Narrative Of Transgression Research Articles

Creating good knowledge together: heartful-communal storytelling at the intersection of caregiving and academia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore a novel storytelling approach that investigates lived experience at the intersection of motherhood/caregiving and Ph.D. pursuits. The paper contributes to the feminist tradition of writing differently through the process of care that emerges from shared stories.Design/methodology/approachUsing a process called heartful-communal storytelling, the authors evoke personal and embodied stories and transgressive narratives. The authors present a composite process drawing on heartful-autoethnography, dialogic writing and communal storytelling.FindingsThe paper makes two key contributions: (1) the paper illustrates a novel feminist process in action and (2) the paper contributes six discrete stories of lived experience at the intersection of parenthood and Ph.D. studies. The paper also contributes to the development of the feminist tradition of writing differently. Three themes emerged through the storytelling experience, and these include (1) creating boundaries and transgressing boundaries, (2) giving and receiving care and (3) neoliberal conformity and resistance. These themes, like the stories, also became entangled.Originality/valueThe paper demonstrates how heartful-communal storytelling can lead to individual and collective meaning making. While the Ph.D. is a solitary path, the authors' heartful-communal storytelling experience teaches that holding it separate from other relationships can impoverish what is learnt and constrain the production of good knowledge; the epistemic properties of care became self-evident.

Negotiating Transgression, Deathlessness, and Senescence in Mary Shelley's ‘The Mortal Immortal’

This article attempts to study deathlessness in relation to notions of physical and moral transgression. Through a close textual analysis of Mary Shelley's work, ‘The Mortal Immortal’, the article undertakes an enquiry into the discomforts of arrested immortality. It argues that by turning an otherwise normative body corporeally interstitial, deathlessness prompts a narrative of transgression. The focus is on the protagonist, Winzy, and the impact deathlessness has on both his personal and social relations. I utilise theories of transgression, linking them to concepts of physical impurity and corruption to examine how deathlessness dehumanises the individual, rendering them a potential threat to social stability. Keeping corporeal transgression as its focal point, I also elucidate how deathlessness-generated-corporeal interstitiality can problematise sexuality. Deathlessness, therefore, is analysed in terms of multiple transgressions synthesised into one. The article identifies and highlights the factors shaping the theme of transgression and the manner in which transgression plays out within the larger context of deathlessness. In the concluding segments, the paper also explores the manner in which transgression prompts the dehumanisation of the deathless.

“But, I Mean, the Thing Has Become a Myth that Nobody Can Live up To.” Lou Reed’s Narrative of Transgression, Stigma, Self and Resistance

ABSTRACT This study contributes to the criminological transgression literature with an in-depth ethnographic analysis of Reed’s narrative of transgression, stigma, self and resistance. This analysis includes two intertwined perspectives on rule breaking, 1) the transgression concept within cultural criminology and 2) deviance studies with its focus on labeling and stigma. This combination creates an academic focus that includes the empowering and disempowering qualities of rule breaking. Lou Reed’s rich narrative extending over a period of six decades shows that the meaning making process of his transgressions was shaped by Reed’s interactions within several transgressive social worlds, the commodified mediatized representations of his work, and societal transformations changing the meaning of drugs and sexualities. In addition, this article shows that Reed’s transgressions were intimately related to stigma and shame, an angle which is hardly explored within cultural criminology and deserves more attention in order to further our understanding of the social meanings of transgression.

An Affinity for Wagner, Michelangelo, and Sadistic Torture: The Implicit Homosexuality of Captain Munsey in Jules Dassin's Brute Force

Known for its transgressive narratives and anti-hero characters, film noir is an American film cycle that dominated the box office in the 1940's and 50's. At the time, homosexuality was banned from American cinema under the Production Code, yet film noir still managed to offer subtle and implicit representations of homosexuality. The sadistic prison guard in Jules Dassin's Brute Force (1947), Captain Munsey, is one such example and the film uses many signifiers to suggest his homosexuality. The implications that such a reading has on the narrative of the film are immense, and this paper merely scratches the surface of possible interpretations.
 Despite film noir's offering of some of the earliest portrayals of homosexuality in American cinema, scholarship on representations of homosexuality in film noir is few and far between. By revisiting Brute Force and examining how it manages to queercode Captain Munsey under the restraints of the Production Code, this paper seeks to spark new conversation among film scholars regarding homosexuality in film noir, and more broadly, films made under the Production Code. Moreover, the discourse surrounding representations of LGBTQ characters in American cinema has become increasingly mainstream, and by revisiting films from the past and analyzing them from a modern perspective, scholars can seek to gain new insight on the history of LGBTQ representation in cinema.

A “Burlesque Queen in Bobby Socks”: Domesticity, Criminality, and Suspense in Charles Williams’s Noir Fiction

This article proposes that Charles Williams’s mid-twentieth-century noir fiction reshapes post-war representations of gender roles and paves the way for various renditions and developments of noir. Williams’s works are narratives of transgression meeting domesticity, crime meeting docility, and cunning meeting conformity; they portray a deadly recipe that comprises different, even conflicting ingredients of a fusion between domesticity, crime, and suspense. By examining the recurring figure of the criminal housewife in his work, especially Hell Hath No Fury (1953), this article argues that Williams brings forth a complex and subversive gender schema to trouble both the creed of domesticity popular in the 1950s and the stereotyping of the lethal seductress prevalent in noir fiction. By so doing, Williams’s noir not only brings the transgression of women to the fore but also displays a compelling picture of post-war gender roles in the US under McCarthyism.

Language, affect, and carnivalesque: tourism encounters and transgressive narratives on a party island

ABSTRACT Party island tourism is construed as a type of tourism that heavily relies on sensory and intimate encounters that evince structures of inequality. In this paper, I investigate how the notion of the party influences the negotiation of sociolinguistic relations on party islands. By employing a linguistic ethnographic approach, this paper attempts to examine the affective dimensions of the narratives of “tourism frontliners” about their tourism encounters in Boracay from the perspective of the party. The party dynamics in Boracay can be described as carnivalesque, which shows “ … life turned inside out … the reverse side of the world” (Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated and edited by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 122). I argue that the coalescence of different participants, emotions, and linguistic practices in the Boracay party enables tourism frontliners to subvert various forms of inequality (e.g. occupational norms, precarity, and discrimination) through their accounts of getting even and getting by. This results in a suspension of reality – a space where transgressive behavior can potentially disrupt or reconfigure unequal sociolinguistic relations. This paper argues that while carnivalesque behaviors are inherently suspensions of reality, their iterability can lead to the establishment of sustainabile transgressive spaces.

Jewish “Bad Girls”: Transgressive Narratives and Rebellious Daughters in Contemporary British Jewish Women’s Writings

Jewish “Bad Girls”: Transgressive Narratives and Rebellious Daughters in Contemporary British Jewish Women’s Writings

Personal and Intergenerational Narratives of Transgression and Pride in Emerging Adulthood: Links to Gender and Well‐Being

SummaryIntergenerational narratives, stories parents share with children about their own youthful experiences, may facilitate the understanding of challenging life experiences and be related to psychological well‐being; yet, little research has examined what young people know of their parents' self‐challenging and self‐enhancing experiences and how they interpret them. Research examining intergenerational narratives has observed relations between adolescents' narratives and their psychological well‐being, but these relations may depend upon gender and narrative type. In the current study, 94 college students provided intergenerational and personal narratives of transgression and pride experiences. Narratives were coded for emotional, cognitive, and evaluative content. Results show that transgression and pride narratives differed in content, and that women provided more interpretative content than men. Stories about mothers contained more interpretative content than fathers, but this pattern varied by participant gender. Finally, relations to well‐being were observed, especially for cognitive content in stories of participants' same‐gender parent. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.StartCopTextStartCopTextStartCopTextCopyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Religion as makeover: Reality, lifestyle and spiritual transformation

In this article I discuss the relationship between religion, spirituality and processes of makeover and transformation as presented in a number of British reality television shows. Programmes including The Monastery, The Convent and Make Me a Muslim placed participants in scenarios where they experimented with adopting religious or spiritual practices as part of their journey of self-transformation. I argue that the nature of transformation in these programmes is in line with standard reality and makeover television practices. However, it also makes a claim to be more ‘authentic’ than these because of its unfolding within the more traditional environs of religious communities from which makeover culture’s narratives of transgression, repentance and salvation were originally derived.

Our Man on the Inside: Cannibalism in William Seabrook's Jungle Ways

In Jungle Ways (1931), travel writer, adventurer and self-identified cannibal William Seabrook describes in detail his direct personal participation in West African cannibalism. Though he later reveals this to have been a fabrication, the ‘truth’, narrated in his end-of-life memoir, is perhaps even more shocking than the account in Jungle Ways. The story of Seabrook's transgressive meal takes several competing forms. As a book, it was an example of best-selling popular participatory anthropology, and in serial form in Ladies Home Journal, the story was incorporated into mainstream mass culture. However, seen by dissident surrealists Michael Leiris and George Bataille as an evocative fantasy, Seabrook's narrative of transgression seems to mark a rupture in colonial ideology of dominant European culture. The subject of this article is the metaphoric potential of the ‘cannibal’ and the potential use and disturbance of the cannibal myth in early twentieth-century popular and avant-garde cultures. Jungle Ways represents a popular culture repetition of the myth of the man-eater, as identified by William Arens. Seabrook's seeming resistance to the conventional distinctions between savage and civilized, the side of the narrative which appealed to surrealists, actually reveals the self-generating, or self-defeating, logic of the myth.

“Suicide machine” seekers: transgressing suicidal taboos online

Internet-mediated joint suicides or “Net group suicides” (Net shinjū) has become a significant social problem in Japan since 2002. Despite a privileged view of suicide-related cyberspaces as a murky underworld, there has been little study about how the participants of such spaces interact and perform their “suicidal” identity. Viewing cyberspace as a unique discursive playground that sprouts a myriad of transgressive narratives, this paper examines “Suicide Club” (Jisatsu Club) an online discussion forum that facilitated the largest “Net group suicide” in Japanese history. A thematic content analysis of actual postings on “Suicide Club” reveals the double-edged nature of the forum. While some participants were determined to seek suicide companions or what I metaphorically call “suicide machines,” others used the board as a social outlet to freely disclose their pent-up struggles, attempting to collectively transgress social taboos of suicide.

The dark side of tellability

This article propounds a revised, two-sided notion of tellability – one which encompasses both the familiar lower-bounding side of tellability as sufficient to warrant listener interest and the generally ignored upper-bounding side where tellability merges into the no longer tellable of impropriety. It demonstrates how tellers and recipients of stories orient to the upper boundary of tellability in various ways, signalling discomfort as they approach the threshold of impropriety, but also conspiring to breech and go beyond the boundary of impropriety in the pursuit of greater intimacy and entertainment. It is within the framework of the lower boundary and upper boundary of tellability that narrators are free to construct their individual identities. (Tellability, Identity construction, Transgressive narratives, Conversational storytelling)

NARRATIVAS DE IDENTIDADE: AS ‘COMING OUT STORIES’ COMO UM DISCURSO DE RESISTÊNCIA

O gênero coming out stories representa uma "narrativa de transgressão" (CALDAS-COULTHARD, 1996, p. 256), associadas a afirmação pública de uma identidade sexual que, para muitos ainda, é vista como transgressora (GIDDENS, 1992, p. 23). Por outro lado, o gênero constrói um novo sujeito do discurso, ao codificar um conjunto de práticas sociais através das quais o sujeito homoerótico se representa para si próprio e para outros. Nesta pesquisa, apresento uma análise de depoimentos publicados na Revista Época, que fazem parte de uma matéria de capa, intitulada "As homossexuais brasileiras ocupam espaço público e afirmam sua orientação sexual com dignidade". Meu argumento principal é o de que o padrão de articulação de discursos (CHOULIARAKI; FAIRCLOLlGH, 1999, p. 58) nas narrativas analisadas inscreve essas mulheres como o Outro de discursos hegemônicos sobre o gênero e sobre a orientação sexual. No entanto, embora elas sejam inscritas duplamente, suas narrativas representam um desafio às fronteiras demarcadas por "discursos competentes" (CHAUL 2000, p. 7), constituídos para apagar as diferenças culturais, étnicas, linguísticas, de gênero ou de orientação sexual.

Sade and the Narrative of Transgression

Sade and the Narrative of Transgression

"A Language Which Nobody Understood": Emancipatory Strategies in "The Awakening"

Despite the academy's growing commitment to producing and publishing feminist interpretations of literary texts, insofar as feminist critics read Kate Chopin's The Awakening as novel about sexual liberation, we read it with our patriarchal biases intact. Of course The Awakening's final scene is breathtaking; Edna Pontellier transcends her circumscribed status as sensual entity-as the object of others' desires-and stands before us as her own subject, as blissfully embodied being: ... she cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her.'1 It is because of this new dignity and visibility Chopin gives to women's desires that The Awakening has been celebrated as one of the great subversive novels-a novel belonging to the tradition of transgressive narratives Tony Tanner describes in Adultery in the Novel. But in this essay I will suggest that Tanner's ideas are inadequate to account for the real transgressive force of Chopin's novel. Instead, I want to locate this force in Chopin's representation of language Edna Pontellier seeks but does not possess, in her representation of a language which nobody understood.2 In Adultery in the Novel Tanner explains that eighteenthand nineteenthcentury novels derive narrative urgency from their power to interrupt the status quo by representing characters or ideas which impinge on society's stability. While most bourgeois novels affirm marriage, the nuclear family, or genealogical continuity as the source of social stability, these same novels gather momentum by representing energy that threatens to contravene that stability of the family on which society depends: an energy frequently embodied in the adulterous woman.3 While prostitutes, orphans, adventurers, and other marginal characters dominate the early phases of the novel and