Seizing the “Point Imaginary”

2019 ◽  
pp. 111-140
Author(s):  
Wendy Beth Hyman
Keyword(s):  
Limit Point ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Vanishing Point ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Richard Crashaw ◽  
Limits Of Knowledge ◽  
A Site ◽  
Elusive Concept

“Seizing the ‘Point Imaginary’ ” follows erotic poets as they grapple with the elusive concept of nothingness. The pervasive quips about a woman’s “nothing” within Renaissance literature belie the fact that virginity is in several respects a genuine paradox. Although countless attempts upon the “point imaginary” were merely sexual in nature, others make of the hymen the ultimate sign of mystery and impossibility: a tympan between materiality and immateriality, the cusp between the known and unknown. The hymen, like the Lucretian atom or the draftsman’s mathematical horizon of sight, sometimes functions as the poet’s conceptual limit point. Worth pursuing for its own sake, this vanishing point of the female body further beckons the poet with the tantalizing threshold of knowledge that it emblematizes. A seemingly trivial seduction narrative such as Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander thereby re-emerges as a site for wrestling with the epistemological and ontological problems that this paradoxical bit of material represents. This chapter traces these operations in the works of several authors, including Shakespeare, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, Ben Jonson, John Davies, and Thomas Wyatt. “Nothing,” for these poets, may initially refer to the woman and her questionable virginity, but also becomes attached to more portentous unknowables and supersigns. Such “impossible” thoughts were not wholly containable within the airy realm of paradox. They had implications for how early moderns understood the limits of knowledge in relation to both bodily and poetic form.

The role of the female body in contesting and negotiating space in sports for women in rural and urban Zimbabwe

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-113
Author(s):  
Obert Bernard Mlambo ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Girl Child ◽  
School Sports ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Gender Ideals ◽  
A Site ◽  
Embodied Practice

This article examined attitudes, knowledge, behavior and practices of men and society on Gender bias in sports. The paper examined how the African female body was made into an object of contest between African patriarchy and the colonial system and also shows how the battle for the female body eventually extended into the sporting field. It also explored the postcolonial period and the effects on Zimbabwean society of the colonial ideals of the Victorian culture of morality. The study focused on school sports and the participation of the girl child in sports such as netball, volleyball and football. Reference was made to other sports but emphasis was given to where women were affected. It is in this case where reference to the senior women soccer team was made to provide a case study for purposes of illustration. Selected rural community and urban schools were served as case references for ethnographic accounts which provided the qualitative data used in the analysis. In terms of methodology and theoretical framework, the paper adopted the political economy of the female body as an analytical viewing point in order to examine the body of the girl child and of women in action on the sporting field in Zimbabwe. In this context, the female body is viewed as deeply contested and as a medium that functions as a site for the redirection, profusion and transvaluation of gender ideals. Using the concept of embodiment, involving demeanor, body shape and perceptions of the female body in its social context, the paper attempted to establish a connection between gender ideologies and embodied practice. The results of the study showed the prevalence of condescending attitudes towards girls and women participation in sports.

scholarly journals Oppression and Female Body: A Feminist Critique of the Novel 'Half the Sky'

2021 ◽  
Vol VI (I) ◽  
pp. 79-85
Author(s):  
Ayesha Khaliq ◽  
Mamona Yasmin Khan ◽  
Rabia Hayat
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Sampling Technique ◽  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Interpretive Paradigm ◽  
A Site ◽  
Body Theory

The female body is more than often used as a site to perpetuate violence and oppress women in patriarchal societies. The current study aims to explore how patriarchal oppression targets the female body and how it enforces women to become subalterns having no voice in the selected fictional work, Half the Sky by Kristoff and WuDunn. For this purpose, Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Bryan Turner's The Body theory (1984) are used as theoretical frameworks to explore the selected novel. The research is descriptive qualitative, and placed within the interpretive paradigm. The data for the present study is in the form of textual paragraphs, which is taken from the selected novel and is collected through the purposive sampling technique. The study argues on women's oppression and violence. The findings of the study revealed that the dominancy of male counterpart in every field of life is the basic reason for women oppression which leads to the women being subalterns.

American Nervousness: Motherhood and ‘The Mental Activity of Women’ in the Era of Sexual Anarchy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Coit
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Mental Activity ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
A Site ◽  
Common Association

This chapter revisits a site of foundational feminist scholarship to ask new questions about gender, class, race, health and motherhood. Examining two iconic fin-de-siècle female writers, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Gilman, it highlights an age-old tension in their work, articulated via contemporary eugenics, between the portrayal of the female body and that of the female intellect. It shows that both writers held antiquated views about female agency that sit uncomfortably with their common association with feminism and modernity.

The Affective Feminism of Ghazaleh Hedayat

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-121
Author(s):  
Foad Torshizi
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Iranian Art ◽  
New Form ◽  
Contemporary Artist ◽  
A Site ◽  
Western Woman

Abstract This article examines the works of the Iranian contemporary artist, Ghazaleh Hedayat. It argues that her turn from figural representation to nonfigural abstraction and consequently to what Laura Marks has called “haptic visuality” demonstrates a careful and systematic aesthetic strategy that attempts to confront and at times even exit representation. It shows that Hedayat's works since the early 2010s offer an affective approach to feminism in contemporary Iranian art that doesn't hinge on representational modes of expression, which are often susceptible to assimilation into identitarian narratives and inadvertently complicit in various forms of marginalization (gender, ethnic, etc.). Hedayat's affective feminism not only complicates clichéd interpretations of her work as a non-Western woman, but it also materializes a new form of knowledge more in tune with feminism. Focusing on the female body as a site of pain, friction, tension, love, maternality, and, more significantly, as a site where self and its other—both in terms of gender and ethnicity—encounter each other, Hedayat undermines visibility by way of pushing it across the borders of sight into the realms of visuality, haptic experience, and proprioception.

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

2018 ◽  
pp. 72-100
Author(s):  
Kimberly Lamm
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Angela Davis ◽  
The Us ◽  
Iconic Images ◽  
American Media ◽  
A Site

Chapter 2 analyses Angela Davis’s written reflections on her transformation into the ‘imaginary enemy’ of the US nation-state. A spectacle in the most consequential sense, the iconic images of Davis telegraphed across American visual culture in the early 1970s, many of which highlight her Afro, demonstrate that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies of racial and sexual difference can take visual form. Beginning with the FBI’s ‘Wanted’ poster of her, this chapter tracks the images of Davis that circulated through the American media and came close to inscribing the accusation of her criminality into legal truth and commonly held belief. I argue that Davis’s ordeal demonstrates that visual culture serves as a site where the pathologies of racism and sexism compound each other and force black women into positions of subordination, and that it therefore offers a powerful context for understanding the stakes of Piper’s textual interventions into the iconicity of the black female body. Reading a range of Davis’s writings (her autobiography, her letters to George Jackson, her own defence statement) in relation to Piper’s artwork, this chapter shows that Davis also deployed language to contest the legacies of ‘ungendering’ and undo the visual logics that have determined black women’s visibility..

Blackgirl, One Word: Necessary Transgressions in the Name of Imagining Black Girlhood

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 275-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique C. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Girlhood Studies ◽  
A Site ◽  
Education Discourse

Blackgirls are an oft-disappeared population. Frequently, race or gender in popular and education discourse are foregrounded, leaving the Blackgirls fragmented. By contrast, one word, Blackgirl, rejects compartmentalizing Blackgirls’ lives, stories, and bodies and serves as a symbolic transgression to see them/us as complex and whole. Interlaced with the symbolic is the material needed to value the Black female body. To provide redress for the disregard of Blackgirl experience and posit the Black female body as a site of cultural memory and possibility, this article offers my body as a vessel through which transgression is incited. In particular, it discusses insights from an intergenerational project on Black girlhood and the vital impromptu transgressions/grooves I made during the reflexivity process of my performance. By sharing a Blackgirl’s truths and praxis that arose from yearnings, beauty, genius, and struggles of Black girlhood and being a Blackgirl advocate, this article expands the work of Black Girlhood Studies, interjects Blackgirls into the landscape of girlhood, and contributes to its reterritorialization.

Civility and Virility in Ben Jonson

2002 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorna Hutson
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Note Taking ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Evaluative Language ◽  
Social Advancement ◽  
European Renaissance ◽  
Personal Liability

THE EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE SAW the rise of a phenomenon known as ''civil conversation,'' according to which the arena of informal speech became significant for men's social advancement. At the same time, however, Renaissance literature inherited from the classics an evaluative language that denounced loquacity as effeminate. Hutson's article uses Ben Jonson's writings to explore the tension between the prescriptions of ''virile style'' and the social reality for men of ''civil conversation.'' The tension manifests itself, she argues, in the expanded sense of personal liability inherent in the notion of informal speech as a significant site of advancement in the age of ''note-taking'' and the commonplace book. She shows how the note-taking habit blurs the line between circulating speech for aesthetic purposes and for purposes of espionage. She discusses certain pervasive classical figures and ideas - such as the ''mindful drinking companion'' and the Plutarchan idea of internalizing and preempting hostile judgments of one's words by imagining oneself as one's own enemy. She notes that Jonson reworks these figures and ideas to produce a heroic notion of a ''civil conversationalist'' who is also ''virile'' in that he can resist being effeminized bythe circulation of hostile or ignorant interpretations of his words; he can resist, in other words, being transformed into the feminine figure of Rumor. The article concludes with a reading of Jonson's Every Man in His Humour as a play concerned to articulate a new, heroic ''civil virility'' as the ability to resist hostile constructions of informal speech.

"Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue": William Cavendish, Ben Jonson, and the Decorative Scheme of Bolsover Castle*

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Raylor
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe iconography of Bolsover Castle is much appreciated but little understood. This is because we have not recognized its dynamic, theatrical character, which centers on — indeed, implies the presence of its seventeenth-century owner, William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle. Read in terms of Cavendish's self-conception as a figure of patriachal authority and Herculean passions, the castle emerges as a witty apologia for its owner — and perhaps even as a site for the pursuit of his amours. This reading sheds new light upon the relationship between Cavendish, Bolsover, and Ben Jonson, who provided the text for a royal visit to Bolsover in 1634.

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