Carnival Is Woman

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Trinidad And Tobago ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Female Bodies

What is most intriguing in the Carnivals today is the substantial increase in the number of women who play mas’ with some figures estimating as much as 70% of all players. This volume, probably the first of its kind to concentrate solely on women in Carnival, normalizes the contemporary Carnival especially as it is playedin Trinidad and Tobago by demonstrating not only their numerical strength but the kind of mas’that is featured. The bikini and beads or bikini and feathers or 'pretty mas' is the dominant mas’ in today’s Carnival. The players of today, mainly women, are signifying or symbolizing by this form of mas’, their own newly found empowerment as females and their resistance to the older cultural norms of male oppression. Several chapters discuss in detail the commoditisation of Carnival in which sex is used to enhance tourism and provide striking visual images for magazines and websites. Several put the emphasis on the unveiling of the female body and the hip rolling sexual movements called “winin” or sometimes just “it” as in “use your it.” What most of these chapters have in common however is the emphasis on the performance of scantily clad female bodies and their movements and gyrations. This volume provides a feminist perspective to the understanding of Carnival today.

‘I saw a knock-out’: Fatness, (In)visibility, and Desire in Shallow Hal

Somatechnics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Wykes
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Fat Body ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Knock Out ◽  
Dominant Meaning ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Fat Bodies ◽  
Sexual Body

When the Farrelly brothers' movie Shallow Hal (2001) was released, one reviewer suggested that the film ‘might have been more honest if [it] had simply made Hal have a thing about fat women’ ( Kerr 2002 : 44). In this paper, I argue that Kerr hits the mark but misses the point. While the film's treatment of fat is undoubtedly problematic, I propose a ‘queer’ reading of the film, borrowing the idea of ‘double coding’ to show a text about desire for fat (female) bodies. I am not, however, seeking to position Shallow Hal as a fat-positive text; rather, I use it as a starting point to explore the legibility of the fat female body as a sexual body. In contemporary mainstream Western culture, fat is regarded as the antithesis of desire. This meaning is so deeply ingrained that representations of fat women as sexual are typically framed as a joke because desire for fat bodies is unimaginable; this is the logic by which Shallow Hal operates. The dominant meaning of fatness precludes recognition of the fat body as a sexual body. What is at issue is therefore not simply the lack of certain images, but a question of intelligibility: if the meaning of fat is antithetical to desire, how can the desire for – and of – fat bodies be intelligible as desire? This question goes beyond the realm of representation and into the embodied experience of fat sexuality.

BODY PRACTICES OF WOMEN IN THE LIGHT OF FEMINIST DEBATES

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-156 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Phenomenological Tradition ◽  
Academic Feminism ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Body Practices

The paper provides an analysis of the structuralist and phenomenological traditions in interpretation of female body practices. The structuralist intellectual tradition bases its methodology on concepts from social anthropology and philosophy that see the body as ‘ordered’ by social institutions. Structuralist approaches within academic feminism are focused on critical study of the social regulation of female bodies with respect to reproduction and sexualisation (health and beauty practices). The author focuses on the dominant physical ideal of femininity and the means for body pedagogics that have been constructed by patriarchal authority. In contrast to theories of the ordered body, the phenomenological tradition is focused on the “lived” body, embodied experience, and the personal motivation and values attached to body practices. This tradition has been influenced by a variety of schools of thought including philosophical anthropology, phenomenology and action theories in sociology. Within academic feminism, there are at least three phenomenologically oriented strategies of interpretation of female body practices. The first one is centred around women’s individual situation and bodily socialization; the second one studies interrelation between body practices and the sense of the self; and the third one postulates the potential of body practices to destabilize the dominant ideals of femininity and thus provides a theoretical basis for feminist activism. The phenomenological tradition primarily analyses the motivational, symbolic and value-based components of body practices as they interact with women’s corporeality and sense of self. In general, both structuralist and phenomenological traditions complement each other by focusing on different levels of analysis of female embodiment.

"Ten Times More Difficult to Treat": Female Bodies in Medical Texts from Early Imperial China

NAN Nü ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Wilms
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Conditions ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Negative Association ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
The Family ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Reproductive Processes ◽  
Positive Focus

AbstractThis paper examines the interpretation of female bodies by male medical authors in post-Han China, investigating medical theories and practices as reflected in the applied medical literature of "prescriptions for women." Between the Han and Song periods, this paper argues, the negative association of the female body with the vague category of pathologies "below the girdle," referring most notably to conditions of vaginal discharge, was replaced with a more positive focus on menstruation, which symbolized regular and predictable cycles of generativity and free flow. As male physicians came to recognize the female body as gendered and accepted the need for a specialized treatment of women, menstruation became the window through which they gained access to the hidden processes inside the female body. By "balancing/regulating the menses," they learned to treat and prevent such dreaded chronic conditions as infertility, susceptibility to cold, or general emaciation and weakness, all which were seen as related to the female reproductive processes. Thus, the practice of menstrual regulation ultimately served to ensure female fertility and the continuation of the family line.

The Blood of Female Martyrs as the Sperm of the Early Church1

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 8-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes N. Vorster
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
Regulatory Body ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Self And Identity ◽  
Female Bodies

AbstractTo what extent did early Christian martyr stories function as empowering the female body and contributing to an independent view of her 'self' and 'identity'? In the light of claims, often motivated by political correctness, that certain early Christian traditions acknowledged, appreciated and promoted woman's agency in Graeco-Roman social interaction, it is argued that if the notion of a 'regulatory body' is taken into consideration, early Christian female bodies and identities were crushed both by the Roman Imperium and early Christian patriarchal leadership.

The Blood of the Female Martyrs as the Sperm of the Early Church1

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes N. Vorster
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
Regulatory Body ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Self And Identity ◽  
Female Bodies

AbstractTo what extent did early Christian martyr stories function as empowering the female body and contributing to an independent view of her 'self' and 'identity'? In the light of claims made, often motivated by political correctness, that certain early Christian traditions acknowledged, appreciated and promoted woman's agency in Graeco-Roman social interaction, it is argued that if the notion of a 'regulatory body' is taken into consideration, early Christian female bodies and identities were crushed both by the Roman Imperium and early Christian patriarchal leadership.

scholarly journals Motherhood in crisis in Lucrecia Martel’s Salta Trilogy

2015 ◽  
pp. 64-75
Author(s):  
Fiona Clancy
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Screen Media ◽  
Autonomous Identity

This article concerns the complex negotiation of ageing and femininity in Amy Heckerling’s two most recent films: I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) and Vamps (2012). These films are positioned as part of the contemporary postfeminist media culture, (Gill, 2007) noting the scrutiny received by the ageing female body, and its changing status under the prevailing cultural norms of femininity. However, Heckerling’s films also demonstrate a sense of play with these gender norms, and so calls to be read also in terms of Judith Butler’s theorisation of performativity (1990; 1993; 2004). This article contends that Heckerling’s representation of liminality and indeterminacy—in her teen movies, and later work alike—provides a way for women to carve out an autonomous identity that humorously demonstrates the absurdity of mediatised constructions of femininity. Her work, then, is more complex than has hitherto been acknowledged, and the piece concludes by calling for the director and screenwriter to be repositioned as a significant female voice in 21st century screen media.

Mad Women: Dance, Female Sexuality, and Surveillance in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Emily Holmes Coleman

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Engdahl Coates
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Maternal Body ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Gradual Shift ◽  
Revolutionary Praxis ◽  
Female Embodiment ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Waves

This chapter argues that Emily Holmes Coleman’s novel, The Shutter of Snow, and Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, both politicize and mobilize the dancing female body so as to perform a critique of the nationalist rhetoric circulating between WWI and WWII, which was exploiting the maternal body and subjecting the female body in general to increased surveillance. Reading dance as signifying not only in reference to aesthetic freedom but also as instantiating a revolutionary praxis, the chapter contends that the dancing female bodies within the pages of Woolf and Coleman’s novels perform a feminist politics of refusal and a complex aesthetic unraveling of dualisms that have traditionally and historically contained and restrained women. Implicitly gendering Foucault’s assessment of the gradual shift from a society premised on spectacle to an increasingly modernized society dependent on surveillance, The Shutter of Snow and The Waves discursively choreograph lines of flight and moments of suspension which, though they may not offer easy escapes (liberation or freedom from), visually and rhetorically imagine an unforeseeable future (the freedom to), where previously sanctioned modes of female embodiment might be replaced with on going gestures of becoming.

The Artifice of Syphilitic and Damaged Female Bodies in Literature

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-82
Author(s):  
Encarnación Juárez-Almendros
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Common Representation ◽  
Female Prostitutes ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
La Lozana Andaluza ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter examines the literary depiction of the broken and contaminated corporality of female prostitutes as illustrated in Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana andaluza [Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman] (1528), Miguel de Cervantes’s Casamiento engañoso [The Deceitful Marriage] (1613), La tía fingida [The pretended aunt], a novel attributed to Cervantes, and Francisco de Quevedo’s satiric poetry written in the first half of the seventeenth century. These works share a common representation of syphilis as a gendered metaphor of physical and moral decay that functions in opposition both to male embodiment and to the ideal of the integrity of the female body, expressed in the concept of virginity and chastity. Furthermore, they exemplify the development of the syphilitic trope through the century as well as the diverse solutions to taming alterity.

Jeremiah and Gender

2021 ◽  
pp. 660-675
Author(s):  
Christl M. Maier
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Gender Performance ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Gendered Language ◽  
Male Privilege ◽  
Language And Gender ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
Salient Features ◽  
And Gender

This chapter explores salient features of gendered language and gender performance in Jeremiah from a feminist perspective. At first sight, the book witnesses a patriarchal world of male privilege and female subordination, which is expressed by gendered language and sexualized metaphors. The personification of Jerusalem—Judah as adulterous wife of YHWH and the devastation of her female body—generates horrific images that express the shame and humiliation of its ancient audiences, but are unbearable for postmodern readers. Inspecting some passages more closely, this chapter reveals flaws in this rhetoric of shaming and breaches in gender performance that help to deconstruct an allegedly rigid gender hierarchy and to seek ways to alternative interpretations of the divine-human relationship.

Firm but Shapely, Fit but Sexy, Strong but Thin: The Postmodern Aerobicizing Female Bodies

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 424-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirkko Markula
Keyword(s):  
Body Image ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Media Analysis ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Women's Relationships ◽  
The Media ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Individual

This paper aims to reconstruct the cultural dialogue surrounding the female body image in aerobics. To do this I have used several methods: ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and media analysis. I found that the media ideal is a contradiction: firm but shapely, fit but sexy, strong but thin. Likewise, women’s relationships with the media image are contradictory: They struggle to obtain the ideal body, but they also find their battles ridiculous. I interpret my findings from a Foucaultian perspective to show how the discourse surrounding the female body image is part of a complex use of power over women in postmodern consumer society. In addition, I assume a feminist perspective that assigns an active role to the individual aerobicizers to question the power arrangement.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document