Revolutionary Women Research Articles

Revolutionary women, body, and the limits of nationalist ideology in colonial Bengal: re-reading the memoirs of Bina Das and Kamala Dasgupta

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the memoirs of two Bengali revolutionary women, Bina Das’ Srinkhal Jhankar published in 1948, translated as Bina Das: A Memoir, and Kamala Dasgupta’s Rakter Akshare (Written in Blood) in 1954 to argue how their subjective desire and experience dismantle the gendered rhetoric of nationalism in colonial Bengal. The accounts of Bina and Kamala present their involvement in militant activism and subsequent imprisonment. Notably, there is an inherent urge in their writings to sacrifice life for the nation and a determination not to retreat from the torturous conditions of the colonial prison. The paper contends that the rhetoric of nationalism in colonial Bengal is embedded in hegemonic masculinity that initially confined women to the spiritual and domestic realm and later allowed them to be educated and modern without acknowledging their subjectivity. Activities of these political women thus destabilise the gender discourse prevalent in the private and public sphere of colonial society, which calls for a revision of the nationalist historiography. So, this essay will examine how tropes of the body, self-sacrifice, and penal experience, as produced in these memoirs, negotiate the nationalist ideology, subvert the binary of masculine and feminine, and establish their political subjectivity.

“Les femmes dans l’ombre”: Gendering the 1946 Revolution in Haitian Literature

This article examines revolutionary episodes, particularly the events of January 1946 in Haiti, which stage the exclusion/inclusion of women’s bodies in post-revolutionary politics. These were tensions with which Haiti’s first revolutionary generation had already grappled following national independence in 1804. Here, we will consider how the revolution was gendered, how it was experienced through the female body, and how the women of the revolution were represented in Haiti’s cultural and journalistic sphere of the mid-1940s. We will then examine how revolutionary women and the events of January 1946 have been portrayed in Haitian literature, including the writings of former revolutionaries like Gérald Bloncourt and novels by women such as Marie Vieux Chauvet and Yanick Lahens. Through the tradition of a female revolutionary spirit, its revival in 1946, and its subsequent literary reincarnations, this article examine how Haiti’s revolutionary women have historically played a role in shaping national identity and how fictional landscapes continue to be shaped by the collective memory of previous generations of female revolutionaries. It concludes that taking gendered, embodied, and intergenerational perspectives into account can be a useful way of diversifying our understanding of Haiti’s multiple historic legacies of revolution.

“An Unexpectedly Transgressive Subject of Twentieth-Century History”: How to Write (and Why to Read) about Communist Women Today

This review article discusses two newly-released publications on communist women activists: Kristen Ghodsee’s Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women and The Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women Activists around the World, edited by Francisca de Haan. It focuses on questions of narrative and the persuasive function of the reviewed works, asking how and for whom one should write about communist women today. It brings to light methodological challenges, as well as those related to access to sources on communist women. It also reflects on the place that publications which tell stories of communist women who challenged gender, class, and racial inequalities in the past occupy in the perception of contemporary readers, so often confronted in these times with experiences of inequality and violence.

Book Review: Unshaved: Resistance & Revolution in Women’s Body Hair Politics by Fahs B.

Book Review: <i>Unshaved: Resistance &amp; Revolution in Women’s Body Hair Politics</i> by Fahs B.

Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women by KristenGhodsee. New York: Verso Books, 2022. 224 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978‐1‐83976‐660‐2

The Russian ReviewEarly View BOOK REVIEW Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women by Kristen Ghodsee. New York: Verso Books, 2022. 224 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-1-83976-660-2 Julia L. Mickenberg, Corresponding Author Julia L. Mickenberg [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-0780-7726 University of Texas at Austin Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Julia L. Mickenberg, Corresponding Author Julia L. Mickenberg [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-0780-7726 University of Texas at Austin Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 15 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12518Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Creative Transformation of Art Language and Women's Revolutionary Spirit in the New Era

During the revolutionary period and after the founding of New China, there were many literary records, museum displays, film and television works, paintings and images that depicted female heroes, showing the complex connection between female power and the Chinese revolution. In the modern era of rapid social development and information flow, visual expressions can convey the inner meanings and concepts more quickly than traditional written records, audio and video works or historical museums. In order to complete the contemporary transformation of the revolutionary spirit of women, the historical spirit of revolutionary warfare is brought into line with the new era of today, inspiring the youth of today to pursue their ideals and dedicate themselves to building a new society. The thesis documents an attempt to transform the revolutionary spirit of women into a contemporary one by analyzing and selecting representative revolutionary women and using graphic software to combine artistic images, using wood panel carving effects and oil painting texture simulation to create, together with geometric graphic design, a secondary artistic creation with storytelling.

A New Female Identity in Indonesian Films: A Feminist Critical Discourse on Marlina Si Pembunuh Dalam Empat Babak

After the New Order Era (1998-present), women's involvement in the Indonesian film industry increased significantly. Previously, Indonesian cinema conceived more unfavourable content toward women. However, nowadays, women are no longer regarded as forceless and dependent in the eyes of men but as the inspirers who are active and highly educated. They serve as producers, directors, trainers, publicists, and distributors behind the camera. This article contended that these women filmmakers develop a distinct female identity from their male counterparts. It further examined how they establish a distinct feminine identity by incorporating a variety of female characters throughout their films. This study applied Robert Stanton and Sara Mills's analysis technique to filmmaker Mouly Surya's Marlina Si Pembunuh Dalam Empat Babak to demonstrate how she deals with the identification of female characters focused on women's concerns, stereotypic phenomena, and how women use movies to express themselves. The results show that women filmmakers represented the women's revolution in filmmaking. They filmed not only to amuse but also to liberate women from stereotypes and to oppose gender-based violence. Besides, films are also considered an ideological tool for combating men's stereotyped images of women and can be used to increase respect for the issues of women’s marginalisation. Keywords: Female identity, women filmmakers, Indonesian film, feminism, patriarchy.

The Hidden Shadow Pandemic of Marital Rape During COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak: A Critical Role of Women’s March for Awareness of Rape, Consent, and Sexual and Reproductive Rights

Introduction: Aurat March–the women’s rights movement has left an indelible imprint on a contradictive ensemble of a revolutionary women’s rights demand in a conventional socializing segment of society. Women’s March is an intersectional, intergenerational and inclusive feminist discourse centrally concerned with the health, education, engagement, advocacy, gender equality, freedom and empowerment. Anecdotal discourse of Aurat March, enacted amidst COVID-19 pandemic, is centrally concerned with achieving space in private and public sphere and equal sexual and reproductive rights in the marriage institution. Method: A broad research of literature and online data base related to marital rape using PsycINFO, PsycNet, PubMed, ERIC, EMBASE, Scopus, Google Scholar and Elsevier was undertaken. Manual searches of the specific intimate partner violence journals (e.g., Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Journal of Family Issues) and news articles were also included. Result: This analysis provides epistemological and media representation grounds for strategy and intervening analysis on the re-construction of the narrative of semantics of stereotyped gender roles. Further, this paper is embedded in the measure of women’s rights, bodily autonomy, sexual and reproductive rights, differential context of consent between sex and rape within the institution of marriage.

Domesticity and Political Participation: At Home with the Jacobin Women

The exclusion of women from political participation and the separation of private and public spheres seem anchored in human history to such an extent that we may think they are necessary. I offer an analysis of a philosophical moment in history, the early years of the French Revolution, where politics and domesticity were not incompatible. I show how this enabled women to participate in politics from within their homes, at the same time fulfilling their duties as wives and mothers. The republican home, on this interpretation, was a place of power and virtue, a merging of the public and the private sphere where political ideals and reforms could be born and nurtured. This conception of the home was derived in great part from a reading of Rousseau’s writings on motherhood. As the influence of French revolutionary women became more visible, they were severely repressed. The fact that they could not hold on to a position of power that derived naturally from the ideals they and others defended, I will suggest, was caused both by the fact that the framework used to allow women political power was insecure, and by the gradual replacement of republican ideals by liberal ones.

Radicalizing Feminism: The Mexican and Cuban Associations within the Women's International Democratic Federation in the Early Cold War

AbstractThis article analyses the interactions between the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and its Mexican and Cuban national chapters and affiliated organizations. Focusing on the National Bloc of Revolutionary Women, the Democratic Union of Mexican Women, and the Democratic Federation of Cuban Women, this article studies the ideological foundations these organizations defended and the action programmes they used to materialize them. One of its main contributions is to argue that Mexican and Cuban socialist and communist women contributed to the struggle for women's emancipation within the Eastern Bloc through grass-roots contributions that did not simply emulate European communist organizations, but drew on, and were informed by, national contexts, material conditions, and historical backgrounds. The increasing number of requests, demands, and proposals emerging from Latin America, and more specifically from Mexico and Cuba, ultimately fostered a steady process of decentralization that broadened visions of women's progress within the global leftist feminist movement during the early Cold War.

ТВОРЧІСТЬ МЕГРНУШ МАЗАРЕЇ В КОНТЕКСТІ СУЧАСНОЇ ПЕРСЬКОЇ ЕМІГРАЦІЙНОЇ ЛІТЕРАТУРИ

This overview paper presents the work of Mehrnoosh Mazarei (born 1951), a representative of modern Persian emigration literature of the late XX – early XXI centuries, living in the USA. The relevance of the chosen topic is due to the insufficient number of Ukrainian-language studies devoted to the prose of individual personalities among Iranian writers, in particular, the works of Mehrnoosh Mazarei. In the context of the development of modern prose in Iran in the late XX – early XXI centuries it was found that, against the backdrop of the changes brought about by the Islamic Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988), interest in the status and problems of women increased. Persian women's prose occupies a special place in Iranian literature both in Iran and abroad, since a large number of Iranian writers emigrate to the West and continue to work outside of Iran, including Mehrnoosh Mazarei. It was found that the characters in her works are mostly emigrants who live their lives trying to accept the culture of a new country, but also at the same time to keep memories of the past in order to console themselves with this. The lyrical hero of the stories of Mehrnoosh Mazarei is a woman who adapts to a new life and often recollects her past life. In her works, the writer, despite her feminist ideas, tries to convey to the readers as objectively as possible what the life of emigrant women was like and to tell their stories. Due to achievement of the goal of the study, which was to analyze the trends of Persian women's emigration prose on the basis of the works by Mehrnoosh Mazarei, it has become possible to determine the main features of the main characters of the author, being that they cannot forget that they have no place in their own society, and thus they are trying to adapt to the new rules of the countries where they are. The dominant theme of Mehrnoosh Mazarei's stories is the relationship between a man and a woman, the description of which undergoes serious metamorphosis from gender gap to gender equality, from condemning men to enabling their harmonious coexistence with women, from explaining patriarchy culture as a part human nature to recognizing that it is caused by social relations. The topic of a rebel woman is of no less importance for Mehrnoosh Mazarei. In particular, in the novel "Mina's Revolution", the heroine Mina becomes the embodiment of recalcitrant women, not only of Iran, but of all women with a similar fate: her experience and the difficulties she goes through make her a global rebel, a modern archetype of revolutionary women forced to leave their country in search of a better life and socio-political freedom.

A Pioneer of Women’s Liberation

Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel is a creative icon who has freed the ‘new’ woman from the millennium of dictated dress codes, stereotypical behaviors and clichéd sexual and status simplification. The little black dress has become synonymous of sophistication, to the femininity she gave the character flavor of relaxation and empowered women with timeless clothing pieces and equipped them with inspiring pieces of jewelry, distinctive decorative accessories and bold fragrances. Since then, with the Chanel fashion women were able to step sovereignly and freely aside of male. Coco resisted the reservation of clothing and decorative pieces and fabrics as exclusively masculine in order to help revolutionary women on their journey to a more a more useful elegance and a more noticeable fatality. Without any doubt she succeeded. She gave the new woman what she could not have before: practicality, youthfulness, timelessness and freedom, which was often scandalous at the time of her creation. But it has paid off with a revolution in the clothing industry and, more importantly, with a historic step in liberating the modern woman.

Sobre a literatura russa em tradução no Brasil: Entrevista com Denise Regina de Sales

Apresentamos uma entrevista com Denise Regina de Sales, professora, pesquisadora e tradutora cujo repertório de traduções do russo ao português incluem obras de autores renomados, tais como: Fiódor Dostoiévski, Anton Tchékhov e Ivan Turguêniev. Além das obras desses autores, seu repertório inclui ainda traduções de escritores como Mikhail Zóchtchenko, Vladímir Voinóvitch, Valentin Katáiev, Aleksandr Grinevsky e Varlam Chalámov, as duas últimas em parceria com Graziela Schneider e Elena Vasilevich, respectivamente. Entre suas traduções do russo, figura ainda A revolução das mulheres, volume organizado por Graziela Schneider com artigos, atas, panfletos e ensaios escritos por autoras russo-soviéticas sobre a emancipação e a condição das mulheres. Do português ao russo, Denise Regina de Sales traduziu, em parceria com Elena Vasilevich, o conto “O mate do João Cardoso”, de Simões Lopes Neto. No momento, realiza a tradução, a partir do russo, de trechos de uma novela de Galina Keptuké (1951-2019), escritora e tradutora cuja língua pertence ao ramo tungúsico da família altaica, falada pelos evenques, povo nômade que vive no Norte da Ásia, na região fronteiriça da Rússia, China e Mongólia. A entrevista nos foi concedida por e-mail de junho a agosto de 2020 e aborda questões que perpassam a tradução do russo ao português. Regina nos falou também de suas experiências acadêmicas e sobre sua posição teórica no que concerne o fazer tradutório. Nosso objetivo duplo foi conhecer um pouco mais sobre as questões que envolvem o mercado de tradução das obras escritas em língua russa e seus estudos e ensino no Brasil.

Feministic Analysis of the House of the Spirits

Begun in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the feministic theory has manifested in a variety of disciplines including literature. The House of The Spirits written by the Chilean author Isabel Allende in 1982 depicts the struggle faced by women of different classes in different generations. Although the novel spans about fifty years of the life of Esteban Trueba, it is the women around him during distinct phases of his life that bring life to the novel. This study explores the patterns of women subjected to distress and misery because of the male subjects around them. The second wave of feminism which lasted roughly two decades finds itself in the vicinity of the movement. It is no secret that the writer wanted to portray the veracity of the society with revolutionary and conventional women. The work also portrays how women empower the spirits of others of their gender around them. This study challenges the belief that exceptional women who are constrained in their families because of their gender endure more grief till they become the best version of themselves.

Insurgency, Land Rights and Feminism: Zapatista Women Building Themselves as Political Subjects

This article discusses how Zapatista women have built themselves as transformative political subjects that disrupt the racist, classist, and patriarchal nation-state. It underscores the importance of reflecting on Zapatista women, on their struggle for particular demands specified in the Revolutionary Women’s Law, especially the collective struggle for obtaining rights such as to land, to participate politically, and to organize themselves in the armed struggle. Instead of entering into debate over whether Zapatista women are feminists or not, this article recognizes how, besides transforming living conditions, the Zapatistas have organized politically and gone from a process of invisibility, silence, and obedience to one of recognition, speech, and command. In this sense, the struggle of Zapatista women is an example of theoretical and practical ruptures within the history of class, gender, and race struggled in Mexico and the world.

Naming What Is: Black Feminist Speculative Pedagogies

Naming What Is:Black Feminist Speculative Pedagogies Carmel Ohman (bio) INTRODUCTION: NONREALIST VEHICLES FOR THE REAL In a world where the government breeds dragons to eat people of color, Black women freedom fighters called "Sapphires" cultivate the ultimate survival strategy: they train the dragons. Sapphires strategically satisfy the dragons' hunger for "dark meat" by feeding them soul food.1 Once the unnamed narrator is able to "si[t] astride" the "huge" "beautiful" leader of the dragons named "Queen," the Black women's revolution can begin.2 N. K. Jemisin's short story "Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death" (2019) uses [End Page 298] nonrealist devices to diagnose long-standing structural violences while gesturing toward alternative worlds. In this way, the story enacts Octavia Butler's statement on the imaginative work of speculative fiction: "There's nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns."3 There is "nothing new" about the U.S. state systematically stereotyping and killing Black people. Dragons might as well take their place among linked anti-Black, misogynist, and heterosexist tools of state violence. Just as the story's narrator trains and "si[ts] astride" the very creature designed to kill her, Jemisin also reharnesses discursive violences that mark Black women in particular as angry and expendable.4 Dragons emerge as a nonrealist vehicle asserting the necessity and immanence of "new suns."5 Ending on the cusp of a Black women's revolution, Jemisin's story points to possible worlds that are free of police murders, housing segregation, mass incarceration, and the relentless scapegoating of Black womanhood. Here I make a brief case for teaching U.S. women's studies with an emphasis on Black feminist speculative fiction—a genre of writing by Black women, cis and trans, that uses nonrealist world-building to do the political work of valuing Black genders and sexualities.6 Nonrealist narrative choices in this context do not signify the unreal but rather illuminate multiple layers of Black life in a real world structured by white supremacy. My texts of focus are Black feminist because they interrogate dominant assumptions at the intersections of race, sex, sexuality, and gender in the interests of Black women's freedom.7 The pedagogical reflections I offer stem from my experience teaching women's studies during the coronavirus pandemic and abolitionist uprisings since spring 2020.8 Like Farah Jasmine Griffin, I have been struck by how Black speculative texts can model "community-building" for students "in the midst of economic, social, political, and ecological catastrophe."9 Griffin ultimately emphasizes how the genre can help students imagine different worlds—"new suns," in Butler's formulation. Yet the white supremacist storming of the Capitol together with the murders of Breonna Taylor, Riah Milton, George Floyd, and too many others have since compelled me to sit longer with the first part of Butler's formulation: "There's nothing new / under the sun." As Saidiya Hartman writes, Black Americans have long "been allowed to die in great numbers without a crisis ever being declared."10 Pandemics past and present only accelerate and expose the realities of institutionalized vulnerability to death. Jemisin's story redescribes and reclaims the violences of "nothing new." Refusing the passive erasures of being "allowed to die," the story recasts power in "huge," "beautiful," and "shimmering" terms.11 It makes interpretive demands that render existing forms of state-sanctioned violence newly legible, offering pedagogical tools for naming what is. Naming what is is an underacknowledged [End Page 299] strength of Black feminist speculative fiction more broadly. Black feminist speculative pedagogies can foster a deeper understanding of the real by way of nonrealist narrative. READING DIFFERENTLY: THE PEDAGOGICAL IMPERATIVES OF BLACK FEMINIST SPECULATIVE TEXTS Black feminist speculative texts demand different reading practices because their nonrealist devices defamiliarize real-world uses of power to oppress and alienate.12 In Bodyminds Reimagined (2018), Sami Schalk cites Marie Jakober on the critical capacities of speculative fiction: "'it makes us think differently. It makes us examine things we have never examined. Even better, it makes us re-imagine things we thought we knew.'"13 Here again is the multilayered promise of thinking differently that informs Butler's pronouncement. In Jemisin...

Women of Aktion: Performance, Gender, and the German Revolution of 1918

The role of women in the 1918 German revolution has largely been neglected in the historiography, recent commemorative events, and popular understanding of the end of World War I. One hundred years on, the revolution is seen as the cornerstone of German democracy. Leaving women out therefore excludes them from their own democratic history and distorts the historical narrative. In 2018 a new play, Women of Aktion, toured the UK and Germany, placing the forgotten female revolutionaries at center stage. It was the result of a close collaboration between academics and the theater group Bent Architect. The creation and staging of the play uncovered and performed the history of German women's resistance, and the performance itself intervened in the historiography and public narratives to resist the erasure of revolutionary women.

Revolutionary Women of Texas and Mexico: Portraits of Soldaderas, Saints, and Subversives ed. by Kathy Sosa et al.

Revolutionary Women of Texas and Mexico: Portraits of Soldaderas, Saints, and Subversives ed. by Kathy Sosa et al.

Unmaking the tricolore: Catherine Flon, material testimony and occluded narratives of female-led resistance in Haiti and the Haitian Dyaspora

ABSTRACTThe Haitian Revolution was the most radical antislavery and anticolonial struggle of the modern Atlantic World and the only successful slave revolution. Yet the dominant, white-authored colonial archive, which privileges written texts over forms of non-literary expression that flourished in the archive of slavery, conspicuously occludes the historical agents at its locus. While Michel-Rolph Trouillot set a precedent for rehabilitating these histories, the voices of the women that were so central to this historical moment remain concealed, peripheral and ultimately ignored. Using a creative interdisciplinary methodology, this article interrogates how unarticulated narratives of Haiti’s revolutionary women might be reassembled from disparate sources, looking closely at the mythologised figure of Catherine Flon, who purportedly sewed together the first Haitian flag at the Congress of Arcahaie on 18 May 1803. It also examines how artists and community groups in Haiti and across the Haitian dyaspora aim to preserve such figures for posterity.

W okresie powolnej modernizacji. Kobieta w II Rzeczypospolitej – próba bilansu

In the period of slow modernization: Women in the Second Republic of Poland – conclusions The First World War was an important factor in social modernization, bringing a new order of gender in public space. Among the most important changes in the situation of women in the post-war period, historians mention: obtaining full citizenship rights and broad access to education, increasing professional and educational aspirations, the evolution of intra-family relationships, increasing the proportion of active women, loosening of moral norms and a revolution in women’s fashion. Nevertheless, in the Second Republic, there was a visible widening of women’s life opportunities and increase of their independence in many areas of social life and in the public sphere. The granting of passive and active electoral law became the symbol of changes that took place in the social position of women after Poland regained its independence in November 1918. The aim of this article is to discuss the most important aspects of women’s participation in the political and social life of the Second Republic (1918–1939), as well as to follow social modernization processes in the context of women’s situation: labor market opportunities, educational aspirations, political activity, and changes in family and fashion. Another goal is the analysis of social structures that had the most powerful impact on women’s lives: tradition, economics, law.