The Crossing of Boundaries: Transgression Enacted

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHONAGH HILL
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Irish Theatre ◽  
Feminist Theatre ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Social Subordination

Feminist discourse has proven to be a vital component in the expanding field of Irish theatre studies owing to its exposure of elided work and the articulation of unrepresented voices. Irish women's participation in the public sphere and cultural fabric of society has been hindered in the course of the twentieth century and this is reflected in limiting representations of femininity as perpetuated by discourses of nationalism and Catholicism: the dominant imagery of the idealized mother which merges the feminized nation – Mother Ireland – and the Virgin Mary. In Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949, Paul Murphy highlights the ‘contradiction between the symbolic centrality of Woman as fantasy object and the social subordination of women as social subjects’. The incongruity between the shifting realities of Irish women's lives and the inflexible institutions that shape cultural representations is the focus of much feminist theatre research in Ireland. This research examines work which articulates the experience of estrangement from the dominant cultural imaginary and attends to the possibilities of staging more accommodating models through three interlinked strands: self-representation and the unhomely experience; constraint and freedom as explored through space and form; and a shift in focus to performance and the body.

scholarly journals ‘Transforming’ Women's Lives: Bobby Baker's Performances of ‘Daily Life’

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Aston
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Contemporary Performance ◽  
Women's Theatre

In an earlier issue of New Theatre Quarterly, NTQ55 (August 1998), Marcia Blumberg examined the setting of the kitchen in performances by Bobby Baker and Jeanne Goosen, arguing for the ‘transitional and transgressive’ possibilities of this domesticcum-performance space. Here, Elaine Aston returns to the ‘kitchen’ in Bobby Baker's performances of ‘daily life’. The article examines Baker's ‘language’ of food which ‘speaks’ of domesticity, and her conjunction of comic playing and the hysterical marking of the body, to show how her performance work constitutes an angry, feminist protest at the lack of social transformation in women's lives. Elaine Aston has authored a number of studies on contemporary women's theatre, and is Chair of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies, Lancaster University.

scholarly journals Women as Breadwinners in Maureen Sherry’s Opening Belle

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 318-327
Author(s):  
Margaretha Finna Calista ◽  
Wening Udasmoro
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Economic Globalization ◽  
Economic Aspect ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Public Sphere

There have been many popular fiction novels in the literature world that raise how women enter the economic aspect. One of them is the novel Opening Belle written by Maureen Sherry and published in 2016. Opening Belle represents women’s participation in the financial sector because they want a good life. This research is studied with the feminist political economy theory proposed by Jacqui True. In her book, The Political Economy of Violence against Women, True explains that economic globalization has changed women’s lives becoming financially independent. However, on the other hand, women involved in the public sphere are underappreciated and receive sexual harassment or violence, making it difficult for women to participate in the economic aspect. This research uses the descriptive qualitative method. With this method, the writer takes parts of the novel in the form of words, sentences, paragraphs which explain the economic aspect and women’s participation in it. This research is analyzed through the explanations and utterances of the characters. The results of this study are: first, the participation of women as breadwinners in this novel is started as part of her life experiences and is driven by the hardships of her family; second, women are highly motivated figures so that they implement several strategies to survive in their office, namely by proving their competence, joining the GCC women’s community and voicing equal rights in the workplace. In conclusions, economic globalization opens up women’s opportunity to become the sole breadwinner in the family.

scholarly journals The Dichotomy of Intimate Garments: Women’s Stays and Pockets in Georgian Britain

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia Cotton Cornwall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
The Public ◽  
Women's Clothing ◽  
Women's Relationships ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Public Sphere

In John Collet’s 1777 print, Tight Lacing, or Fashion Before Ease a woman is depicted holding onto a bed poster as her maid and husband strain to tighten the lacing on her stays. Meanwhile, a large tie-on pocket can be seen hanging from the woman’s waist. Although they were worn closely together on the female body stays and pockets have been studied independently from each other. This is understandable, as at first glance, they appear incomparable. Stays were the precursor to nineteenth century corsets and they moulded the body into the desired and fashionable shape. Pockets on the other hand were utilitarian bags meant for carrying necessary items; separate from women’s clothing they were tied around the waist with string and were hidden under the skirts. Despite the initial differences, these garments did not function independently from each other. Using caricatures, etiquette books, and physical examples found in museum collections, this study demonstrates that when examined in tandem it becomes apparent that stays and pockets served distinct, yet overlapping functions in women’s lives. They informed women’s relationships with their surrounding environments, strengthened women’s connection to the domestic realm, yet also gave women freedom to move outside the home and participate within the public sphere. Furthermore, both items also acted as private spaces, which allowed women to actively partake in romantic courtship and sexual flirtations in a gender appropriate way. By juxtaposing stays and pockets this study contributes to the growing historical discussion surrounding these items, but also begins to piece together a larger picture of the role undergarments, as a whole, played in women’s lives.

Soft Force

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Anne McLarney
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Women's Leadership ◽  
World Economic Forum ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Global Leader ◽  
World Economic ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter focuses on the work of Heba Raouf Ezzat. Ranked the thirty-ninth most influential Arab on Twitter, with over 100,000 followers, voted one of the hundred most powerful Arab women by ArabianBusiness.com, and elected a Youth Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, Raouf Ezzat has articulated and disseminated her Islamic politics in a global public sphere. Her writings and lectures develop an Islamic theory of women's political participation but simultaneously address other contested questions about women's leadership, women's work, and women's participation in the public sphere. Heba Raouf Ezzat is one of the most visible public figures in the Arab and Islamic world today, a visibility that began with her book on the question of women's political work in Islam, Woman and Political Work.

The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Sousa
Keyword(s):  
Gender Relations ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Criminal Records ◽  
Native Women ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Important Position ◽  
The One

The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar examines gender relations in indigenous societies of central Mexico and Oaxaca from the 1520s to the 1750s, focusing mainly on the Nahua, Ñudzahui (Mixtec), Bènizàa (Zapotec), and Ayuk (Mixe) people. This study draws on an unusually rich and diverse corpus of original sources, including Ñudzahui- (Mixtec-), Tíchazàa- (Zapotec-), and mainly Nahuatl-language and Spanish civil and criminal records, published texts, and pictorial manuscripts. The sources come from more than 100 indigenous communities of highland Mexico. The book considers women’s lives in the broadest context possible by addressing a number of interrelated topics, including: the construction of gender; concepts of the body; women’s labor; marriage rituals and marital relations; sexual attitudes; family structure; the relationship between household and community; and women’s participation in riots and other acts of civil disobedience. The study highlights subtle transformations and overwhelming continuities in indigenous social attitudes and relationships. The book argues that profound changes following the Spanish conquest, such as catastrophic depopulation, economic pressures, and the imposition of Christian marriage, slowly eroded indigenous women’s status. Nevertheless, gender relations remained inherently complementary. The study shows how native women and men under colonial rule, on the one hand, pragmatically accepted, adopted, and adapted certain Spanish institutions, concepts, and practices, and, on the other, forcefully rejected other aspects of colonial impositions. Women asserted their influence and, in doing so, they managed to retain an important position within their households and communities across the first two centuries of colonial rule.

Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hem Borker
Keyword(s):  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Marriage Education ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Media ◽  
Education And Employment ◽  
A Site ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
Educational Journeys ◽  
The Ideal

This ethnography provides a theoretically informed account of the educational journeys of students in girls’ madrasas in India. It focuses on the unfolding of young women’s lives as they journey from home to madrasa and beyond. Using a series of ethnographic portraits and bringing together the analytical concepts of community, piety, and aspiration, it highlights the fluidity of the essences of the ideal pious Muslim woman. It illustrates how the madrasa becomes a site where the ideals of Islamic womanhood are negotiated in everyday life. At one level, girls value and adopt practices taught in the madrasa as essential to the practice of piety (amal). At another level, there is a more tactical aspect to cultivating one’s identity as a madrasa-educated Muslim girl. The girls invoke the virtues of safety, modesty, and piety learnt in the madrasa to reconfigure conventional social expectations around marriage, education, and employment. This becomes more apparent in the choices exercised by the girls after leaving the madrasa, highlighted in this book through narratives of madrasa alumni pursuing higher education at a central university in Delhi. The focus on journeys of girls over a period of time, in different contexts, complicates the idealized and coherent notions of piety presented by anthropological literature on women’s participation in Islamic piety projects. Further, the educational stories of girls challenge the media and public representations of madrasas in India, which tend to caricature them as outmoded religious institutions with little relevance to the educational needs of modernizing India. Mapping madrasa students’ personal journeys of becoming educated while leading pious lives allows us to see how these young women are reconfiguring notions of Islamic womanhood.

scholarly journals The Entrepreneur in “Transformation Cinema”: Representing the Economic Changes of the 1990s in Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542098015
Author(s):  
Veronika Pehe
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Working People ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Economic Expectations

This article analyses how economic change after 1989 was perceived and rooted in society through cultural representations, specifically in the film production of Poland and Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic and Slovakia). The starting premise of this investigation is that popular commercial films, alongside the media and discourse of politicians and other key actors of the systemic transformation, also informed ideas about the free market circulating in the public sphere. Filmmakers, faced with the new realities brought about initially by the gradual liberalization of the economy in the late 1980s and later the systemic change of the economic transformation in both countries, immediately turned to capturing and fictionalizing the changes surrounding them. They presented audiences with role models of what it means to be a capitalist, but also tales of warning. This article investigates the “transformation cinema” of the 1990s, focusing on the figure of the entrepreneur and private enterprise. It examines how filmmakers searched for a visual language to critique or affirm the new social order, but also continued to work with inherited modes from the late socialist era. The article asserts that while the economic expectations conveyed through cinema focused largely on structuring the imagination of a new middle class in Poland, Czech(oslovak) cinema adopted a more sceptical outlook, suggesting that the promises of the free market were not available to “ordinary” working people.

Feminist Theory

2021 ◽  
pp. 488-503
Author(s):  
Jean Mills
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Feminist Community ◽  
Critical Responses

This chapter examines Virginia Woolf’s foundational role in the development of feminist theory, placing her theoretical positions on women’s lives and life-writing, privacy, the body, and self-expression in dialogue with a diverse and actively changing continuum of feminist thought. Focusing on the return of rage to the forefront of feminist discourse and social media’s effect upon feminist politics, the chapter chronicles the changing critical responses to Woolf’s feminisms, in relation to her positions on feminist identities and feminist community. The chapter also investigates the ways in which women of colour feminists disclosed Woolf’s racialized self and racist thinking to assess the place of Woolf’s feminism in contemporary political thought. From issues seeking to reconcile and value difference and diversity with the uses of ambivalence and calls for unity and integration, the chapter places the concepts and vocabulary of feminist theory within the context of Virginia Woolf’s work and example.

An Intimate Economy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra J. Finley
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cotton Production ◽  
Women's Labor ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Personal Histories ◽  
Southern Society ◽  
Lower South

Alexandra Finley adds crucial new dimensions to the boisterous debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism by placing women's labor at the center of the antebellum slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor. The slave market infiltrated every aspect of southern society, including the most personal spaces of the household, the body, and the self. Finley shows how women’s work was necessary to the functioning of the slave trade, and thus to the spread of slavery to the Lower South, the expansion of cotton production, and the profits accompanying both of these markets. Through the personal histories of four enslaved women, Finley explores the intangible costs of the slave market, moving beyond ledgers, bills of sales, and statements of profit and loss to consider the often incalculable but nevertheless invaluable place of women's emotional, sexual, and domestic labor in the economy. The details of these women's lives reveal the complex intersections of economy, race, and family at the heart of antebellum society.

scholarly journals Sign Language Interpreting in Theatre: Using the Human Body to Create Pictures of the Human Soul

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Michael Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Mirror Neuron System ◽  
Mirror Neuron ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Neuron System ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Neurological Research ◽  
Sign Language Interpreting

This paper explores theatrical interpreting for Deaf spectators, a specialism that both blurs the separation between translation and interpreting, and replaces these potentials with a paradigm in which the translator's body is central to the production of the target text. Meaningful written translations of dramatic texts into sign language are not currently possible. For Deaf people to access Shakespeare or Moliere in their own language usually means attending a sign language interpreted performance, a typically disappointing experience that fails to provide accessibility or to fulfil the potential of a dynamically equivalent theatrical translation. I argue that when such interpreting events fail, significant contributory factors are the challenges involved in producing such a target text and the insufficient embodiment of that text. The second of these factors suggests that the existing conference and community models of interpreting are insufficient in describing theatrical interpreting. I propose that a model drawn from Theatre Studies, namely psychophysical acting, might be more effective for conceptualising theatrical interpreting. I also draw on theories from neurological research into the Mirror Neuron System to suggest that a highly visual and physical approach to performance (be that by actors or interpreters) is more effective in building a strong actor-spectator interaction than a performance in which meaning is conveyed by spoken words. Arguably this difference in language impact between signed and spoken is irrelevant to hearing audiences attending spoken language plays, but I suggest that for all theatre translators the implications are significant: it is not enough to create a literary translation as the target text; it is also essential to produce a text that suggests physicality. The aim should be the creation of a text which demands full expression through the body, the best picture of the human soul and the fundamental medium of theatre.

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