Subversive Power Research Articles

Secret Name, or the Secret of a Name

Secret Name, or the Secret of a Name Alison Suen In HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, Kalpana Seshadri carefully examines the secret of silence, the nonsovereign power of silence. She wants to conceive of silence as neither repressive nor transcendent; that is, on the one hand, she wants to resist the temptation to restore silence to speech, but on the other she also wants to resist the temptation to posit silence in opposition to speech, as something above and beyond language. Rather, she wants to think of silence as "an empty space where the regulatory power of discourse is nullified" (Seshadri 2012, 35). Seshadri powerfully illustrates silence as an "empty space" that invalidates the power of speech through her provocative reading of Charles Chesnutt's story "Dumb Witness." In this story, about a mute slave who holds a secret, silence becomes a most unexpected secret weapon. The slave is mute because her master's nephew has brutally cut off her tongue. The irony of this story is that the nephew realized, only after cutting off her tongue, that the slave is the only person entrusted with the secret of the will—the will that the nephew needs in order to claim his right to his uncle's property, which would include the slave woman. As the story goes, the slave woman refuses to disclose the secret until after the nephew is dead. Her refusal is made possible by the wound of her tongue, by the brutal punishment inflicted by the nephew. As Seshadri points out, the secret of the slave woman's silence exceeds her knowledge of the will. This is the case because the slave woman's silence is not a simple silence, but rather "a capability of silence, which manifests as a withholding" (Seshadri 2012, 107). Indeed, it is through her silence that the law is rendered unenforceable. It is through her silence that the nephew failed to properly own her. [End Page 182] In Seshadri's reading, the silence of the slave woman is not a deprivation of speech, but rather a capability to withhold, a silent treatment designed to punish. I am fascinated by this notion of silence as an active resistance—a subversive power that confounds the law. Nonetheless, what is the political efficacy of this silence? Specifically, what can we do with this nonsovereign power, a power that seems contingent and conditional? After all, even if the slave woman was able to use her silence to outsmart her (would-be) master, at the end of the day she is still missing her tongue, and her nonsovereign "power" over the nephew may simply be a consolation prize. I am equally fascinated by the idea that silence is a "capability." Recasting silence as a kind of "capability" is noteworthy in light of contemporary debates on animal ethics, which often revolve around the kind of capacities that animals have. As is well known, Peter Singer, following Bentham, makes the capacity to suffer the ticket to the moral community, while for Tom Regan, one needs the capacity to experience life in order to become a moral patient. In other words, recasting silence as a capability actually conforms to, rather than challenges, a typical strategy in animal rights discourses. What is at stake in this story is also the power of the secret. In her chapter on literature and the secret, Seshadri articulates different ways the secret manifests itself in literature. She writes, "literature is allied to the secret because it emerges from what is suspended (for example, meaning, truth, the word, a determinate context) and therefore can only be read and interpreted as a sign" (Seshadri 2012, 46–47). Literature always harbors secrecies because its interpretation is never exhaustive. In this sense, language itself is also secretive because meaning is necessarily excessive of the sign. In a paradoxical way, every time we speak, we are necessarily withholding. I will say more about secrets and silence as a mode of resistance in the context of animal advocacy at the end of my commentary. For now, I want to turn to Seshadri's excellent discussion on "naming" and hospitality. Specifically, I want to connect it to questions of secrecy and resistance...

Humour in exile: The subversive effects of laughter in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia

This study challenges the common misconception of laughter as simply light-hearted entertainment by exploring its strategic use and subversive effects in two Caribbean novels: Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia. Selvon’s and Pineau’s humorous depictions of the migration to the metropolitan centres of London and Paris after World War II of two elderly female figures, Tanty Bessy and Man Ya, both bring to light and lighten the serious subject matter of Britain’s and France’s practices of exclusion toward their former colonized subjects. In examining Selvon’s and Pineau’s use of humour in light of Henri Bergson’s theory on the social significance of laughter as a corrective to man’s vices and impertinences toward society, this article argues that Tanty Bessy and Man Ya generate laughter at their own expense for the purposes of “correcting” the negative cultural perceptions of the Caribbean migrant population in 1950s and 1960s Europe. This reading of humour uncovers the subversive power of these two seemingly marginalized figures, in turn, serving to overturn and expand upon Bergson’s own theory on the normative effects of laughter.

What living on the edge and outside of organisations can teach us about the spaces in which we work

In this paper the author takes a personal look at recent changes in organisation and working practices. It is suggested that these changes can be traced back to the emergence of the internet and the subversive power of the hyperlink. The author presents his own experiences and experiments with self-organising human systems, offering lessons for corporate property managers. Such managers are urged to move away from discussions about the future of work towards engaging with people who have already embraced a fully-networked working life.

Travestilidades nômades: a explosão dos binarismos e a emergência queering

Apresentamos neste artigo algumas problematizações a respeito da expressão "travesti", que, não se apoiando em um modelo único de referência sexual e de gênero para sua efetivação, nos permitiria falar em processos de 'travestilização'. Esses processos se constituem através de dispositivos em que lineamentos duros, flexíveis e de fuga participam da criação de seus corpos, desejos e prazeres, transitando entre efeitos-consequências de discursos normativos e singularizadores. Sua circulação no mundo coloca em xeque as matrizes binárias heteronormativas do sistema sexo/gênero/desejo, que se desmancham diante de modos de subjetivação orientados por potências subversivas criadoras de novos campos possíveis de existencialização. Nessa perspectiva, queremos mostrar que as expressões sexuais e de gêneros das travestis formulam novas questões a respeito dos modelos identitários vigentes, demonstrando que a coerência e a inteligibilidade impostas pelos códigos heteronormativos precisam ser urgentemente revistas, de modo a questionar a respeito da ordem social que apresenta o gênero associado ao sexo reprodutivo, para ressignificar as expressões sexuais, gendradas e subjetivas, em sua processualidade histórica que explode os binarismos, despreza os universais e desmancha o absolutismo da ideia de verdade, enraizados nos sistemas binários de pensamentos sedentários, fechados, universais e a-históricos.

Festiwale – święta sztuki czy projekty intelektualne

The article tries to analyze the phenomenon of the growing numbers of artistic festivals with an intellectual agenda. In the author's opinion the very appearance of artistic festivals in the beginning of the 20th Century was already an intellectual project of healing war wounds through art, which later created the background for the political project of a common union of European countries. Contemporary artistic festivals are as much presentations of different kinds of art as they are intellectual projects that try to introduce various issues: urban studies, ethnical diversity or results of scientific research. Artistic festivals are analyzed here as cultural performances (in order to be presented, issues undertaken by the festivals need to be performed) that have subversive, transformative and normative power. From the viewpoint of performance studies and aesthetics of performativity, contemporary festivals crushed the division between art and events that are part of everyday, "real" life.

Participatory Learning in Formal Adult Education Contexts

Formal courses in adult education are most often housed within schools or faculties that include other disciplines such as teacher education, psychology, or training and development. Adult educators teaching these courses may feel obligated to follow the procedures and practices of the institution as well as of the programs with which they are associated. This creates a set of paradoxes and conflicts that are rarely addressed. Adult educators working in formal contexts teach about critical pedagogy and democratic practices without engaging in those practices themselves. This article advocates a participatory learning model based on the historical foundations of adult education theory and practice. The authors explore teaching as a subversive activity, hegemony, critical pedagogy, and power relations. The authors then discuss implications for practice in formal contexts.

Noologia radykalnej bezbożności (o Logice sensu Deleuze’a)

Nietzsche’s critique of theistic thinking seems to be one of the major sources of Deleuze’s philosophy. The notion of becoming godless might cast light upon what the French philosopher intended to achieve through his “noology” and critique of the “traditional image of thought”, i.e. a paradigm of reflection that makes any idea “pious” or even God’s own idea, supposing hidden theology behind anthropology, as well as making truth “absolute”. Against such a priestly philosophy searching for the Truth, Deleuze proposed his own unorthodox view the “invention of truths”, a creative undermining of the strict true/false distinction. Furthermore, it led him to question the notion of the sense as theomorphic structure whereby it is akin to the “soul” of the object. To postulate a “reversal of Platonism” is to change sense into the “body” of an object. Although Deleuze’s effort to reinterpret the sense of sense might seem too experimental, we should see it more as his navigation through an intellectual game rather than his “beliefs” – only then can we unfold their subversive power of inspiration.

Engendering the Feminine Power: Identity, Prescience and Anticipation in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and The Good Terrorist

The story of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and The Good Terrorist goes around two characters that may seem quite different at the first sight. Mary Turner and Alice Mellings come from different cultures and live in different historical contexts. Yet, both share oppression and exploitation in economic and sexual terms. While Mary has to enter a family that mirrors the prevalent oppressive relations in the society Alice enters a family-like circle in which oppressive relations are dominant and overwhelming. The former is oppressed and exploited under the patriarchal conduct of her husband while the latter has to suffer a lot being bound to an abusive boyfriend and exploitative squat. But oppression and exploitation are not the only things these two share. A strong sense of anticipation and prescience are the qualities that shape these characters’ identities. Reading these two novels from a socialist feminist point of view we argue that Lessing introduces anticipation and prescience as crucial characteristics for her protagonists. Considering the emphasis that Lessing puts on anticipation and prescience we believe that she takes these qualities as subversive power in the hand of women who struggle to change and revolutionize oppressive relations in capitalist and patriarchal structures. While women are always bombarded by ideological messages that advocate their inferior position in the hierarchy of family and society, we argue that Lessing’s prescient characters can be good examples of New Women who can be powerful agents trespassing false identities and ideologies of patriarchal capitalist circles and societies. Key words: Doris Lessing; Prescience; Anticipation; Socialist Feminism

(Monstrous) Beauty (Myths): The commodification of women's bodies and the potential for tattooed subversions

abstract Women's bodies are often treated as sites of containment, control and oppression (Grosz, 1994). In contemporary contexts of tattooing, women's bodies, and their relationships to their bodies could be challenged and perhaps even shifted, as there is potential to engage embodiment and its subversive power to elevate female subjects from ‘object’ to active ‘participant’ within the consumerist-art-financial-embodied-identity exchange. This is of course contested terrain (Atkinson, 2002) as tattoos and their meanings, and variety of reasons that women decide on becoming tattooed, vary enormously, however the potential for subversion through tattooing does nevertheless exist. Within consumerist cultures, the body becomes a great commodity-bodies are used to sell almost everything, and the use and representation of bodies in this context is always gendered (Wolf, 1990). Braunberger (2000) engages what she labels ‘monster beauty’ - basically an alternative ‘female aesthetic’ in the context of women who are tattooed, she offers this in relation to existing conventions of feminine beauty which arguably render female bodies as consumer objects. To this end, Naomi Wolf provides a core consideration for this Perspective when she argues that beauty is a currency system - in short both embodied, and commodified - but proceeds to advocate this: “In response, we must now ask the question about our place in our bodies that women a generation ago asked about their place in society” (1990:270).

Graphic Novels or Novel Graphics?: The Evolution of an Iconoclastic Genre

Graphic Novels or Novel Graphics?The Evolution of an Iconoclastic Genre Elaine Martin Since their inception comic books have creatively explored the relationship of text and image. The advent in the 1970s of a new subgenre, the graphic novel, guaranteed the continued vitality of the genre and simultaneously expanded its audience. Graphic novels have developed innovative, thought-provoking, and entertaining new relationships between texts and images that have made them especially attractive to readers who are increasingly oriented to images. In this essay I would like to investigate the history, evolution and current popularity of the graphic novel, a genre that represents the creative interplay between text and image par excellence. Sequences of pictures, often with accompanying texts, used to relate a story or an event in history have been dated by some critics as far back as ancient Egypt. In The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels, Danny Fingeroth carves out a brief history as follows: The paintings in ancient Egyptian tombs record events through a combination of sequential drawings and hieroglyphic lettering…. A monumental example of sequential art from the Roman period is Trajan's Column, completed in AD 113. Its spiraling carvings tell the story of the emperor Trajan's victory in the Dacian Wars…. Similar narrative friezes are found on ancient Greek and Roman temples, as well as early Church buildings. Sequential art can also be seen in medieval tapestries, the most famous of which is the Bayeux Tapestry, recording the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066. (11) In Europe and the United States, where the graphic novel has especially flourished, comics, cartoons, or graphic stories have been around for several centuries, beginning with broadsheets published in England in the seventeenth century, some observing public executions, others intended as either personal or political satire. Gradually individual cartoon cells were strung together to make comic strips that told a more detailed story, and then these strips were collected into more complex and sustained narratives that have commonly been referred to as comic books.1 Comic books, which have a seventy-year history in the US, introduced a new subgenre in the late 1970s: the graphic novel. Its name has been contested: graphic novel, sequential art, bande dessinée, picture novella, picto-fiction, illustories, and [End Page 170] adult comics. Other terms have also been suggested: "One editorial collective, Canadian publishing house Drawn & Quarterly proposed 'graphica' for this 'whole new art movement' in a Manifesto" (Campbell 169). "Graphica" of course, has its limitations (sounds too much like erotica, is an unidentifiable new word, etc.) but it was the best option" (Le Duc 7). Despite extensive discussion and multiple new proposed terms, graphic novel still appears to be the most commonly used term. As a genre, the graphic novel is (usually) not graphic in any sexual sense of the term and may well consist of a short story or novella rather than a novel per se. It also may not even be fictional, so the term "graphic novel" is further called into question. Definitions vary widely, but common characteristics include multilayered narrative, a black/white format (reminiscent of the dramatic and effective use of chiaroscuro technique in films of the '20s), [auto]biography or auto/biographical elements, and serial publication. Often they treat serious topics or are aimed at an adult audience and present a socio-political critique. It is important to note that in certain eras and locations publicly exercised social criticism has been known to have dangerous consequences. The tradition of social critique via cartoons, rather than being a contemporary phenomenon only, actually dates back several centuries. In discussing the shift from execution broadsheets to sheets involving humor, Roger Sabin notes: "One important aspect of this shift towards humour was that the subversive power of pictorial satire was felt for the first time. Occasionally, things could get dangerous, as artists used the sheets to say things about royalty and politicians that they knew they could not get away with in the written word. As a result, the history of this period is peppered with stories of cartoonists being imprisoned, attacked or even assassinated for going too far" (12). It might not be out of place to think of...

Memory as "Shifting Sand": The Subversive Power of Illustration in George Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson

Memory as "Shifting Sand": The Subversive Power of Illustration in George Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson

Whispering: the murmur of power in a lo-fi world

As the Industrial Revolution and the Electric Revolution turn our acoustic environment into a ‘lo-fi’ soundscape, modern communication tends to evolve into an escalating ‘volume war’ where one shouts, yells, cries and screams. This article challenges the assumption that ‘volume is power’ and explores an alternative mode of vocal emission — the whisper. Weak in volume and yet persistent in resonance, evanescent in space and yet lingering in time, elusive to knowledge and yet haunting to unconscious desires, whispering questions some key assumptions about the relationships among voice, body, space and power. Commonly used in private address (by mothers, lovers and friends), whispering bears the imprint of domesticity and is seldom related to publicness. When associated with politics (e.g. the whispering politicians), it reminds us of secret plots, double dealings and the obscene underside of publicness. Is whispering doomed to turn sour when it enters the public space? Can we bring out its subversive power and make it a political act? This article explores the various ramifications of whispering in physiology, theology, sociology, psychoanalysis, ethics and theorizes a new type of political agency that is urgently needed in our contemporary lo-fi world — the world of acoustic claustrophobia and attention deficit.

An exploration of the aesthetics of an oral history performance developed in the classroom

This paper aims to explore a range of aesthetic aspects involved in the devising and production processes of oral history performance in a classroom setting. It touches upon the ethical dimension of aesthetics employing the Confucianist Wang Yang Ming's aesthetic philosophy and Buber's theories of relation as the theoretical frames. The devising process realises the concept of aestheticisation of ethics by fulfilling the ‘I–You’ relations through the constructed dialogues formulated by the teacher-facilitator. The paper is divided into six parts to illustrate the whole aesthetic system – from aesthetic framework to reception. I apply Ricoeur's narrative theory to analyse the cycle of re-interpretation and reception process of the personal narratives. Deleuze's theories in ‘Signs and Memory’ have been employed to decipher how the signs of art have been distilled from personal memories. Bachelard's poetics of space and Lefebvre's theories of the subversive power of space have been employed to demonstrate the possibility of the presentation and subversion of body and space through performance. In conclusion, I apply Shusterman's pragmatist aesthetics to argue that oral history performances put ethics into action by re-negotiating personal and collective identities through dialogical process and re-interpreting the past.

Infidel poetics: riddles, nightlife, substance

Poetry has long been regarded as the least accessible of literary genres. But how much does the obscurity that confounds the reader of a poem differ from, say, the slang or patois that captivates listeners of hip-hop? Infidel Poetics examines not only the shared incomprehensibilities of poetry and slang but also poetry's genetic relation to the spectacle of underground culture. Charting connections between lyric obscurity, vernacular speech, and types of social relations - networks of darkened streets in preindustrial cities, the historical underworld of taverns and clubs, and the subcultures of the avant-garde - Daniel Tiffany shows that poetic obscurity has functioned for hundreds of years as a medium of alternative societies. For example, he discovers in the submerged tradition of canting poetry and its eccentric genres - thieves' carols, drinking songs, beggars' chants - a genealogy of modern nightlife, but also a visible underworld of social and verbal substance, a demimonde for sale. Ranging from Anglo-Saxon riddles to Emily Dickinson, from the icy logos of Parmenides to the monadology of Leibniz, from Mother Goose to modernism, Infidel Poetics offers an exhilarating account of the subversive power of obscurity in word, substance, and deed.

TB or not TB? Fishing for Molecules Making Permissive Granulomas

Focal accumulations of mononuclear cells, called granulomas, are a hallmark of mycobacterial infections. A common misconception is that granulomas are uniformly protective. In transparent zebrafish larvae infected with Mycobacterium marinum, Volkman et al. demonstrate an interaction of mycobacteria with epithelial cells that helps recruit macrophages to the granuloma as "feeder cells."

Art and Transcultural Resistance

In a globalized culture dominated by ICT, video‐art, photomontage and mediatized installations and events, the question of authenticity – in the sense of being true to oneself – is posed in terms of artistic expression. How can one go about re‐creating oneself and the world through the subversive power of art, while retaining a degree of freedom? The same artistic criteria are imposed for forms of expression for the works of non‐European artists, and particularly artists from former colonies like the North African countries. Today, artists from these countries are quite at home with new techniques, but post‐colonial stereotypes (pictures of veiled women or oriental violence) continue to prefer artists who meet these expectations. So for these artists, creating means ‘resisting’, to quote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The new generation of Tunisian artists, which includes many women, seems to deliberately ignore the problem of identity, the better to appropriate the uniqueness of each artist. Their imagination is a driving force for moving borders and preventing people from clinging to ethnic identity.

Women, Religious Conviction and the Subversive Use of Power

AbstractThis article examines the actions of female religious orders to explore the scope available to them to exercise power in the French Counter-Reformation Church. It argues that while the Ursuline and Visitandine communities accepted enclosure, which affected their ability to undertake an active charitable role outside the cloister, they nonetheless consistently sought to carve out an active role for themselves that went beyond the traditional space accorded to nuns. These nuns actively sought roles as spiritual directors to women in their local communities, to clerics and to prominent courtiers. By exercising subversive power clandestinely, they succeeded in wielding significant influence, even over doctrinal matters. In contrast, Madame Guyon challenged the right of the ecclesiastical establishment to declare her writings heretical. Similarly, the Port-Royal nuns overtly challenged the commands of Pope and King, arguing that the dictates of conscience superseded the doctrinal judgements of the reli...

Translating Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Feridun Zaimoglu’s <em>Koppstoff</em>

Feridun Zaimoglu’s second major book, Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft (1998), resists common conceptions of belonging and challenges readers to rethink conventions of religion, nationalism and femininity. As a group of three translators working within an academic setting, we seek both to unpack what it means to be an agent and to exercise our own individual and collective agency as translating subjects in the “mainstream.” This involves providing greater access to Koppstoff through the English language, while respecting the complexity of Zaimoglu’s original texts and their subversive power to both build and obscure notions of community. In this introduction to our collaborative translations of two exemplary texts, “Sistem versus Soopcoolture” (Sistem gegen Süppkültür) and “Everything in this World is Fleeting” (Alles in dieser Welt ist vergänglich), we will discuss our translation process in reference to existing theories of translation and current criticism on Zaimoglu’s work, underscoring the ways in which Zaimoglu complicates prominent models of community formation and the relevance of these models to current German society. In accordance with the nature of Zaimoglu’s work, which constantly undermines the possibility of finite interpretation, this discussion will highlight the act of translation as an exercise in subjectivity. Rather than objectifying the “translatable” or “untranslatable” qualities of Koppstoff, we hope to demonstrate that our translations represent one of multiple ways Zaimoglu’s texts could be effectively rendered into English.

Utilizing Satire in Post-Deng Chinese Politics

Although China's institutional campaign against the Falun Gong has been closely observed and analyzed, researchers have failed to take note of the subversive power of satire utilized in the comic theatrical skits ( xiaopin) of popular comedian Zhao Benshan to ridicule the Falun Gong. This exemplifies the Chinese Communist Party's long-established political practice of “educating the masses.” Based on an analysis of what are now commonly referred to as “Zhao Benshan xiaopin” and their perceived impact on the Falun Gong issue, this article examines how satirical power in post-Deng Chinese politics has been employed, and it outlines the key features of the practice. This article reviews the use of satire as a political weapon in contemporary Chinese politics, before turning to focus on four relevant Zhao Benshan xiaopin and the way in which they create popular metaphors for propagating official views in the anti-Falun Gong campaign.

Some Current Publications

Some Current Publications Julia Fawcett Individuals APHRA BEHN Wilkerson, Virginia L. “Behn’s The Widow Ranter.” The Explicator 66.2 (2008): 73–75. Wilkerson notes that Behn’s choice of the title for her play is surprising, given that “the character of Ranter is almost a distraction from the story line” rather than its central figure, but she suggests that “Behn employs Ranter to illustrate the advantage gained by taking the wearing of men’s clothing to another level of representation, and thus she deemed her character important enough for the tragicomedy’s title to carry her name.” See also: SOUTHERNE (Jaher), GENDER & SEXUALITY (Wiseman), POLITICS & RELIGION (Visconsi), RACE & ETHNICITY (Doyle). ROBERT BOYLE Anstey, Peter, and Michael Hunter. “Robert Boyle’s ‘Designe about Natural History.’” Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 83–126. Anstey and Hunter cite a 1666 letter from Boyle to Henry Oldenburg in which he “elaborated in a sophisticated way the salient Baconian doctrine which thereafter formed the centerpiece of Boyle’s methodology in natural philosophy.” They read this letter as a turning point in Boyle’s career, as the first and most comprehensive explanation of Boyle’s “Designe about Natural History” and his debt to Sir Francis Bacon’s ideas about compiling and arranging a natural history, and as a key to understanding many of Boyle’s later works. See also: LOCKE (Walmsley), SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (Peterfreund). MARGARET CAVENDISH Kellett, Katherine R. “Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure.” SEL 48 (2008): 419–442. Kellett responds to the debate about whether Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure is a stage drama or a closet drama by shifting attention from the play’s performability [End Page 69] to its performativity, applying Judith Butler’s queer theory to argue that the play “highlights the instabilities of identity and of performance as a genre.” She describes the setting of the play as a “curiously immaterial space” that resists stabilization and “suggests that the subversive power of identity exists not merely in bodies, but in the discourse that produces those bodies.” However, Kellett questions Butler’s strict distinction between “performance” and “performativity”: noting that not only the identity but also the very materiality of the bodies within The Convent of Pleasure is “conspicuously ambiguous,” she claims that the play “resists corporal reification, complicating Butler’s contention that a subject is presumed underneath all performances by revealing that subjectivity can never be stable.” Mascetti, Yaakov A. “A ‘World of Nothing, but Pure Wit’: Margaret Cavendish and the Gendering of the Imaginary.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6 (2008): 1–31. Through her “wordy, intricate, and often self-contradictory writing style, combined with complex, paradoxical, regressive, reflexive, and counterintuitive conceptions of matter and motion,” Margaret Cavendish carves out a place for the female writer who deals in “wit, fancy, and imagination, as opposed to the patriarchal framework of objective truths.” Comparing Cavendish’s writings to those of Descartes, Bacon, and Hobbes, Mascetti claims that she constructed a female world not opposed against but rather “parallel to the masculine dominion of objectivity, where she manifested and realized the inalienable right of a woman to think within the intimacy of her mind and her house.” Scott-Bauman, Elizabeth. “‘Bake’d in the Oven of Applause’: The Blazon and the Body in Margaret Cavendish’s Fancies.” Women’s Writing 15 (2008): 86–106. Despite former scholars’ arguments that the recipe poems of Cavendish’s Poems, and Fancies feminize the language of science by combining it with the language of the kitchen, Scott-Bauman argues that the recipe poems “are an engagement with the (male) Cavalier poets as much as with the kitchen, and that the kitchen itself is no simple signifier of domestic femininity.” The recipe poems mimic the cavaliers’ use of the blazon and “combine food and natural philosophy images playfully to deflate seventeenth-century ideas about gender” and to transform “the female figure of Nature” from the dissected object of male experimentation” into “a cannibalistic and self-recreating power.” It is Cavendish’s interest in natural philosophy, Scott-Bauman concludes, that influences her focus “on the body’s vitality and function, rather than the allure...