, Summer, The Age of Innocence, and Twilight Sleep - as well as her short stories, criticism, and essays are explored.

Inside Out: Female Bodies in Rabelais

AbstractThis article explores representations of female bodies in Rabelais in the light of Laqueur's notion of the “one-sex body”. Contrary to previous studies which have argued that women are marginalised and excluded from Rabelais's works, this piece demonstrates the author's fascination with the female body, a site that he revisits throughout his narratives. This preoccupation emerges from the impossibility of resolving tensions inherent in the social construction of two genders within the medically-defined “one-sex body”. As a consequence, Rabelais continually seeks to cover over signs of female sexual difference by using representational strategies which rewrite the female body in terms of its safer (male) parallel, particularly during scenes of childbirth. These dynamics of desire and revulsion echo Kristeva's theory of the abject, where the primal scene of abjection (the child's rejection of the Mother) resurfaces in society's expulsion of waste beyond its boundaries, exteriorising the danger within.