HerStory (2007): Falling with Hong Kong in women’s writing and dance

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuefei Ma
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Potential Field ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Women’S Writing

This article analyses Hong Kong-based choreographer Helen Lai’s work HerStory (2007) in the context of Hong Kong’s handover in 1997 and its impact on modern dance and women’s writing. I examine HerStory’s innovation of a gesture – falling – in multiple registers and argue that the gesture of falling enacts a potential field to articulate the unspeakable, unrecognizable bodily experience. I show the ways HerStory, through falling, undid the boundaries of the rural and urban space, the past and the present, the individual and the collective; and expressed the tensions between women’s corporeal experience and gendered social inscriptions. In the end, I discuss why revisiting these relations can help us better understand Hong Kong’s historical moment.

The symbolic survival of the “living dead”: Narrating the LTTE female fighter in post-war Sri Lankan women’s writing

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 384-398
Author(s):  
Birte Heidemann
Keyword(s):  
Women's Writing ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
Post War ◽  
Literary Portrait ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Female Fighters ◽  
The Military ◽  
Women’S Writing

This article examines the lingering presence of the female militant figure in post-war Sri Lankan women’s writing in English. Through a careful demarcation of the formal–aesthetic limits of engaging with the country’s competing ethno-nationalisms, the article seeks to uncover the gendered hierarchies of Sri Lanka’s civil war in two literary works: Niromi de Soyza’s autobiography Tamil Tigress (2011) and Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012). The reading draws attention to the writers’ attempt to “historise” the LTTE female fighter and/or suicide bomber within Sri Lanka’s complex colonial past and its implications for the recent history of conflict. The individual motives of the female fighters to join the LTTE, the article contends, remain ideologically susceptible to, if not interpellated by, the gendered hierarchies both within the military movement and Tamil society at large. A literary portrait of such entangled hierarchies in post-war Sri Lankan texts, the article reveals, helps expose the hegemonic (male) discourses of Sri Lankan nationalism that tend to undermine the war experiences of women.

Hong Kong on display: Things, time and urban space

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-133
Author(s):  
Anneke Coppoolse
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Past ◽  
Urban Condition ◽  
Visual Approach ◽  
The City ◽  
Selection Of

Despite, and due to, its culture of consuming ‘the new’, Hong Kong contains an expansive second-hand world that encourages preoccupation with the past through pre-owned ‘things’ and related practices of displaying and collecting. This article takes on a visual approach to understanding (fragments of) Hong Kong’s urban condition by considering its second-hand world. Following an established tradition of revaluing second-hand objects (economically and otherwise), the sites where these objects are temporarily ‘exhibited’ form stages for the emergence of stories about the city, through practices of exchanging, collecting and displaying. Focusing on a selection of these objects, displayed in particular locations, an attempt is made at understanding the significance of their persistence in Hong Kong.

Feminism and Alienated Labor: Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills

Prospects ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 239-250
Author(s):  
Marty Roth
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
The Past ◽  
Obvious Reason ◽  
Women’S Writing

As One of the primary works of American literature to be recovered by feminist archaeology, Life in the Iron Mills (1861) can also stand as the test of a theoretical blind spot of early feminist criticism – its inability to see “bad writing” – for Davis's novella is notably awkward in its conception and construction. An obvious reason for the lack is that this kind of judgment fulfills an assumption of patriarchy in regard to women's writing: “that the reason for the absence of women [in the literary canon] is that women have not written in the past – or that what they have written is not very good” (Spender, 1). In the older formalist critical dispensation, aesthetic defects had to be publicly identified and labeled, like Hester Prynne's badge of shame. I certainly do not mean to suggest that feminism (however constituted) has any obligation to reproduce this order of judgment, but not owning such effects has consequences. Davis's novella can temporarily resolve this dilemma by using feminism to expose the traditional aesthetics of judgment.

scholarly journals Contemporary Hungarian Women’s Writing and Cosmopolitanism

Porównania ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-246
Author(s):  
Ágnes Györke
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Hungarian Literature ◽  
Geographical Regions ◽  
Women’S Writing

This article investigates contemporary Hungarian women’s writing in the context of cosmopolitan feminism. The literary works explored are Noémi Szécsi’s The Finno-Ugrian Vampire, Noémi Kiss’s Trans and Virág Erdős’s Luminous Bodies: 100 Little Budapest, which I read as examples of a cosmopolitan feminist engagement with urban space. As opposed to the Kantian concept of cosmopolitanism, which has been critiqued for failing to take the experiences of particular social groups and geographical regions into account, cosmopolitan feminism focuses on the local and the embodied. The discussed texts thematise border crossing both on the level of form and content, while they engage with the mundane, affective aspects of everyday life in an emphatically urban setting. This cosmopolitan feminism challenges parochial, heavy, national literary traditions and points towards a distinct feministaesthetics in contemporary Hungarian literature.

Writing, Reception, Intertextuality

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-180
Author(s):  
Sarah Connell ◽  
Julia Flanders
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Text Book ◽  
Large Scale Data ◽  
Digital Spectrum ◽  
Digital Methods ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Women’S Writing

Reading has received renewed scrutiny in the digital age, a result of the defamiliarization of the medium that has also brought about a rethinking of what is meant by “text,” “book,” and “author.” Fascination with large-scale data analysis has shifted attention toward modes of reading that sample the source to produce a statistical artifact from which we can in turn read clusterings of words, shifts in topic or register, or changing orthographic habits. These remote reading practices, however, fail to capitalize on valuable modeling of the individual text, but more recently researchers have been exploring ways of bringing these two ends of the digital spectrum into closer conversation. This article explores the study of readership and reception of pre-Victorian women’s writing through these emerging digital methods, examining two collections (Women Writers Online and Women Writers in Review) related to early women’s writing with large-scale analytical methods that engage with the detailed textual models in these collections’ metadata and markup.

scholarly journals “A Living Mosaic of Human Beings”: The Life Writing of Virginia Woolf and Zitkala-Ša

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Czarnecki
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Maternal Loss ◽  
The Past ◽  
Women’S Writing

This essay examines life writing by English author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša (1876-1938), specifically Woolf’s memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” written in 1939-40 and first published in Moments of Being in 1976, and Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essays, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900. This comparative study explores how both women establish selfhood amid competing pressures vying for their minds and bodies; how mothers and maternal loss shape their autobiographies; how physical and psychological place and displacement influence their life writing; and how matters of audience affect their literary self-portraits. Reading Woolf and Zitkala-Ša together yields fresh insights into the intersections of race, class, gender, and feminism in women’s writing.

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