Wrestling with “Half Gods”: Biblical Discourse in Mary Austin’s The Ford

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-668
Author(s):  
John Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
Water Transfer ◽  
Owens Valley ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
And Gender

Mary Austin’s novel The Ford recounts the water transfer from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles in the early twentieth century. Previous critical analysis of the text has focused on its vision of regional development and its concern with gender roles, while largely ignoring the novel’s extensive use of biblical narratives and symbolism. In this article I examine Austin’s use of these narratives, in particular the story of Jacob’s wrestling with God, in order to better understand the racial and gender diversity that complicates the protagonist’s coming of age.

Inside and Outside Chinatown: Chinese Elites in Exclusion Era California

2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth H. Marcus ◽  
Yong Chen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The West ◽  
Chinese Populations ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Limited Degree ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Exclusion Act

Chinese elites who were exempted from the Exclusion Act of 1882 became important figures in interethnic dialogue in the West. This article focuses on herbalists and missionaries, who were often able to cross boundaries of race, geography, and gender through their professions. In comparing the experiences of these elites in Los Angeles with their counterparts in San Francisco—the two cities in California with the highest Chinese populations by 1890—the authors demonstrate how a limited degree of inclusion was possible during a period of extreme discrimination and race hatred. The examination of photographs, newspaper articles and advertisements, memoirs, and other materials provides a way to understand the class dimensions of the Exclusion Act in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century California.

scholarly journals Plateaus and Afterglows: Theorizing the Afterlives of Gayborhoods as Post-Places

2021 ◽  
pp. 371-389
Author(s):  
Jack Coffin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Material Form ◽  
New Millennium

AbstractA number of commentators have acknowledged the decline of gayborhoods and the concomitant emergence of non-heteronormative diasporas in societies where sexual and gender diversity is normalized (Ghaziani 2015; Nash and Gorman-Murray 2017; Bitterman 2020). Academic studies tend to focus on the new lives that are being led beyond the gayborhood and the diminished distinctiveness of the territories left behind (e.g. Ghaziani 2014). In contrast, this chapter explores the possibility that gayborhoods can continue to influence sociospatial dynamics, even after their physical presence has diminished or disappeared altogether. Individuals and collectives may still be inspired by the memories, representations, and imaginaries previously provided by these erstwhile places. Indeed, the metaphor of a non-heteronormative diaspora relies on an ‘origin’ from which a cultural network has dispersed. In this sense gayborhoods can continue to function as post-places, as symbolic anchors of identity that operate even if they no longer exist in a material form, even if they are used simply as markers of ‘how far the diaspora has come’. The proposition that gayborhoods are becoming post-places could be more fully theorized in a number of ways, but the approach here is to adapt Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 22) notion of plateaus, which denote a “region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culmination point or external end”. From this perspective gayborhoods are not spatial phenomena that reach a climax of concentration and then disappear through dissipation. Instead, they can be described as becoming more intense and concrete in the latter half of the twentieth century before gradually fading after the new millennium as they disperse gradually into a diaspora as memories, habits, and so forth. Put another way, non-climactic gayborhoods leave ‘afterglows’, affects that continue to exert geographical effects in the present and near future. This conceptualization is consequential for theory, practice, and political activism, and ends the main body of this edited volume on a more ambitious note.

scholarly journals Killing "woman" : gender and violence in selected plays by Sheila Callaghan and Marisa Wegrzyn

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kate Busselle
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Gender Performance ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Violent Acts ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Representations Of Women

One of the most popular manifestations of spectacle in the theatre is violence. Frequently, violence on the stage manifests in the form of violence towards women at the hands of men. As a woman violence and intimacy designer, I wanted to find works that challenged and subverted this popular staging and question what those works have to say about gender, violence, and gender performance. Two playwrights who are challenging long-held dramatic representations of women and violence are playwrights Sheila Callaghan and Marisa Wegrzyn. Callaghan and Wegrzyn are two of the founders of the Kilroys, a group of femme-identifying literary managers, playwrights and producers living in Los Angeles, California, who organized in 2013 to promote the work of female and trans playwrights. Not only do their most representative works contain several acts of violence committed by women characters, but the nature of these portrayals of violence strays from "traditional" representations of violence. Using a range of relevant theoretical lenses, I will analyze four representative plays -- Sheila Callaghan's Roadkill Confidential and That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play and Marisa Wegrzyn's The Butcher of Baraboo and Killing Women to investigate how these works disrupt essentialist notions of gender and identity, with special attention to the implications and meanings of their dramatic representation of onstage acts of violence committed by women. Through critical analysis of these works, this dissertation seeks to increase understanding of how these performances of violence challenge heteronormative notions of gender. As the context in which these violent acts occur is crucial, this dissertation analyzes the gendered implications of the setting, plot, and characterizations of each work. Additionally, this dissertation explores how designing the violence within these moments may help reinforce the gender disruption created by Callaghan and Wegrzyn.

Outside and Inside

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reva Marin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
White American ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ethnicity And Gender

This book is the first full-length study of autobiographies and memoirs of white American jazz musicians, whose accounts reveal attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and gender across a wide range of twentieth-century jazz communities. White jazz autobiographers highlight their immersion in Black jazz environments as central to establishing their legitimacy as jazz musicians, claiming versions of masculinity shaped by these immersion experiences and positioning themselves in relation to colorblind or essentialist arguments that have dominated twentieth-century jazz discourse. Their accounts illustrate the triumphs and failures of jazz interracialism, displaying the contradictory attitudes of reverence and entitlement, deference, and insensitivity that remain part of the white response to Black culture to the present day. The book examines sixteen autobiographies published between 1926 and 2010. Its thematic approach includes chapters that examine the collaborative process in jazz autobiography, Jewish American jazz musicians, and race relations in the New Orleans jazz revival and on Los Angeles’ Central Avenue. Its focus on male instrumentalists and bandleaders provides opportunities for revisiting some of the classic depictions of the “white Negro” in contemporary cultural criticism. While informed by the insights of critical race theory, the book argues that viewing these texts simply through the lens of white privilege does not do justice to the sustained relationships with Black music and culture described by these autobiographers. It both insists upon the value of insider perspectives and holds the texts to rigorous scrutiny, while embracing an expansive interpretation of white involvement in Black culture.

Graduate Students' Perceptions of Ethnic and Gender Diversity

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Zarb ◽  
Ryan F. Birch ◽  
David Gleave ◽  
Winston Seegobin ◽  
Joel Perez
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
And Gender

Cross-border Migration and Gender Boundaries in Central Eastern Europe – Female Perspectives

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 499-509
Author(s):  
Ágnes Erőss ◽  
Monika Mária Váradi ◽  
Doris Wastl-Walter
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Labour Migration ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Livelihood Strategy ◽  
Central Eastern Europe ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Dual Earner ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Boundaries

In post-Socialist countries, cross-border labour migration has become a common individual and family livelihood strategy. The paper is based on the analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with two ethnic Hungarian women whose lives have been significantly reshaped by cross-border migration. Focusing on the interplay of gender and cross-border migration, our aim is to reveal how gender roles and boundaries are reinforced and repositioned by labour migration in the post-socialist context where both the socialist dual-earner model and conventional ideas of family and gender roles simultaneously prevail. We found that cross-border migration challenged these women to pursue diverse strategies to balance their roles of breadwinner, wife, and mother responsible for reproductive work. Nevertheless, the boundaries between female and male work or status were neither discursively nor in practice transgressed. Thus, the effect of cross-border migration on altering gender boundaries in post-socialist peripheries is limited.

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