Traditions and Transformations

Author(s):  
Regina Marler

Modernist, feminist, experimental: the terms we now most associate with Virginia Woolf all presuppose a break with conventions and a rejection of the status quo in art and power relations. Yet all her life, Virginia Woolf kept returning in memory to her childhood home, to the crowded Victorian family in which she was raised, where boys went to the best schools that Sir Leslie Stephen could afford, and girls, however clever or gifted, were shaped for charitable work, for motherhood, for marriage to prominent men. This obsessive turning back is a kind of pained nostalgia: a lament, a grievance, a comfort—and the engine of even her most avant-garde work. This chapter explores the traditions and assumptions of that potent childhood world, in part through the prism of three conservative female role models her mother, Julia Stephen, chose for her daughters: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Octavia Hill, and Florence Nightingale.

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.


2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 209-212
Author(s):  
Phillip Joy ◽  
Brandon Gheller ◽  
Daphne Lordly

Purpose: In Canada, few men are dietitians. Literature is sparse regarding why so few men are drawn to dietetics. This study, part of a larger qualitative study, explores the experiences of men who are dietitians throughout their training and careers using a phenomenology framework. The study examines the meanings participants make about dietetics in relation to recruitment.Methods: Semi-structured individual interviews with 6 men who are dietitians were completed, transcribed, and analyzed.Results: An overarching theme, “experiences and outcomes of a gendered profession”, was related to the participants’ perspectives concerning recruitment into the dietetic profession. Four sub-themes are reported: (i) societal gender division, (ii) gender division within the profession, (iii) isolation from men who are mentors and other men, and (iv) the need to deconstruct and change. The results provide insight into recruitment barriers and potential approaches for increasing the number of men within dietetics, including changing the perceptions of the profession, increasing role models for men, and dismantling gendered practices.Conclusion: Participants believed that increasing men within dietetics would be beneficial and would increase diversity. It is unlikely that recruitment of men will increase if the status quo and gender norms of the profession are not disrupted and challenged.


Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (5) ◽  
pp. 742-767
Author(s):  
Mirjam de Bruijn ◽  
Loes Oudenhuijsen

AbstractSlam poets in Africa are part of an emerging social movement. In this article, the focus is on women in this upcoming slam movement in francophone Africa. For these women, slam has meant a change in their lives as they have found words to describe difficult experiences that were previously shrouded in silence. Their words, performances and engaged actions are developing into a body of popular knowledge that questions the status quo and relates to the ‘emerging consciousness’ in many African urban societies of unequal, often gendered, power relations. The women who engage in slam have thus become a voice for the emancipation of women in general.


Author(s):  
Christina Petersen

This chapter examines the evocation of Pearl White's star persona by avant-garde theorists and filmmakers ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to surrealist Robert Desnos. The avant-garde's reactions to White fall largely along movement lines. At once the embodiment of a low-culture narrative mode and a spectacular star object who transcended any particular plot line, White's pejorative status as “the most assassinated woman in the world” may have been more revealing than Jean Epstein originally intended. Whereas Epstein decried White's constant near-death experiences and numerous last-minute escapes as unrealistic pulp fiction, surrealists celebrated her as a “marvelous” apparition. This chapter compares the reactions of adherents of surrealism and impressionism to White and considers how Desnos and the surrealists attempted to transpose the “love and poetry” of her films into their own filmmaking practice. It suggests that White's legacy aside from international stardom exerted an influence upon the avant-garde movement, and that her influence had revolutionary potential for challenging the status quo.


2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison McQueen

Political realism is frequently criticised as a theoretical tradition that amounts to little more than a rationalisation of the status quo and an apology for power. This paper responds to this criticism by defending three connected claims. First, it acknowledges the moral seriousness of rationalisation, but argues that the problem is hardly particular to political realists. Second, it argues that classical International Relations realists like EH Carr and Hans Morgenthau have a profound awareness of the corrupting effects of rationalisation and see realism as an antidote to this problem. Third, it proposes that Carr and Morgenthau can help us to recognise the particular ways in which realist arguments may nonetheless rationalise existing power relations and affirm the status quo by default, if not by design.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-182
Author(s):  
Alencar Zidani Manuel da Silva ◽  
Raul Aragão Martins

This article works on Vygotsky’s (1987) conceptions of the relationship between thought and language from a perspective of influence on cognitive development and the formation of the view on gender proposed by the school. In this sense, we also noted the construction of stereotypes understood by Brunneli (2016) as major influences on social behavior and discourse, relating, from this perspective, and being able to explain actions and interactions that are studied by social psychology. Nevertheless, the studies of Cunha and Góes (2002), Xavier, Ribeiro and Noronha (1994) were used to understand how the formation of these stereotypes that were disseminated influenced the educational organization and cooperated to maintain the status quo, that is, inequality and its justifications. Also, to understand the new questions that arise about sexuality, it was necessary to analyze the studies of Louro (1997) and Oliveira e Santos (2012) to understand these new dynamics and perspectives that arise to think about a school concerned with the present, leaving aside your worries about yesterday. Therefore, it was perceived how these relations coexisted and fostered a social organization based on a purpose not only to justify hierarchical power relations, but also to maintain them using strategic sectors such as education and, consequently, the school.


2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110227
Author(s):  
Stephanie Patrick

This article examines the media framing of and relations to the 2014 iCloud hack, wherein hundreds of female celebrities’ private photos were stolen and distributed online. In particular, I problematize the reading of this event as merely signalling the misogyny of ‘toxic’ online cultures and contextualize it as part of a larger political economy of female celebrity. I argue that, while the growth in feminist discourses emanating from both the mainstream media and celebrity women is encouraging, it perhaps occludes the broader power relations that extend across both new and traditional media, ensuring maintenance of the status quo. This event exemplifies problems with a popular form of feminism that seeks inclusion into these systems, rather than wider systemic change. Therefore, in addition to examining the celebrity and/or her audience as the site of political (feminist) work, I call for an excavation of the systems in which she is embedded and her relations to the means of media production and profit.


Author(s):  
Anthony Parton

Neo-Primitivism is a style-label employed by the Muscovite avant-garde in the early twentieth century to describe forms of visual art and poetry that were tendentiously crude in style and socially and politically contentious in terms of subject matter. In the field of painting, the style was chiefly developed by Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964) and Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) as well as by members of the Donkey’s Tail and Target groups, of which they were the respective leaders. In poetry, Neo-Primitivism was most consistently explored by Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922) and Alexei Kruchenykh (1886–1968), with whom the painters frequently collaborated. Neo-Primitivism was not only oppositional to the polite and refined culture of the status-quo, but it was also intensely nationalistic, seeing itself as the inheritor of indigenous artistic practices that had been erased under the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great. Whilst initially inspired by Western avant-garde Modernism, the neo-primitives quickly disassociated themselves from Western practices to find inspiration in the soil of Russia. Their aim was to reinvigorate Russian art by reference to the expressive qualities of icon painitng, the lubok (Russian woodcut print), peasant embroidery, the painted tray and signboard, and the ancient Russian fertility statues found in the steppe landscape.


Author(s):  
Jean Mills

Jean Mills uses Virginia Woolf’s legacy and literature to process the work and impact of two important women in her life, the Virginia Woolf scholar, Jane Marcus, and her own mother, following their deaths. In her attempts to preserve and champion the memory of the two women, Mills acknowledges Woolf’s own participation in the act of writing women into obscurity and refers to Jane Harrison’s title of ‘J.H’ in A Room of One’s Own. Mills argues that not using the scholar’s full name contributes to Harrison’s erasure and reveals Woolf’s act of distancing between herself and her female role models. While Mills attributes Woolf’s sense of isolation from her academic audience as a result of distancing and alienation, she acknowledges that many of Woolf’s narratives privileged women’s history and experience, and observes that any presence of ambivalence can be utilised as a necessary tool to foreground the need for the recognition of women in activism and political thought.


2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ji-Young Lee

What explains Korea's success in surviving as an independent state for over 2,000 years, not annexed to China, when it shares a border with this powerful imperial neighbor? I argue that diplomatic ritual can be conducive to managing asymmetric power relations and that the Korean state and the Chinese state prior to the nineteenth century used the diplomatic ritual of investiture in a strategic manner as a signaling mechanism to manage the expectations of each side. Drawing insights from ritual studies, I offer three specific mechanisms: (1) regularity and precision, (2) strategic ambiguity, and (3) the manipulation of symbols, through which the ritualization of power relations reduces the tension arising from the disparity in power. The empirical evidence comes from an investigation of a total of sixteen investiture cases between Chosòn Korea and Ming China between 1392 and 1644. It shows that the granting and seeking of investiture on both sides was not only a way of signaling their commitment to the status quo, but also a medium of negative soft power through which the stronger side could change the status quo relations to its favor using the symbolic power embedded in the investiture ritual.


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