Women's Texts Research Articles

Text Of Women's Theater in Kurdish Theatre

Text Of Women's Theater in Kurdish Theatre

UKRAINIAN WOMEN'S NOVEL ABOUT THE WAR OF THE 20TH CENTURY: THE PROBLEM OF THEME AND GENRE

The object of the study is the genre of women's novels about war. Attention is focused on how women's experience modifies the genre, changing the status of the event and adjusting plot schemes. The purpose of the study is to trace the peculiarities of the development of a women's novel about the war on the material of 4 novels of different periods: "Petrya Slymak" by Oleksandra Svekla, "Behind the Plow" by Varvara Cherednychenko, "Khreshchaty Yar" by Dokiya Humenna and "The Death of Cecil the Lion Made Sense" by Olena Stiazhkina. The novelty of the study is in the fact that it is the first attempt to analyze the genre of women's novel about the war in Ukrainian literature. The study is carried out in line with feminist studies and is based on the works of Nira Yuval-Davis, Cynthia Enloe, Miriam Cooke, Margaret Higonnet, and others. As a result of the research, a number of features of Ukrainian women's novels about the war have been revealed. The genre develops as inscribing women into male plot schemes and creating herstories of war. In the plot scheme, the depiction of battles is episodic, but the depiction of events in the rear and the occupation becomes important. This significantly expands the understanding of war not only as a history of defeats and victories, life and death but also as suffering, patience, and hard work. Women's novels focus on the contribution of women to the provision of the army and social organization, but also on the suffering that women experience during the war. The wounding or mutilation of men in war also becomes a frequent motif, which undermines the standards of masculinity usual for male examples of the genre. Women's texts are also more attentive to female characters, giving them more subjectivity. In the texts of the first half of the 20th century, this subjectivity is a consequence of the lack of men in the public space, providing women with space for self-realization outside the private sphere. In later texts, the subjectivity of women is substantiated by their characters. The appearance of the sniper character marks the overcoming of the victimization of female images in war novels.

Leisure and Recreation in the Socio-Cultural Memory of Urban Women in the 1950 and 1960s Based on Materials from Volgograd

The article examines everyday practices of rest and leisure among urban women living in the city of Volgograd (Stalingrad) - a city that had been completely destroyed during the war. The goal of the present study is to identify specific characteristics in the everyday practices of women. The methodology combines comparative historical, biographical and aggregate methods. Interviews conducted along the empathy method made it possible to identify the sensual and emotional sides of the respondents' lives. The research is based on ego-documents (diaries, oral history), periodicals (magazines, newspapers), and statistics. The article discusses the concepts of free time and rest as preserved in the memory of townspeople, and also private and public forms of leisure. A major finding is that women's memory and texts reveal sensory and emotional experiences that can be used for the history of everyday life. This allows for an imagination of everyday life from a new angle. Domestic work took away the vast majority of women's free time, and given the cultural potential of the region was still underdeveloped, most city dwellers concentrated pastime activities on their homes. However, with the high workload of women at home and at work, it was leisure outside the home that remained one of the few ways for women to relax and recover from mental and physical stress. The everyday life of urban women in the 1950s and 1960s was characterized by a division of leisure in private and public forms.

Чешско-немецкие и словацко-немецкие культурно-исторические взаимоотношения в современной женской прозе

The problem of historical relations with German-speaking nations is widely discussed in the modern Czech and Slovak literature, in particular, in women’s literature. Thus, the research objectives can be formulated as follows: to reveal the specificity of women’s prose, to identify the peculiarities of Germans’ image representation. Scientific originality of the study is conditioned by the fact that Czech and Slovak women’s literature has not been previously investigated by domestic researchers and also by the fact that “women's texts” are analyzed from imagological viewpoint. As a result, it is shown that Germans’ artistic image created by female writers aims to eliminate painful memories associated with Slavonic-German interactions.

Reading an Other

ABSTRACT The Resisting Reader by Judith Fetterley is a groundbreaking critique of the American literary canon that put together two major critical movements of the 1970s—feminist criticism and reception theory. Fetterley demonstrated how canonical American texts are “designed” to “immasculate” women readers, to compel them to identify with a male point of view, one of whose tenets is the designation of woman as other. Fetterley inspired the author to examine how women read women's texts and to formulate a theory of careful, responsible reading that does justice to the communicative project embodied in the text.

Teaching Women Writers in a "Great Books" Program

Abstract: This piece discusses the integration of women writers into a "Great Books" curriculum at a public university in Canada. I consider how the relations among my students, me, and the texts of early modern women have changed over the past twenty years as those texts have become part of the canon. I argue that the availability of high-quality teaching editions and my university's Learning Management System (LMS) have transformed both my students' encounters with female authored texts as well as the kinds of academic labor that I need to undertake to facilitate undergraduate learning. Where I once spent a good deal of time establishing frameworks within which women's writing had value, I now provide much more specialized guidance often helping students grapple with the material idiosyncrasies of early modern texts. Today, my students view women's writing as integral to the curriculum and are far more eager to embark on in-depth research projects. At the same time, these positive developments have often obscured the ways in which patriarchy shaped women's reading and writing, and I have had to underscore the conditions that restricted women's textual agency. My students and I reflect on the implications of teaching women's texts as "great books" and about the kinds of changes we need to make to make the curriculum more racially diverse.

The Pastoral Ethos of Joseph McElroy’s Writing: Lookout Cartridge and Women and Men

This article begins by proposing a very partial reading of Lookout Cartridge (1974) as a means of opening the way to a more comprehensive analysis of Women and Men (1987), an analysis which restricts itself, however, to a treatment of the main “man” of the novel, James Mayn, and in particular to his relation to his apparently suicidal mother. In doing so, it attempts to conceptualize various pastoral themes and intentions that appear in McElroy’s writing, thus finding a way of rendering an account of the author’s anti-paranoid stance with respect to science and technology, and enabling certain observations on the viability of an eco-critical approach to literature. The main objective, however, is an attempt to understand McElroy’s intention to “transmute” our technological fears without merely rejecting them, which involves a fundamental rethinking of the Art-Nature, Techne-Phusis conflict at the heart of the pastoral tradition. This rethinking, as it is deployed by the text of Women and Men, enables a critique of Western power and of its will to domination and destruction that appear infinitely capable of ignoring themselves. What McElroy’s pastoral ethos ultimately amounts to is a respect for the enigma of appearance in its difference from nature, an ethos which neither dominant modes of power nor eco-critical approaches to its catastrophic effects seem eager to acknowledge.

MULHER NEGRA NA LITERATURA: A PALAVRA COMO INSTRUMENTO DE LUTA E RESISTÊNCIA

O presente artigo pretende discutir como a literatura tem sido utilizada enquanto mecanismo de luta e resistência por mulheres negras, de modo a evidenciar diferentes caminhos e temáticas que permeiam tal utilização. Nesse âmbito, propomos uma reflexão sobre as vozes que se fazem presentes na escrita literária a partir do lugar de fala das escritoras, de suas experiências individuais e coletivas. Em seguida, realizamos uma análise de como as autoras, em suas produções, abordam questões relacionadas às identidades, ao empoderamento, às lutas e resistências da mulher negra. Historicamente, a mulher negra foi colocada à margem das ordens estabelecidas pelo sistema patriarcal, desse modo, o movimento para dar visibilidade a textos literários de mulheres negras é fundamental para desconstruir o discurso dominante e para o reconhecimento das potencialidades femininas negras. Assim, o crescimento de autorias femininas negras contemporâneas na esfera literária evidencia a busca pela “descolonização” da literatura, utilizando-a como meio de existência identitária e de busca pela igualdade de direitos. Como metodologia para a escrita, realizamos pesquisa bibliográfica, a partir de diferentes autores como: Chimamanda Adichie (2009); Evaristo (2014); Davis (2016); Soares (2006) Osana Zolin (2009); Candido (2002); Facina (2004); Cercas (2020); Ribeiro(2017); Zolin (2009); Guimarães(1998); Jesus( 2000); Rufino( 1988) e Santana(2015).

Perempuan di Bidang Politik dalam Surat Kabar Lombok Post Tahun 2019: Analisis Wacana Kritis Perspektif Teun A. Van Dijk

This study focuses on the analysis of critical discourse on microstructure, superstructure, and macrostructure in women's text in the political field in the Lombok Post newspaper in 2019. The theory used in this study is the theory of critical discourse analysis according to Teun A. van Dijk on the text dimension which consists of microstructures related to linguistic aspects consisting of semantic, syntactic, stylistic, and rhetorical elements. Superstructures related to the structure of the text or the text scheme. Macrostructure related to the theme in general. This research is qualitative research. Data collection methods in this study use the method of literature, which is a method that can help researchers in collecting data and filtering data that will be used for research. The data analysis method in this research uses the data analysis method according to Miles and Huberman. The results of this study show how the text analysis of news texts about women in politics in the Lombok Post newspaper in 2019 is based on van Dijk's discourse analysis theory.

The Trauma of Child Death: The Discourse of Mourning in Camille Laurens's and Laure Adler's Autobiographical Writings

This article addresses a noteworthy development in French women's autobiographical texts of the extreme contemporary: the painful writing of mourning subsequent to the traumatic death of a child. Trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Susan Brison, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub insist on the importance of the narration of the traumatic experience in the form of a 'meaningful [...] story' (Caruth, 1996: 117) enabling the object of the trauma to become the subject of her own story, and thus effecting a transformation of her status from passive victim to agential subject. If, however, trauma is beyond words and 'unspeakable' (in both senses of the adjective), how can one find the adequate discursive means to represent it, how can one transform the traumatic experience into a narrative? Drawing on theories of trauma and mourning, the article analyzes the ways in which two contemporary French writers, Laure Adler and Camille Laurens, deal with this daunting discursive dilemma, following the passing of their respective infants. Using various textual strategies, Adler and Laurens both succeed in narrating poignant accounts of loss, producing in each case a 'livre-tombeau' which is simultaneously a book of death and a book of life, allowing the deceased infant to live on through the writing of the trauma of mourning.

Editing Early Modern Women ed. by Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman

Reviewed by: Editing Early Modern Women ed. by Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman Margaret J.M. Ezell Editing Early Modern Women, ed. Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2016. Pp. xii + 299. $99.99. This thought-provoking collection, produced by two highly regarded scholars of early modern women's writings and including contributions by established editors working with early modern women's texts, will be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of anyone who teaches critical bibliography, scholarly editing, and/or who works with women's texts as part of their scholarship and in the classroom. Ms. Ross and Mr. Salzman's useful introduction gives an overview of the varied traditions of editing of early modern women's works. It also draws attention to the ways in which, in the twentieth century, these texts forced new editorial issues to be considered and dealt with that diverged from those codified by editions of mainstream canonical authors such as Jonson, Milton, and Melville. These are editorial choices that continue to be problematic today. "How do we edit texts that have no editorial history, or whose editorial history is concerned with oddity and exemplarity rather than canonicity?" is the first of their guiding questions, followed by "how do we edit texts that do not fit easily into conventional taxonomies of 'literature,' and what contexts should we present for them?" Finally, "how can digital methods of editing, archiving, and amassing early modern texts facilitate multiple editorial and literary-critical aims?" These are important, central questions confronting twenty-first-century editors in general and not just those devoted to the recovery and preservation of works by women or lesser-known male authors. The volume is divided into four parts. The first deals with "Editorial Ideologies," followed by "Editing Female Forms: Gender, Genre, and Editing," "Out of the Archives, Into the Classroom," and "Editorial Possibilities," the last dealing with editing in the digital age. Many of the essays deal with major figures and familiar texts produced by women in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Danielle Clarke's "Producing Gender: Mary Sidney Herbert and Her Early Editors," Susan M. Felch's "The Backward Gaze: Editing Elizabeth Tyrwhit's Prayerbook," Ramona Wray on Elizabeth [End Page 166] Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, Leah S. Marcus on editing Queen Elizabeth, and Mary Ellen Lamb on Mary Wroth's Urania. Other essays address generic issues, including editing women's letters for print publication by Diana G. Barnes and Marian WynneDavies's chapter on editing dramas for performance. Essays that will have particular interest for the readers of The Scriblerian include ones looking at women writing during the English Civil War, including Lucy Hutchinson, Anne, Lady Halkett, and Katherine Philips, as well as to what extent lesser-known women writing in the Interregnum and Restoration need modernization for the classroom. Elizabeth Clarke, Suzanne Trill, and Marie-Louise Coolahan tackle editing issues raised by individual texts and authors. Ms. Clarke, who is one of the team of editors producing the OUP complete works of Lucy Hutchinson, points out in "Contextualizing the Woman Writer: Editing Lucy Hutchinson's Religious Prose" that a male-authored, seventeenth-century theological treatise would be edited in the context of printed, public theological writings. However, Hutchinson's Principles is devised in the form of a long letter to her daughter Barbara. Hutchinson expects others will read her text, but she will not publish it: "I write not for the presse, to boast my owne weaknesses to the world but to imprint on your hart the characters I have received of God." Ms. Clarke thus argues the importance of situating the work in part in the context of the popular seventeenth-century women's genre, the "mother's legacy," suggesting that the choice of "a consciously feminized genre" is important in the assumptions the writer is making about her readers and the type of theological knowledge they will bring to the text. Similarly, in "Critical Categories: Towards an Archaeology of Anne, Lady Halkett's Archive," Ms. Trill looks at the way in which earlier editing of Halkett's "life and works" has created different "lives" in different times. She begins with...

Tools of the Trade: Working Women in Texts from the Sexual Revolution

“Despite the trend toward stay-at-home mothering in the post-WWII decades, few popular women’s narratives…focus on the domesticated woman, with the notable exceptions of Grace Metalious’s scandalous bestseller Peyton Place (1956), Sue Kaufman’s acerbic social commentary Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967), and Betty Friedan’s liberal-feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique (1963). Herein, Friedan deplored the suburban entrapment of middle-class women and argued vigorously throughout her own career for women’s improved access to the paid professional sector. Due to the influence of this text and related outcries from the nascent feminist second wave, stories about women’s search for meaningful careers in conflict with traditional desires for spouse and children left their mark on this era.”

Penelope and the Minyades: Mythologemes and a Rhizome for Women's Text(ile)s as Women's Work in the Lyric Voice of Juana Inés de la Cruz

Penelope and the Minyades: Mythologemes and a Rhizome for Women's Text(ile)s as Women's Work in the Lyric Voice of Juana Inés de la Cruz

Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and the Ethics of Pedagogy: Contested Imaginaries in Post‐9/11 Cultural PracticeLisa K.Taylor and JasminZine, Editors. Routledge, 2014.

Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and Ethics of Pedagogy: Contested Imaginaries in Post-9/11 Cultural Practice Lisa K. Taylor and Jasmin Zine, Editors. Routledge, 2014.In Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and Ethics of Pedagogy, editors Lisa K. Taylor and Jasmin Zine have produced a pedagogical intervention. .. concerned with how of Muslim women are taken up in various educational sites and within diverse publics with a view to addressing politics and ethics of reading within and against these various constructs (3). Their main concern argues that academics and teachers have reified concept of Muslim women as the Other by using Orientalist rhetoric in classrooms. With sections on reading practices, text production, pedagogies, and interviews with key figures in arts and scholarship, this collection works to disrupt such orientalist readings by offering strategies to problematize, demystify, and dismantle [such] representations (6). An extensive introduction an overview of feminist, postcolonial, and gender theory related to study of transnational issues facing Muslim women and their representations.The editors' main audience is those who teach within interdisciplinary fields of study that focus on gender, feminism, arts, and popular culture and who both seek to approach their classrooms with a deeper understanding of challenges of teaching topics focused on Muslim women and wish to challenge their students' perceptions of these women and their needs. This text asks those educators to reconsider framing of courses to align with a less Western-centered approach when teaching about Muslim women around globe.Those teaching such texts in Western classrooms will find several articles most useful. Dana M. Olwan's Pedagogies of Solidarity in Sheir Hammad's 'First Writing Since' introduces poem as a work that engages, performs, and teaches politics of (111). Olwan then examines such works that remember 9/11 complicate narratives of American victimhood, singularity, and innocence (111). Finally, Olwan describes how Hammad's poem presents a transformative politics of solidarity that transcends national borders (111). Moving reader through a close reading of poem and then offering ideas for teaching it, Olwan ultimately shows that Hammad's poem offers a substantive and cogent challenge to dominant narratives of Arab American unbelonging (128).Scholars interested in cultural importance of book in West will find Catherine Burwell's 'A Too Quick Enthusiasm for Other': North American Women's Book Clubs and Politics of Reading a useful voice in conversation about ways in which Third World women's texts are framed and presented to First World women's book clubs (134). …

Theorizing Democratic Feelings, Disagreement, and the Temporal Child in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's <em>The Linwoods</em>

Theorizing Democratic Feelings, Disagreement, and the Temporal Child in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's The Linwoods Marissa Carrere Written in the wake of the Nullification Crisis over tariffs on manufactured goods in which South Carolina threatened to leave the Union, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's 1835 novel The Linwoods stages the anxieties that condense around the desire to believe that democracy follows timeless certainties and the knowledge that its process necessarily entails negotiating contingent and ephemeral opinions. The Linwoods suggests that such irresolvable tension is vital to democratic thought, and Sedgwick uses the figure of the child to represent that tension. Because of nineteenth-century constructions of children as both malleable and transcendent, the figure of the child permits Sedgwick to dramatize the conflict between the self-evident truth and radical revisability of the Constitution and the patriotic feelings of American citizens. As the novel investigates the nature of both national and political commitments, Sedgwick uses the figural child to assert normative claims in response to her particular politico-historical moment while troubling the theoretical integrity of those claims. In limning Sedgwick's move toward the theoretical realm, my project aims to expand our understanding of how the child operates in the political literary imagination and to recognize Sedgwick's contributions to the archives of democracy. Contextualizing these aims demands that we read nineteenth-century American women's writing through the lens of political theory. Without question, the feminist recovery of nineteenth-century female-authored fiction introduced women writers to the political clime and canon; indeed, the inclusion of women involved disrupting the fantasy of an apolitical or ahistorical [End Page 33] aesthetic canon and recognizing literary texts as politically, socially, and historically contingent. However, literary historians have not fully examined how these texts theorize democratic governance and participation. While we read women's texts for their political valences and explicit political critiques and as political acts themselves, we might also ask how these texts variously theorize democracy not only in the ideological terms of gendered relationships to the political center but also at the level of philosophical principle. Admittedly, in seeking the conceptual nature of political critique I may be trying to tease a distinction that will ever elude us: What is the difference between reading a literary text for its political engagements and as a mode of political theory? How do we discern which aspects of a literary text count as articulations of political critique? Even without resolving these questions, we can acknowledge the need to rethink and revise the disproportionately (white-and) male-authored literary archive of democracy.1 This essay begins to offer a response by reading through the historical in order to reach the conceptual in Sedgwick's writing. the nullification crisis and the temporal child In the opening chapter of The Linwoods, a group of boys on a playground confound their adult audience with the un-childlikeness of their politically charged play. Mr. Linwood turns to his son and asks: "Herbert, can you tell me what these boys are about? They seem rather to be at work than play" (17). Herbert replies that the boys are "throwing up a redoubt to protect [their] fort" and to "keep off the British" (17–18), and Mr. Linwood is appalled by "the seeds of rebellion springing up in their young hot bloods": A loud huzzaing was heard from the fort—"What does that mean?" asked Mr. Linwood. "The whigs are hanging a tory, sir." "The little rebel rascals!—Herbert!—you throwing up your hat and huzzaing too!" (18) With this scene, Sedgwick establishes the intergenerational conflict between loyalist Mr. Linwood and his revolutionary children that the novel will work to resolve. Critical readings of The Linwoods generally characterize this conflict as a domestic political allegory responding to the nationalist concerns of its contemporary moment, in particular the passing of the Revolutionary generation and the threat of disunion raised by the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33.2 By casting these concerns about the current generation's national identity into the moment of its discordant origins, Sedgwick imagines the possibility of a reconciled and [End Page 34] healthy national future through proper models of republican virtue. In keeping with other domestic...

‘Not a country at all’: Landscape andWuthering Heights

This article explores the issue of women's representational genealogies through an analysis of Andrea Arnold's 2011 Wuthering Heights. Beginning with 1970s feminist arguments for a specifically female literary tradition, it argues that running through both these early attempts to construct an alternative female literary tradition and later work in feminist philosophy, cultural geography and film history is a concern with questions of ‘alternative landscapes’: of how to represent, and how to encounter, space differently. Adopting Mary Jacobus' notion of intertextual ‘correspondence’ between women's texts, and taking Arnold's film as its case study, it seeks to trace some of the intertextual movements – the reframings, deframings and spatial reorderings – that link Andrea Arnold's film to Emily Brontë’s original novel. Focusing on two elements of her treatment of landscape – her use of ‘unframed’ landscape and her focus on visceral textural detail – it points to correspondences in other women's writing, photography and film-making. It argues that these intensely tactile close-up sequences which puncture an apparently realist narrative constitute an insistent presence beneath, or within, the ordered framing which is our more usual mode of viewing landscape. As the novel Wuthering Heights is unmade in Arnold's adaptation and its framings ruptured, it is through this disturbance of hierarchies of time, space and landscape that we can trace the correspondences of an alternative genealogy.

The grasp that reaches beyond the grave: the ancestral call in black women's texts

The grasp that reaches beyond the grave: the ancestral call in black women's texts

Promised bodies: time, language & corporeality in medieval women's mystical texts

Promised bodies: time, language & corporeality in medieval women's mystical texts

Interpretive Challenges Posed by the Gendered Performances of Early American Female Criminals

process of understanding, recovering, and researching early American female criminals is rife with complications. (1) While writing my dissertation on female criminals and the nontraditional texts that we use to examine how these women communicated, expressed agency, and maintained a voice, I have often found myself coming up with more questions than answers. These questions present a theoretical problem of how to reconstruct a cultural narrative that includes female criminals when we do not have their own words with which to work. Examining women's texts often leads me to question how we read and analyze nonliterary texts such as trial transcripts, execution narratives, and other documents focused on these women. We face several interpretative challenges when trying to construct an accurate and complete narrative of any historical situation. This is compounded when the story of the woman's life is told largely through fragments written by people other than the woman herself. execution narrative The Declaration and Confession of Esther serves as a telling case in point. In addition to the narrative of the twenty-one-year-old servant girl who was executed in 1701 for infanticide, the published text includes a sermon by John Rogers and two other execution narratives. first-person narrative putatively came directly from Esther Rodgers, yet the narration frequently slips into third person, disrupting the first-person confession. Many different voices constituted this execution narrative. Rev. Samuel Belcher wrote the introduction. Although no names are specifically attached to the later parts of the text, certain sections are attributed to ministers, including John Rogers, and to a woman who was supposedly a friend of Esther Rodgers during her imprisonment. All of these figures bring their own voices and agendas to the table. For example, Belcher's opening emphasizes how God's forgiveness made Rodgers into a Candidate of Heaven (Rogers 95). This expresses the desire to convert those reading to God's ways in order to make themselves, also, candidates for heaven and God's grace. rhetoric indicates an authorial voice that is distinct from that of twenty-one-year-old Esther Rodgers, who had very little education. personal confession supposedly transcribed from her words closely mimics the rigid rhetoric of a Puritan minister, calling into question the degree to which Rodgers's voice emerges in the midst of these other voices; the latter were privileged by their owners' ability to write and more powerful social positions. However, it would be simplistic to conclude that Rodgers is just a figure being used by others and not an actual twenty-one-year old woman who is experiencing and engaging with the circumstances of her own life. Rodgers herself, unable to write her own separate narrative, had to depend on others to create the text we have today. This is the complicated situation that one must contend with in order to analyze a figure such as Rodgers accurately. Performance theory provides a way to read Esther Rodgers's narrative that illuminates the richness and complexity of the text, especially the narrative's ending on the dramatic day of her execution. Joseph Roach writes: social processes of memory and forgetting, familiarly known as culture, may be carried out by a variety of performance events, from stage plays to sacred rites, from carnivals to the invisible performance rituals of everyday life. To perform in this sense means to bring forth, to make manifest, and to transmit. To perform also means, though often more secretly, to reinvent. (xi) According to this definition, every moment is a potential opportunity for both cultural transmission and creation. Rituals involving female criminals, including trials and the texts associated with them, become liminal moments full of performative power. Multiple members of the community who watched Rodgers's performance at the time of her execution reportedly created this portion of the text. …

Toward a Culturally Cliterate Family Law

Sexual desire and sexual activity long have played central roles in family law, rationalizing its rules, informing its policies, and animating any number of calls for reform. Since the 1970s, gender equality has also become a salient value in family law - purporting to correct legally imposed double standards of the past. Yet, despite the conceptual centrality of sexual desire and sexual activity, family law says nothing explicit about sexual pleasure. And despite the salience of gender equality in contemporary family law, the field remains preoccupied with performances that produce heterosexual men's orgasms while ignoring or rejecting women's interest in orgasmic pleasure. As a result, family law today is marked by fundamental omissions and inconsistencies.This paper attempts to begin to fill the gap and to explore the incongruities. It builds on Susan E. Stiritz's Cultural Cliteracy: Exposing the Contexts of Women's Not Coming (published as a companion piece) and examines the relevance of Stiritz's analysis for family law. According to Stiritz, '[c]ultural cliteracy' denotes what an adequately educated person should know about the clitoris, which is that it is a culturally despised body part because it is an obdurate reminder of women's independence and power and supports women's liberation. Stiritz tracks the role of the and women's sexual pleasure through history, compares past and contemporary anatomical understandings of the clitoris, and then demonstrates through empirical studies, based on courses she has taught, how cultural cliteracy can empower women and bring new insights to the reading of women's texts. She calls for the integration of adequate understandings of the clitoris into a variety of different discourses, including law.In response, this paper focuses on family law as a promising site for integrating cultural cliteracy into legal discourse. Part I introduces the project and its challenges. Part II explores the central role of sex in family law, with emphasis on how family law seeks to channel sexual desire into monogamous marriage and how this effort to manage sexual activity plays out, given the pervasive silence about women's sexual pleasure. This analysis, in turn, exposes significant inconsistencies, challenging the coherence of family law’s own stated policies, including its simultaneous preference for monogamous marriage, acceptance of no-fault divorce, and commitment to gender equality. Part III turns to contrasting ways to make family law more culturally cliterate, specifically, allowing individuals to learn what they can from popular culture versus undertaking affirmative government efforts to promote such knowledge, through educational programs. Part III next looks beyond educational programs to suggest how respect for women's sexual pleasure might prompt rethinking several specific aspects of family law, including divorce grounds; civil actions for sexual harm; and the legal treatment of various supports, interventions, and protections that facilitate sexual pleasure, from sex toys to reproductive autonomy. Part IV concludes with a deeper look at the prospect of a culturally cliterate family law, including the fundamental paradoxes that it might pose.