Unruly Women Research Articles

Making Space for Those Unruly Women of Color

When I first walked into the classroom without the luxury of sitting in the back of the room, I was extremely self-conscious. As a brand new teacher, I was terrified that my body would betray me. I...

Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800-1865 (review)

Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in Urban South, 1800-1865. By Christine Jacobson Carter. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. x, 200. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.00.)In An Evening When Alone (1993), historian Michael O'Brien called for more systematic study of antebellum South's single women. The assumed centrality of plantation mistress, he implied, had drawn attention away from her more numerous sisters-middle- and lower-class women, urban women, slave women, unruly women, and fallen women among them. Single women, he felt, had been particularly overlooked, and it was lacuna he began to fill with his edited collection of four journals of single women in South. Though desire for independence deserves consideration as among [these] journals' more consistent topics, O'Brien noted in his introduction, perhaps their theme . . . is loneliness, its presence and looming persistence (6).Thirteen years later, O'Brien's call for more systematic study has been (partly) answered by Christine Jacobson Carter. In her examination of affluent, single white women of antebellum Savannah and Charleston, however, Carter stresses different predominant theme: usefulness, she claims, not loneliness, circumscribed and gave meaning to these women's lives. In urban centers of South, elite unmarried women socialized, volunteered, churched, and traveled together (9). They were reserve army of paternalism, plugging holes in nuclear families, stitching up South's social fabric, and propping up its many fictions, even those that caged them.Carter is quick to admit that Savannah and Charleston were atypical, if not unique. Plugged into a wider seaboard of letters and ideas, these coastal towns trafficked in Northern notions of domesticity that be practiced outside home (41). In South's urban enclaves, single women were not denigrated as unchosen ones, flawed and deficient (43). Instead they were allowed, even encouraged, to play more vital social roles. Carter is sensitive to fact that although they were intertwined with North, these Southern cities were also instruments of greater plantation culture (51). In South, man's mastery, unquestioned and unquestionable, relied on natural and reinforcing dependency of his wife, children, and slaves.How then woman be single and natural? How she play an independent social role without undermining South's social dependencies? Only through usefulness to others, Carter concludes, could unmarried women save themselves from long-held stereotype of pathetic, barren, cold, and crotchety old maid (47). Thus, South's single women had to walk thin line. Selfishness of any kind was abhorrent; it was Northern, threat, and it brought stinging rebuke. A single woman help raise her sister's children; she sing praises of her brother and father; she sing sweetly in church and feed poor, but she not venture too far. She had to remain within the bounds of southern womanhood, which may have expected marriage and motherhood but demanded piety, dependence, and service to others (66). …

Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xvi+386pp. Bonnie Gordon, Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. x+234pp.

Wendy Heller, <i>Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice</i>. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xvi+386pp. Bonnie Gordon, <i>Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. x+234pp.

Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy (review)

Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy. By Bonnie Gordon. York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism.) [x, 234 p. ISBN 0-52184529-7. $80.] Index, bibliography, music examples. This monograph is the latest addition to the series New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism published by Cambridge University Press. The first chapter, subtitled Mouths, Breath, and Throats in Early Modern Italy, uses the Aristotelian and Galenic views of the human body prevalent in the late Renaissance to present a thought-provoking reading of Monteverdi's soprano duet O come sei gentile (seventh book, 1619). Gordon sees this as affair of throats [that] allows for a discussion of the ways that throats were imagined to work and the discourses that circumscribed that working (p. 12). Her argument is that, by singing this music, women of the time transcended the condition and ethos (in the Aristotelian sense) customarily attributed to them, and became bold, warm, singing bodies. This is an act of empowerment as, traditionally, female bodies were thought to be cold(er) than those of hot-tempered men, an attitude nurtured not only by the patriarchal status quo, but also a long-standing medical discourse that saw female bodies in this way. Galen lived at the end of the Greek medical tradition and his views, and mistakes, remained current up to the sixteenth century when the Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius began his challenge of the Galenic doctrine. Despite this, Gordon, and others scholars, believe that Galen's views remained valid well into the seventeenth century and beyond, and she presents a substantial defense of the importance of Galen throughout the period covered by her examples (p. 13). Galenic medicine imposed an interesting identification between the female throat and the vagina as two openings which interconnected and were the source of heat in female bodies, pulsating during the menstrual cycle, intercourse, and, as Gordon proposes, singing. This connection is not as strained as it seems at first, if one considers that early medicine considered the female neck area to elongate during sexual activity, when the cold female body changed to hot transcending its normal condition. This discourse, Gordon argues, is not only valid for how women singers saw themselves, but also for how they were perceived externally, and how composers wrote for them using sensual and sexual themes in the covert metaphorical language of the time. It is not that this link is made here for the first time (see Camillo Maffei's 1562 letter on singing; Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 199O]; and Laura Macy's Speaking of Sex: Metaphor and Performance in the Italian Madrigal, Journal of Musicology 14, no. 1 [Winter 1996): 1-34). But by putting the whole argument together and shifting it towards its empowerment conclusions, Gordon creates a paradigm that looks at the singing throat as a complete organ, and a gendered one. Although Gordon's argument is convincing (albeit with some methodological problems discussed below), I find that the message can be just as interesting and empowering for us, if shifted a little outside its gendered context. This view of the intricacies of Renaissance singing as the result of the palpitations of the warm throat can provide an imaginative shift in our approach to the vocal artifices of the period. Rather than viewing them coldly as the result of technique emanating from the vocal chords, we might be able to emulate them better by steering our imagination towards a warm, loose, and malleable throat. Chapter 2, Back Talk: The Power of Female Song on the Stage, is based on Gordon's 1999 article Talking Back: The Female Voice in Il hallo delle ingrate, Cambridge Opera Journal 11, no. 1 [March 1999]: 1-30, exploring Monteverdi's L'Arianna and Il hallo delie ingrate. …

Adaptation as a filmed homage: Truffaut's Une belle fille comme moi (1972)

This article highlights and explores the complicated manner in which Truffaut seeks to create, in cinematographic terms, a correlative of what the novel accomplishes verbally, in his film Une belle fille comme moi. Drawing attention to the aspect of the film as a site of self-conscious film-making by the auteur, it argues that adapting Farrell's comic novel Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (1967) allows the cinéphile director an opportunity to maintain a sense of continuity with the past by interpolating various allusions to the classical Hollywood comedy. Truffaut's film also preserves the novel's anti-bourgeois potential and attitude as articulated through the deployment of coarse language and perpetual comic moments provided by visual gags. By extension, Truffaut claims that it is a feminist film. Nonetheless, unlike Farrell's novel, the film's feminist potential is undermined by its rather uncritical conformity to conventional representations of ‘unruly women’ in western culture. As a consequence, Une belle fille comme moi might shock, but does not radically challenge, established bourgeois order in the way that Farrell's novel dares to do.

Monteverdi's unruly women: the power of song in early modern Italy

Introduction 1. Vocal anatomies: mouths, breath and throats in early modern Italy 2. Back talk: the power of female song on the stage 3. Madrigalian desire: the convergence of love and sex in madrigals 4. Emblazoning Angioletta: musical fantasies and dissection 5. Angry ladies: changing experiences of sensations Coda.

Beyond the Latin lover: Marcello Mastroianni, masculinity, and Italian cinema

Preface Acknowledgements 1. In the beginning: Mastroianni, Masculinity and Italian Cinema 2. Undressing the Latin Lover: La dolce vita, Fashion and Italian Masculinity 3. Masculinity, Sicilian Style: Il bell'Antonio and Divorce - Italian Style 4. Remember, It's a Comedy: Mastroianni in the Films of Federico Fellini 5. The Inetto versus the Unruly Woman: Mastroianni and Sophia Loren 6. Remembrance of Films Past: Mastroianni and the Aging Male Body Notes Bibliography Index

Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman (review)

Reviewed by: Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman Yung-Sing Wu (bio) Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman by Sheryl St. Germain. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 2003, 227 pp., $21.95 hardcover. Helene Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" ends with not so much a bang than with raucous glee. Her figure of a laughing, snake-haired Medusa would have good company in the pages of Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman, a memoir by poet and native New Orleanian Sheryl St. Germain. There St. Germain—the author of four previous collections of poetry, and currently associate professor of English at Iowa State University—wields prose that reminds one of the sinuousness of ecriture feminine. "I've come to understand Louisiana waters," she writes, "as the ink that gives my words body" (34). From the land-and-waterscapes that give Louisiana its amphibious form, to the state's equally diverse cultural terrains, from a family history replete with intimacy and trauma to the frank sexualization of all things "Louisiana": St. Germain covers ground with this ink, taking advantage of and pleasure in its fullness. Emily Toth has observed in The Women's Review of Books that the 14 essays of Swamp Songs move frequently between the autobiographical and the cultural. This shift provides the memoir both structure and rhythm as it alternates autobiographical incidents—frank examples of the family "bad luck"—with metaphorical meditations on a Louisiana that is both home and the site of her self-imposed exile. Hurricanes in "Eye of the Storm" figure in the tempestuous lives of her parents and siblings as well as the expectant quiet St. Germain associates with her mother's stories as they wait out the passage of storms; and the eye of the hurricane becomes an image for the writing of her family: ". . . each time I pick up a pen to write about my family," St. Germain notes, "I feel like that girl who descended those stairs to walk into the eye in search of her father" (9). In an inversion of this dynamic, St. Germain's family stories also enable her to address broader cultural concerns. "Disappearing Bodies" takes her brother Jules' turn to religion as a catalyst for her questions about what "forms of healing" a rapidly deteriorating Louisiana coast needs (126). Taken together, these gestures perform Swamp Songs' version of the memoir, where St. Germain and Louisiana constitute a doubly remembered self. The significance St. Germain accords Louisiana in her memoir suggests an environmentalist spirit underlying Swamp Songs: she equates the lines defining psychic health and illness with the uncertain fate of Louisiana's lands and waters. The memoir's subtitle—"The Making of an Unruly Woman"—insists that sexuality occupies no small part in this "making" of either St. Germain or the cultures she has inhabited and known. This [End Page 220] is to observe the constancy with which St. Germain writes Louisiana through sexualized metaphors: the lush topography of the swamp, the revelry of Mardi Gras festivals, the eroticism of cooking and eating. Of this last St. Germain is especially graphic, writing of gumbo that This, I found myself thinking one day as I brought a spoonful of thick gumbo to my mouth, the roux-thick broth and a juicy, barely cooked oyster filling the spoon, this is the body of God. I swallowed the oyster whole; it slid into me, as warm and slimy as sperm, tasting like the ocean. (130-1) At the same time, St. Germain takes up sexuality as a defining and at times destructive force in her life. Swamp Songs addresses partners who have come and gone, and more important, her father and her brother François. Both men capture and inflect her writerly imagination—rendering it irrevocably sexual. For St. Germain, François becomes an intimate double, a personality whose desires and troubles are as seductive as the appeal that drugs holds for them both. Meanwhile her father is quite the opposite, an endless source of mystery for which writing becomes a vehicle of exploration. In one particularly evocative moment, St. Germain casts her father through a series of...

Feminist Spaces

Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space by Stacy Alaimo. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000; Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space by Elizabeth Grosz. Canbridge: MIT Press, 2001); and Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space by Radhika Mohanram. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Rooms of one's own, borderlands, nomads, centers and margins, public versus private—both literally and metaphorically, space long has been an important issue for feminists. To Michel Foucault's declaration that "[t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space" (1986, 22), one should add that spaces are constituted to a great degree by relations of gender, race, nationality, and sexuality. While Foucault tended to focus only on the latter, recent feminist work such as that of Stacy Alaimo, Elizabeth Grosz, and Radhika Mohanram helpfully broadens the site of interaction, illuminating crucial ways in which raced, sexed, and imperial(ized) bodies are linked with nature, landscapes, and places. Alaimo's Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000) takes on the important work of dismantling nature-culture dualisms in which culture is viewed as dynamic and nature as static. Alaimo argues that claims that women's bodies are more closely aligned with nature than men's bodies are often have been rejected by late twentieth-century feminists because of the assumption that nature is fixed. Feminist responses to such claims generally have been to refute women's alleged natural inferiority by arguing either that women's naturalness is socially constructed or that feminists should eschew any talk of connections between women and nature because of the misogyny from which such connections were born (3). In both cases, however, the notion of nature as something fixed and unchanging goes unchallenged. Alaimo's concern is that both strategies "attemp[t] to disentangle 'woman' from the web of associations that bind her to 'nature,'" and in doing so, "nature is kept at bay—repelled—rather than redefined" (4). Alaimo, in contrast, seeks precisely to rewrite the concept of nature, viewing it as an active agent rather than as passive matter (12). Working with nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, film, television, popular journalism, and visual arts, Alaimo shows that "nature has been and continues to be a place of feminist possibility" (2). Nature has been seen as undomesticated, and as such has been crucial to loosening sedimented ideas about domestic spaces and those firmly rooted within them—namely, women. This has happened in a variety of ways: one has been to cast nature as that which dissolves gender distinctions. Thus, for example, Sarah Orne Jewett's 1884 Country Doctor offers a picture [End Page 209] of nature in which it "is identified neither with the world of the mothers nor with that of the fathers; rather it exists as a third space, a place where Nan [the lead female character] can liberate herself from gendered scripts" (54). A contrasting approach, found in Mary Austin's 1909 Lost Borders, has been to embrace gender differences by casting nature as "an unruly woman" who cannot be wholly controlled by a (masculine) society (72). As Alaimo demonstrates, whether minimizing or maximizing women's differences from men, appeals to nature have been indispensable for feminist social intervention. Part of the strength of Undomesticated Ground is that in urging that nature be seen as an actor, Alaimo does not advocate erasing all distinctions between human beings and other parts of nature (158). In other words, Alaimo is careful to avoid the false dilemma of either positing nature and culture as sharply separate or collapsing them into the same, unidentifiable mush. These two positions are the flip side of the same problematic coin: they both assume that to be distinguishable from one another, two things must be radically opposed to and atomistically separate from one another. In the absence of such opposition and separation, the two things (allegedly) must really be the same one thing after all. Both positions thereby deny that continuities and connections can exist between different, distinguishable things. Or put another...

"A Virago-Errant in Enchanted Armor?": Anne Royall's 1829 Trial as a Common Scold

In mid-July 1829 the editor of the New York Observer offered his readers piece of gossip from Washington: Mrs. Royal [sic] has been presented to the Grand Jury as nuisance, and bill has been found her. Assuming his readers' acquaintance with Royall, the editor reported that she had come into the court to obtain list of the Grand Jury. Such was her reputation, the editor suggested, even the respect and honor due to the Grand Jurors' office would be little protection against the vituperative powers of this giantess of literature. She menaces them with fearful visitation of her displeasure, and her menaces seldom evaporate into thin air. Undeterred, few days later the Grand jury presented an indictment Anne Royall accusing her of being a common scold.1The employment of such an archaic and largely obsolete charge highlighted the fact that Royall, novelist, journalist, and travel writer, had been highly controversial in the ways she conducted herself publicly. As an author her subject matter and writing had been equally contentious. Her books were filled with unflattering descriptions of people and places, and her language was frequently unrefined. As one reviewer of her novel, Tennessean, commented: If it were not ungallant to apply terms of disapprobation to the production of female, we might add, that the 'Tennessean' contains some phrases of profanity, which in our opinion give no interest to the work and had better have been omitted. Royall had reputation for writing books filled with local color and her own forceful opinions: The works of Madam Royall are we grant an exception, for her style is so highly seasoned, her love of country so predominant, she gives so much of local topics and applies the lash so unsparingly to her enemies, that her books like her manners are resistless. Yet, at least in part, Royall may also have been on trial because of the friends and enemies she had made. She was associated with the new Democratic administration of Andrew Jackson, and John Eaton, Jackson's secretary of war, was to be witness on her behalf at the trial. She was also tireless and abusive opponent of evangelical religion. Her trial, as well as her career generally, therefore shed considerable light on the problems and opportunities facing women at this time when they entered the public sphere in order to take active positions on both political and religious matters. fact that she was generally considered sharp-tongued and critical, together with the nature of the legal accusation made her, also emphasized the discursive constraints many men of the day attempted to impose on independent-minded women.2Royall's career, moreover, does not fit easily within existing paradigms of women's history. emphasis by historians on the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres, in which men command the public sphere of work and politics, and women the private sphere of home and family, gives the impression that Royall was merely eccentric. Her trial as common scold can, in this light, easily be explained as the result of her unwillingness to conform to prevailing constructions of womanhood. But historians have recently begun to question such rigid constructions of women's sphere and to explore the ways in which women exploited certain flexibility in their roles. This article seeks to place Anne Royall the background of the ferment of political culture of the 1820s and suggests that Royall was neither an eccentric nor even virago, but an active participant in the party politics of the time-in short, woman politico. Her prosecution as common scold commands no easy explanation, however. Certainly, it was an attempt to humiliate and control her by labeling her as an unruly woman, but by 1829 Royall was more than mere scold who disrupted the peace of her neighbors. She was well-known public figure and woman who exercised some influence through the national audience she had gained for her writing. …

Uncovering hate in The Taming of the Shrew

Many in today’s theater audiences feel uncomfortable with The Taming of the Shrew because of its representation of a cruel man subduing an unruly woman. Although this can be understood as Shakespeare’s phallocentric culture reflected in his writing, I argue that the Bard represents an even more viscous and intractable problem than gender discrimination: humankind’s proclivity for cruelty and violence. In this essay, I show how Shakespeare represents this dangerous tendency evenly on both sides of the gender divide and that whatever amusement we may derive from the farce reflects this same tendency within ourselves.

Women in Uniform: Costume and the 'unruly woman' in the 1930s Hollywood musical

Women in Uniform: Costume and the 'unruly woman' in the 1930s Hollywood musical

Machine

Machine

Community of unruly women: Female comedy teams in the early sound era

Community of unruly women: Female comedy teams in the early sound era

The Gendering of Reconstruction: Contests over the Private and Public in North Carolina

In recent years a stunning new collection of works on nineteenth-century southern history has turned to analyses of gender, in process rewriting political, social, and cultural history of antebellum and Reconstruction South. Laura Edwards' important and deeply researched new study is a compelling addition to such works as Stephanie McCurry's Masters of Small Households, Victoria Bynum's Unruly Women, Drew Gilpin Faust's Mothers of Invention, LeeAnn Whites' The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender, Peter Bardaglio's Reconstructing Household, Leslie Schwalm's A Hard Fight for We, and Glenda Gilmore's Gender and Jim Crow. Like these studies, Gendered Strife and Confusion finds that contests over ideas of manhood and womanhood, dependence and independence, and public and private were at center rather than periphery of southern politics and culture. Indeed, a theme of Edwards' work is that the stuff of private life was inherently for African Americans, common whites, and elite whites during Reconstruction in North Carolina (p. 18). As she argues, politics of public life were separate from but instead were deeply imbedded in and shaped by politics of private life. A local study that takes tobacco-based economy and culture of Granville County, North Carolina as its purview, Gendered Strife and Confusion relies on a perceptive analysis of court cases to find that far from domestic matters having been separate from era's major political debates, they often acted to shape more traditionally defined political demands. Thus isolating certain issues in private sphere was a political move that effectively kept certain people on margins of power. Conversely, when African Americans and common whites made public claim to private rights they were able to claim not just political personas for themselves but also right to define substance of public debate (p. 18).

: The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter . Kathleen Rowe.

Book Review| December 01 1996 Review: The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter by Kathleen Rowe The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of LaughterKathleen Rowe Susan Knobloch Susan Knobloch Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (1996) 50 (2): 58–60. https://doi.org/10.2307/1213431 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Susan Knobloch; Review: The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter by Kathleen Rowe. Film Quarterly 1 December 1996; 50 (2): 58–60. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1213431 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1997 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter Kathleen Rowe

The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter Kathleen Rowe

As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women (review)

As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women (review)

:As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women

:<i>As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women</i>

As she likes it: Shakespeare's unruly women

As she likes it: Shakespeare's unruly women