Remembering rape: The temporal construction of sexual violence in autobiographical narratives from 1990s Finland

Sexualities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 136346072199303
Author(s):  
Matleena Frisk ◽  
Riikka Taavetti
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Life Events ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Temporal Changes ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Sex Research

This article examines how historical contexts affect the recollection of experiences of rape. We reanalyze sexual autobiographies that were gathered in Finland in 1992 in a sex research project called FINSEX. To illustrate how the time of the rape as well as the time it is recalled shape the possibilities of narrating a life story, we present a close reading of four autobiographies that we place in the context of the collection as a whole, and compare our analysis of the autobiographies to their interpretation in the FINSEX study. The narrative elements of the autobiographies reflect the violent experiences in complex and layered ways. For the authors of these autobiographies, temporal changes in cultural and social understandings of sexual violence enable the reinterpreting of life events and the naming of previously unnamed experiences.

Between loneliness and belonging: narratives of social isolation among immigrant older adults in Canada

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Sharon Koehn ◽  
Ilyan Ferrer ◽  
Shari Brotman
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Social Isolation ◽  
Life Events ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Structural Approach ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Structural Forces ◽  
Linked Lives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Immigrant And Refugee

Abstract Research points to a higher risk for social isolation and loneliness among new immigrant and refugee older adults. Our article draws from a research project that explored the everyday stories of ageing among 19 diverse immigrant older adults in Canada. To capture their experiences of loneliness and social isolation, we use four illustrative cases derived from a structural approach to life-story narrative. To these we apply the intersectional lifecourse analytical lens to examine how life events, timing and structural forces shape our participants’ experiences of social isolation and loneliness. We further explore the global and linked lives of our participants as well as the categories of difference that influence their experiences along the continua of loneliness to belonging, isolation to connection. Finally, we discuss how an understanding of sources of domination and expressions of agency and resistance to these forces might lead us to solutions.

scholarly journals The Maiden and the Wolf: Law, Gender, and Sexual Violence in Imperial Russia

Slavic Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-121
Author(s):  
Katherine Pickering Antonova ◽  
Sergei Antonov
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Court Case ◽  
Court System ◽  
Personal Safety ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Private Spaces ◽  
Evidence Law ◽  
Great Reforms

This article is a close reading of an 1859 court case from Moscow, in which a young orphaned noblewoman accused a much older, wealthier, and better-connected man. It situates the case in its cultural context among the striving middling classes of Moscow on the eve of the Great Reforms, revealing deeply fractured understandings of respectability, civic versus private spaces, masculine violence, and personal safety that permeated Russia's urban classes. Legally, the trial's outcome is not as surprising as the sharply conflicted reasoning of pre-reform judges. Each of the three tiers in the court system produced a radically different decision, pitching the obvious facts of the case against the state's pressure to convict the rapist and pre-reform Russia's supposedly archaic—but actually quite flexible—evidence law. Ultimately, the article argues that this noblewoman was able to use notions of female honor and domesticity in her favor, while the accused's status did not entirely serve to protect him where the need to protect male status conflicted with concerns over the dangers of westernization and modernization.

Incoherence matters

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-300
Author(s):  
Anselma Gallinat
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Life Events ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
East Germany ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
German Unification ◽  
Narrative Coherence ◽  
Value System

Life-stories are usually seen as showing considerable coherence even where they include turning points. More recent work has in contrast noted that “living” or “small narratives” do not follow this rule but contrastingly enable the pondering of unresolved life-events helping to develop understanding. This potential is particularly valuable in contexts of fundamental regime-change where changes of the value-system, such as after transition from state socialism to democracy, pose considerable challenges to narrative coherence. The article suggests reconsidering the question of coherence in life-stories and draws on two examples of individuals who experienced life in East Germany and German unification to argue that struggles for coherence in the life-story can be indicative of the lack of wider shared frameworks for the understandings of national events and historical problems.

scholarly journals Framing Sexual Violence in Portuguese Colonialism: On Some Practices of Contemporary Cultural Representation and Remembrance

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (13) ◽  
pp. 1558-1577
Author(s):  
Júlia Garraio
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Cultural Representation ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Victims Of Sexual Abuse ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Portuguese Colonialism

This essay examines two Portuguese novels about colonialism and its legacies: António Lobo Antunes’s Fado Alexandrino (1983) and Aida Gomes’s Os Pretos de Pousaflores ( The Blacks from Pousaflores) (2011). Fado Alexandrino perpetuates the use of Black women’s raped bodies as a plot device to represent colonial violence, while Gomes’s narrative empowers racialized victims of sexual abuse and challenges dominant public memories of the Colonial War. A close reading of these novels, contextualized against the background of scholarly debates about the representation of sexual violence, exposes both the perils and potential of cultural works to preserve the memory of rape in armed conflict.

scholarly journals Onderzoek naar de levensloop van ouderen: ervaringen met het McAdams-levensverhaalinterview

KWALON ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-63
Author(s):  
Lise Switsers ◽  
Hannelore Stegen ◽  
Sofie Van Regenmortel ◽  
Liesbeth De Donder
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Life Events ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Interview Method ◽  
Onderzoek Naar ◽  
Life Story Interview ◽  
Younger Age

Abstract Studying the life courses of older people: The McAdams life-story interview Research among older people often focuses on the present. Nevertheless, life course research can help to understand how certain behavior and feelings take shape and evolve throughout the course of life, and how life events at a younger age can influence conditions, behaviors and feelings in later life. In this article, we focus on the McAdams life story interview method, which we applied in three different studies. We describe the different steps, reflect on the main pitfalls in the implementation of this approach and explain how we attempted to avoid them. The experiences and reflections of both the participants and the researchers are discussed.

scholarly journals A Magnificent Blond Beast: Exploring the Implications of Harlem Renaissance Writer Wallace Thurman as Ghostwriter of a Forgotten Celebrity Gossip Memoir

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
Whit Frazier Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Saturday Evening ◽  
Celebrity Gossip ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the original blonde bombshell Peggy Hopkins Joyce. According to Hopkins’ biographer, however, Basil Woon, an English playwright and gossip columnist was supposed to have been the ghostwriter of this book. My paper will address this discrepancy by focusing on the lack of evidence supporting the Woon theory, and through an analysis using stylometry, close reading and an examination of historical documents, I will argue that Thurman is the more likely candidate as a ghostwriter for Hopkins’ memoirs, just as Hughes suggests. I will be looking specifically at the way the text, which is presented to the reader as a diary written by Hopkins from her early youth to the present day, satirizes the shallowness and excesses of the “roaring twenties.” I will argue that the text is clearly ironic and satirical in style and approach and not only satirizes celebrity, but also a society that unselfconsciously celebrates celebrity, much the way Thurman satirizes the excesses of the Harlem Renaissance in his novel Infants of the Spring. In conclusion, I will show how this book, which has been largely dismissed as celebrity gossip, is transformed into something highly literary by the way Thurman, as ghostwriter and editor, takes Hopkins’ life story and turns it into a satire of the excesses of an era.

scholarly journals EXPERIENCES MADE OF WOOL: VISUAL AND VERBAL METAPHORICAL RECONCEPTUALIZATION IN ADOPTION AND FOSTER CARE NARRATIVES

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-121
Author(s):  
Coral Calvo-Maturana
Keyword(s):  
Foster Care ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Picture Book ◽  
Conceptual Metaphor ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Cognitive Power ◽  
Sense Of Identity

This paper aims at exploring adoption and foster care discourse (AFD) so as to uncover the role of multimodal novel metaphor, and the resulting ad hoc concepts, in (re)addressing (AF) narratives. It specifically focuses on the picture book Speranza’s Sweater (Pusey and Mello, 2018), and the extended conceptual metaphor a life story (of a child [in adoption or foster care]) is a sweater, as well as the net of minor related metaphors. These are analysed following Romero and Soria’s (1997, 2005a, 2007, 2014 and 2016) as well as Forceville (1994, 2008)’s frameworks on, respectively, novel and multimodal metaphors. Dictionaries, thesauri, corpus-assisted tools, as well as close reading/viewing will inform the delineation of source and target domains. The paper illustrates and concludes the cognitive power of multimodal creative choices in relation to (AFD) to integrate children’s past, present, and future experiences, while strengthening their sense of identity and belonging.

scholarly journals Readiness to Master Age-Related Changes and Biographical Reflection in the Context of Late Age and Professional Employment

2020 ◽  
pp. 64-68
Author(s):  
Tamara Borisovna Sergeeva ◽  
Natalia Stepanovna Glukhaniuk
Keyword(s):  
Professional Development ◽  
Older People ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Life Events ◽  
Temporal Changes ◽  
Personal Mobility ◽  
Life Patterns ◽  
Age Related ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Age Related Changes

The relevance of studying the readiness to master age-temporal changes and biographical reflection as components of the personal mobility of older people is due to the insufficient representation of theoreti-cal models and empirical evidence on the relation-ship between age and professional development at a later age, as well as the complex determinants of this process. The aim of the study is to describe the nature of the relationship between the readiness to master the age and the biographical reflection of working and non-working pensioners, what will make it possible to differentiate the age and profes-sional contexts of development. Empirical research has shown that working older people are more likely to analyze their own life events and other people’s life patterns. At the same time, the readiness to mas-ter the age of working and non-working pensioners practically does not differ. The components of read-iness (motivational and cognitive) to master age-temporal changes have a different character of con-jugation with the parameters of biographical reflec-tion. The results showed a greater dependence of the studied indicators on the age context than on professional employment.

scholarly journals From Tale to Tail: Unwinding the Twisted Life Story of PIG 05049

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
Maarten Vanden Eynde
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Presentation ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Body Part ◽  
Consumer Products ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Single Source ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
Everyday Objects ◽  
The Many

Pig 05049 is a book and research project by Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma that chronicles the many consumer products that were made from a pig called 05049. The book offers an insightful look into how this one animal, a single source, provides raw material for a vast number of everyday objects. Meindertsma’s clinical presentation of each laboriously researched object, page by page, organised by body part, follows the progress of the dissection of Pig 05049 and the subsequent use of each part. Some products, she found, are expected and familiar, whilst other diverge dramatically: ammunition, medicine, photo paper, cigarettes, conditioner, and bio diesel. PIG 05049 is currently in its 5th edition. The book won the Dutch Design Award in 2008 and the Index award in 2009 in the category Play. The article is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation between Commodity Frontiers editor, Maarten Vanden Eynde and Christien Meinderstma in September 2021.

The Edges of Consent

2021 ◽  
pp. 30-57
Author(s):  
Rhiannon Graybill
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Contemporary World

The notion of consent plays a key role in many analyses of sexual violence, in both the biblical text and the contemporary world. However, consent is both insufficient and insufficiently feminist as a framework for describing and combating rape and sexual violence. After tracing six major difficulties with consent, the chapter turns to a close reading of three biblical rape stories, suggesting that these texts are better approached as fuzzy, messy, and icky. This point is reinforced via close readings of three rape stories: Dinah (Gen 34), Tamar (2 Sam 13), and Lot’s daughters (Gen 19). The interpretation offered here employs four new tactics, set forth in the previous chapter: refusing to claim a position of innocence, resisting paranoid reading positions, tracing sticky affect, and reading through literature. The result is a more flexible, sensitive, and illuminating reading of biblical sexual violence than is possible under a framework of consent.

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