Representation Of Female Identity Research Articles

Representation of female identity in humour

Abstract The article discusses humour as a form of communication and social interaction, which is not only based on sociocultural similarities, tolerance and solidarity among in-group members but also hostility or aggression towards out-group members. As humour is formed on binary oppositions, the female gender is often used as a popular “target” in humour discourse. It also represents “otherness” regarding the opposite gender and communicates social codes based on physical appearance, behaviour, or specific roles in society. Gender-stereotyping, which is used to categorize and understand the “outside” world better, is one of the most common and simplest approaches in humour discourse. The main aim of our research is to discuss the role of women and the way female identity, as a social construct, is defined and presented in humour discourse through stereotypes. More precisely, this article examines the evolution of women’s representation in the situation comedies with regards to their stereotypical portrayals and traditional social roles.

Gender Subversion in Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn

This study examines the various representations of female identity in Murdoch’s The Unicorn. The analysis of the novel revolves around the character of Hannah who is the center of everyone’s obsessive gaze. She is described both as an angel and a monster, a victim and a victimizer. Her victimization is aggravated by her passive submission to the will of her victimizers. This simultaneous presence of contradictory features in one character problematizes the notion of perceiving female identity in terms of binaries. As a typical Gothic heroine, Hannah is trapped within cultural assumptions about women. She passively and yet subversively plays the roles projected on her by the contradictory desires of other characters. It will be argued that the obsessive pursuit of perfection in a female figure as well as the disruption of the boundaries of victim and victimizer in this novel serve to problematize the cultural tendency to understand individuals in terms of stereotypes. Therefore, this study aims to illustrate how Murdoch has used an enigmatic female character to challenge the readers’ disposition to perceive characters in terms of gender stereotypes.

Projecting the Diva’s Voice: Anna Magnani in Visconti’s Bellissima

In the immediate post-war period of Italian cinema, Anna Magnani emerges as icon of a nation struggling with its recent past. Unlike most cinematic divas, however, Magnani is not lauded or cast for her great beauty. It is mainly her voice that directors mobilize to represent Rome, the working class, and a culture in transition. This article argues that Magnani’s skilled manipulation of her own authorial voice also outlines the struggles inherent to female identity as shaped by the cinema. Specifically addressing Magnani’s role in Bellissima (Visconti, 1951), the article identifies the diva as a disruptive force, particularly in the realm of sound, contending that Visconti employs Magnani’s powerful vocal presence to articulate his disappointment with the increasing superficiality of Italian cinema in the 1950s. More broadly, the article encourages a reinterpretation of the cinematic diva that would lead to a shift in feminist film criticism: the prioritization of female vocal presence above visual lack in order finally to project authentic representations of female identity in film.

Moderata Fonte: Women and Life in Sixteenth-Century Venice (review)

Reviewed by: Moderata Fonte: Women and Life in Sixteenth-Century Venice Karina Attar Paola Malpezzi Price Moderata Fonte: Women and Life in Sixteenth-Century Venice Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. Pp. 175. In Moderata Fonte: Women and Life in Sixteenth-Century Venice, Paola Malpezzi Price's aim is to consider Venice's "various aspects from the position of a twenty-first-century woman interested in the role of women in the sixteenth century, as well as in the life and works of Moderata Fonte as a representative of the educated women of that century" (21). Moderata Fonte is [End Page 211] thus not only a cultural and social history of Venetian women in the sixteenth century, but also the first book-length study of the writer's life and literary concerns. Malpezzi Price initially posits Moderata Fonte as an early modern 'feminist' who, "from within the accepted social structures of patriarchal family and society and from within recognized literary genres of the epic and dialogue, was able to elaborate and divulge a non-conformist message which helped gradually to modify certain aspects of the prevalent social ideology with regard to women" (20–21). This thesis motivates the rest of the book, which is divided into two parts of four chapters each. The first part, entitled "The Woman, the Writer, and the City," concerns the sixteenth-century Venetian contexts surrounding Fonte's life. The second half of the book, "Moderata Fonte's Defense of Women," considers several representations of female identity in Fonte's works and the ways in which these reflect the author's own preoccupations about the position of women in a patriarchal society. The first chapter recounts the main episodes of Fonte's life, the most significant political and cultural events in contemporary Venice that she would have witnessed, and the positive and negative responses to Fonte's works on the part of both her contemporaries but also scholars. The second chapter, "Growing Up Female and Literate in Sixteenth-Century Venice," offers an account of treatises on the role of women within domestic life and discusses the ways in which the experiences of sixteenth-century women followed or departed from the teachings promoted by the treaties. Against this background, Malpezzi Price shows that Fonte's specific educational experience was "probably atypical" since the males in her entourage disregarded contemporary social norms by encouraging her to develop her intellectual skills (48). Chapter 2 concludes with an examination of the theme of education in Fonte's Il merito delle donne, thus providing an essential link between Fonte's social context, biography, and literary concerns. The next chapter, "Cultural and Social Life in Sixteenth-Century Venice," covers significant aspects of life in the Republic, including sections on the role of religion, economy, and welfare. This chapter also discusses the limited avenues open to women who wished to or were forced to work. Of particular interest are the examinations of prostitution and women's significant role in this trade, and on and the ways in which traditional Venetian feasts and carnivals were used to promote a perception of Venice as a just, rich, and powerful republic. Chapter 4 develops this latter theme with a fascinating [End Page 212] discussion of "The Myth of Venice and Sixteenth-Century Women." Here, Malpezzi Price shows how multiple and conflicting images of Venice combined to create "a powerful, just, attractive, and divine woman as incarnation of the spirit of the city" (89). As the author pointedly remarks, however, such images perpetuated a notion of powerful womanhood that did not coincide with reality as expressed by Corinna, the most important speaker in Il merito delle donne, who argues that men have conspired to stop women from developing their intellectual talents by limiting their education and confining them in powerless positions. The fifth and sixth chapters focus on the depiction of the figure of the "Woman Warrior" and of the "Enchantress" in Fonte's epic poem I tredici canti del Floridoro. A composite of Bradamante and Marfisa in both name and character, the female warrior Risamante emerges, in Malpezzi Price's reading, as "an alternative to the behavior displayed by the majority of women, both in...

Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy by Anna Maria Torriglia (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 805 of language, and the core thematic strands of each work. In the case of Gli esami non finiscono mai, for example, the themes are the social constraints, the family as a bour? geois environment, and the constant 'examinations' to which the main character is subjected. Towards the end ofthe book, Esposito lays out the core themes ofthe plays in a series of tables which contain their differentaspects. For instance, under 'death', we have 'death as a final solution to solve conflict', 'irrational fear', or 'simulation of death'. The last chapter contains a more extensive summary of what the critic has identified as the overall main themes: the social environment, the family,and so on. These are defined as 'elements porteurs de sens', as they are the elements through which meaning is convey ed. Esposito undoubtedly identifies some of the main features of De Filippo's plays, but such a schematic analysis is not without its drawbacks. It risks becoming an oversimplified reading which proceeds along the old-fashioned critical lines of dissecting a play by 'themes', which appear unrelated to each other or even independent of each other. Today we no longer talk about 'themes', but about 'discourses', 'concepts', and 'ideologies'. These merge, clash, and intertwine, and in so doing bring to the surface the depth of a text. Esposito's book has stripped down De Filippo's plays to a number of thematic strands and, in the process, we have lost much ofthe richness of his plays. University of Strathclyde Donatella Fischer Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy. By Anna Maria Torriglia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xxii +239 pp. ?28. ISBN 0-8020-3604-x. Anna Maria Torriglia's book presents the reader with a consideration of key themes in post-war ltalian cinema and narrative. There is innovation in Torriglia's work in that hers is an interdisciplinary approach where the differentsections (of which there are four, subdivided into individual chapters) investigate the treatment of a theme in filmand narrative, rather than the more traditional approach of standard anthologies that discuss, separately, post-war ltalian cinema and post-war ltalian narrative. The result is stimulating, inviting the reader to make interesting cross-cultural connec? tions. Such an approach is particularly successful in Section 2, 'From Mother to Daughter', where representation of female identity is examined in the writings of Anna Banti and Alba De Cespedes and then convincingly linked to the emergence of a sensitivity to feminist issues as evidenced in the cinema of Antonio Pietrangeli and in Visconti's Bellissima (1951). However, the system of selecting topic and represen? tative texts does not always produce a satisfactory outcome, and it is legitimate to ask why this should be. In Section 1, 'Time Has Changed', the aim is to show responses to war by studying aspects of the recurring father-son relationship. It is noted that, in Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (1947), the despairing son, located in the streets of a ruined Berlin, kills his fatherand then commits suicide; this is offeredas key evidence forthe author's conclusion that texts of the immediate post-war period are character? ized by a sense that 'there is no hope ofa future forthe younger generations surviving the end of Fascism' (p. 38). One might well ask how accurately such an argument properly reflectsthe overall tenor of Rossellini's work. Could such a conclusion have been drawn ifevidence from Rome Open City (1945) had been cited? The other maj or weakness ofthe book is its failure to take account ofthe full range of available critical material on a particular topic. Section 4, 'The Country at Hand', pro? poses to deal with 'the 'discovery' ofthe South' (p. 119). The argument is presented in such a way as to suggest this is purely a post-war phenomenon: there is no mention either within the section or the concluding, and lengthy,bibliography of the excellent 806 Reviews work of writers such as Gabriella Gribaudi, John Dickie, and Jane Schneider, who have investigated the emergence of particular constructs of Southern identity in the nineteenth century during and after the period of unification. In many...

Literary Representations of Female Identity

The essay examines the texts of the two women writers - Leila Abouzeid (from Morocco) and Nawal El Saadawi (from Egypt) - as offering two female perspectives within what is commonly referred to as "feminine" writing in the Arab Muslim world. My main interest is to explore the various discursive articulations of female identity that are challenged or foregrounded as a positive model. The essay points to the serious pitfalls of some feminist narratives in Arab-Muslim societies by dealing with a related problem: the author's setting up of convenient conceptual dichotomies, which account for the female experience, that reduce male-female relationships in the given social context to a fundamentally antagonistic one. Abouzeid's novel will be a case study of a more positive but also realistic and complex perspec­tive on female experience ...

Strong Mothers, Strong Daughters: The Representation of Female Identity in Vittoria Colonna's Rime and Carteggio

Strong Mothers, Strong Daughters: The Representation of Female Identity in Vittoria Colonna's Rime and Carteggio

Från hemmafru till autentisk människa

This article is based on a study of advertising and material covering ”existential issues”, such as love, sexuality and the body in a Swedish young women’s magazine ”Vecko Revyn”. The period studied runs from 1942-94.It’s main argument is that the representation of female identity has gone through three distinct phases: During the 1940-50’s, the subject of these discourses was represented as a ’type’ who was attributed needs for commodities as well as romantic emotions with reference to expectations contained in a certain social role. During the 1960-70:s she was represented as an individual who’s primary concern was to express her own individuality. During the 1980-90:s, finally, she became an authentic ”person” concerned not only with expressing, but also with finding her own subjectivity.A similar development has been a core assumption of some recent sociological theories particularlyemployed within the field of youth research. There it has been argued that individual identity has become to a lesser extent determined by social structure and to an increasing extent the product of a ”reflexive” process of identity formation, leading to an overriding concern with subjective authenticity. Although the observations presented indeed seem to give some additional credibility to such an assumption, it is argued that these changes - at least as far as advertising goes, might be better explained by innovations in the techniques of representation employed by the advertising industry.