scholarly journals Re-thinking the feminist agenda in selected female authored Zimbabwean literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-40
Author(s):  
Salachi Naidoo ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
African Feminism ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
Women’S Agency ◽  
Gender Based

This article investigates the feminist agenda in female authored Zimbabwean literature, with emphasis on the novel. It focuses largely on Virginia Phiri's Destiny and Highway Queen as well as Violet Masilo's The African Tea Cosy. The paper argues that Zimbabwean female authorship is flavoured with precepts of African feminism(s) in its representations of African women's agency in gender adversities. Framed within African feminism, women's agency derives from and gives meaning to an inescapable African-ness that needs to be accepted in the fight for emancipation. In light of this, the study analyses Zimbabwean women writers’ literary contributions to discourses on gender based violence and it explores how female characters have embraced the concept of agency to recreate their identities and to introduce a new gender ethos in the context of lives that are often shaped by severe restrictions and oppression. Although largely women focused, the African feminist text is concerned about the survival of both men and women.

scholarly journals "Who is Severe Upon the Ladies Now?": The Tri-Tiered Construction of Female Agency in Frances Burney's 'Evelina'

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia Eve Rink
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Women’S Agency

Frances Burney’s novel Evelina follows a young woman through a series of mortifying social interactions, all of which point to a layered concept of women’s agency and the popular perceptions of autonomy during the eighteenth century. Women’s agency in Evelina can be classified as physical agency, emotional agency, or elite agency. Each form of agency is then characterized by the female characters of the lower, middle, or upper classes within the novel. Burney’s uncouth characterization of the lower classes corresponds with physical agency, or the physical ability to create agency outside of social expectations, while elite agency allows upper-class and aristocratic women to act as they wish without public censure. Middle-class Evelina’s emotional agency, accessible to readers through the epistolary format of the novel, relies on her understanding of propriety, sensibilities, and interpersonal connections as a means of navigating social situations and class mobility. Burney’s tiered construction of women’s agency reinforces the importance of sensibility and emotional honesty across highly gendered class lines.    

scholarly journals Aproximación a los enfoques de género e interseccionalidad: aprendizajes significativos en la interacción de estudiantes universitarios con una comunidad indígena del Ecuador / Approach to Gender and Intersectionality perspectives: Meaningful Learning in the Interaction of University Students with an Indigenous Community in Ecuador

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Alejandra Yepez ◽  
Carolina Cedeño ◽  
Eduardo Granja ◽  
Tarquino Yacelga
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Family Environment ◽  
Meaningful Learning ◽  
Community Outreach ◽  
Indigenous Community ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Family ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Estudiantes Universitarios

ABSTRACTUniversidad de Las Américas (UDLA) -Quito, initiated the "Gender roles in the family environment of the El Topo Commune" project, which aims to promote equitable relationships between men and women, and prevent gender-based violence. In addition, the project seeks to expose and act on inequities and social problems of violence. The study focused on evidencing the learning and changes generated in the students as a result of training, sensitization, and interaction with the El Topo indigenous community.  In this context gender, intersectionality, and community outreach and interculturality are combined in the challenge of promoting meaningful learning (action research).RESUMENLa Universidad de las Américas (UDLA)–Quito, inició el proyecto “Roles de género en el entorno familiar de la Comuna El Topo”, cuyo objetivo es promover relaciones equitativas entre hombres y mujeres, y prevenir violencia de género.  Además, se pretende visibilizar y actuar frente a inequidades y problemáticas sociales de violencia. El estudio se enfocó en evidenciar los aprendizajes y cambios generados en las y los estudiantes a partir de la capacitación, sensibilización e interacción con la comunidad indígena El Topo. En este contexto se conjugan género, interseccionalidad, y vinculación comunitaria e interculturalidad bajo el reto de promover aprendizajes significativos (investigación-acción).

Breathing Under Water

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Gabriela Mesquita Borges ◽  
Rita Faria
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Refugee Women ◽  
Specific Analysis ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Gender Specific

The current chapter will allow a better understanding of refugee women's situation in global-forced migration. It also offers a comprehensive account of the ways in which refugee women's experiences of violence are shaped by gendered relations and structures. Furthermore, the chapter will analyze the interactions between the gender identity formation of men and women, the context of escape, displacement and asylum seeking, and the experience or manifestation of gender-based violence against refugee women. Finally, it also intends to illustrate how structural and symbolic violence and power relations cooperate to shape experiences of violence for refugee women and how it can influence and perpetuate interpersonal violence. In this sense, several studies are presented that demonstrate, on one hand, how gender relations are affected by escape, displacement, and asylum, and how they can create different practices of structural and symbolic violence; and, on the other hand, draw attention to the current lack of gender-specific analysis of the problem of asylum and refugees.

Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-34
Author(s):  
Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty ◽  
Dhritiman Chakraborty
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
The Public ◽  
Indian Tradition ◽  
Women’S Agency ◽  
Spiritual Commitment

Abstract Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, and the non-fictions by Kailashbasini Devi, Krishnabhabini Das, and other women writers in the second half of the nineteenth century contested the imagined idealization of the Hindu domesticity and conjugality as spaces of loveableness and spiritual commitment. They criticized coercion in child-marriages and the forceful injunctions of the Hindu scriptures on both married and widowed women. Such rhetoric of quasi empowerment needs to be disaggregated to perpetuate issues of ‘double colonization,’ ‘dual-hold’ in feminism in India. The question is whether there can be any grounds of women’s agency in the Indian tradition. Eurocentric critiques are ill-equipped to politicize all modalities of a culture of social exclusion in Hindu imaginaries. Henceforth, as questions of equality, emancipation, and empowerment are fiercely debated in the public domain in contemporary India, we need to argue how immanent dissenting woman subjectivity can originate to counteract multiple patriarchies formed in Indian immediacies.

Stepping into a Feminist Minefield: Women Sex Offenders

1998 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee FitzRoy
Keyword(s):  
Sex Offenders ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Complex Form ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Postmodern Theory ◽  
Violence Against Children ◽  
Contextual Framework ◽  
Women’S Agency

This article seeks to initiate discussion on the issue of women, specifically mothers, who perpetrate sexual violence against children and explore some tentative theorisations as to how we can understand this complex form of sexual violence. The analysis and discussion will be located within a feminist contextual framework that draws upon contemporary feminist and postmodern theory. Within this discussion, the article will be drawing on the understanding of such violence from the experiences of victim/survivors, other practitioners and a broad range of theorists. In exploring the issue, the article will endeavor to provide a more complex understanding of the issue of women's agency and capacity for violence, the possible wide ranging impacts of phallocentricism and the consequences of such violence in the lives of children, men and women.

scholarly journals Recent Contributions to the Irish Novel by Sara Baume, Anna Burns and Eleanor O’Reilly: On Language, Words and Wordlessness

Oceánide ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 85-94
Author(s):  
Margarita Estévez-Saá
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Unstable Condition ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Identity Crises

The purpose of this contribution is to study three young writers who have offered, in the past three years, in a distinctively new voice, further instances of the Irish writers’ endless ability to experiment with the form of the novel. Sara Baume’s "A Line Made by Walking" (2017), Anna Burns’s "Milkman" (2018), and Eleanor O’Reilly’s "m for mammy" (2019) are three representative instances of the potential of the form of the novel in the hands of Irish women writers. Each of these novels deserve a study in its own due to their complexity and interest, but analysing them together offers us a unique opportunity to assess the thriving state of novel writing in Ireland, especially in the hands of Irish women writers.The three novels object of our study deal with identity crises, and they similarly represent their protagonists as struggling against society and its structures, be it the family, local communities, the world of art, nature or politics. Furthermore, the three authors have been able to devise alternative narrative styles, techniques and even endings that enabled them to render the complexities of the topics dealt with as well as to represent the unstable condition of their protagonists. In addition, Baume, Burns and O’Reilly have significantly chosen as protagonists female characters with artistic or intellectual aspirations who allow the authors to endow their respective narratives with metaliterary meditations on the possibilities as well as limits of language, words and wordlessness.

Agency, Social Status and Performing Marriage in Postcolonial Societies

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (7) ◽  
pp. 980-994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Dery ◽  
Sylvia Bawa
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Political Capital ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
Women’S Agency

This article examines contextually-grounded perspectives on the socio-political significance of marriage in contemporary Ghanaian society. Drawing on qualitative interviews among men and women in northwestern Ghana, this article argues that, beyond historicizing the institution of monogamous marriage, women’s agency in desiring, and navigating marriages are performatively agentic and tied to attaining a myriad of socio-cultural, economic and political capital. Situated within the constrained articulations of participants, our findings alert us to complex negotiations and manoeuvres through which men and women aspire for specific forms of masculinities and femininities within the larger gender hierarchies.

Woman's Body as the Site of Violence in Parijat's Blue Mimosa

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-40
Author(s):  
Indira Acharya Mishra
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Corporal Punishment ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Special Power ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Control

 The article aims to analyze Parijat's Blue Mimosa, which was originally published as Śirīṣako Phūla (1965) from the feminist perspective. Feminists argue that patriarchy is unfriendly to women. They explain that because of biased patriarchal gender roles women suffer from gender-based violence. They claim that in patriarchy men have special power and privileges which allow them to dominate and control women to their benefit. They use corporal punishment and sexual violence in case women deny to submit to them. Thus, feminists protest the imposition of traditional gender roles in the process of socialization. They demand for a more egalitarian perspective towards gender which allows human individuals to live according to their interests and capacities. In Blue Mimosa, the female characters become the victim of gender-based violence. They are physically assaulted, raped, and murdered. Their bodies become the site where men enact violence. Thus, feminism is relevant to analyze the text. The article argues that these female characters become the victim of violence just because they are women. The article helps to understand how women suffer from gender-based violence in patriarchy.

scholarly journals Language of Feminine Consciousness A reading of the Novel (The Beloveds “Al-Muhboubat”) by (Aliyah Mamdouh)

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr Maha Farouk Abdul Qader Al-Hindaw
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Analytical Method ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
American University ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Quantitative Content ◽  
Different Levels

This research is an attempt to reveal the manifestations of (Homosexuality), which is any attitude, deed or language issued by both men and women that says the inferiority of the female, and how women resist it at different levels, the most important of which is (language) in an Iraqi novelist text (Al- Muhboobat) by (Aliyah). Mamdouh) published by Dar Al- Saqi in Beirut in 2003, and the recipient of the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Novel from the American University in Cairo in 2004. The method followed in this study was the analytical method, which came on three levels: 1. Quantitative content analysis: in which the number of male and female characters as they appeared in the novelistic text was compared. 2. The qualitative analysis of the content: It included a comparison between the specifications given to the male and female characters in the novelistic text. 3. Analyzing the homosexuality of the dominant language in the text: by which we mean the way in which language is employed in this text. The research concluded that the number of female characters exceeded the male characters in the novel. Andthe heroine’s desire for rejection, Suhaila, to the reality of tyranny and the invasion that she suffered in the homeland and exile through the rejection letter that represented her in the novel, in contrast to the state of complacency, surrender, and weakness suffered by the son Nader, which was represented by the letter of his machine that he adopted in the novel.

scholarly journals Online Activism Against Gender-Based Violence: How African Feminism is Using Twitter for Progress

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 271-286
Author(s):  
Blessing Dachollom Datiri
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
African Women ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
African Feminism ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
Online Activism ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
The Impact

The chief goal of African feminism has been to better African women’s dire conditions in a mainly patriarchal society. Over the last five years however, the tide appears to be turning as feminists across the continent make greater use of online platforms to work change. This paper discusses the ways in which African women are using Twitter to protest against the abusive conditions women face including early and forced marriages, domestic abuse, abduction, sexual assault, slavery and other forms of genderbased violence. Through the lens of three hashtag campaigns (#BringBackOurGirls, #JusticeforNoura and #JusticeForOchanya), the paper examines the impact of twittering on African gender activism. Through Critical Discussion Analysis of selected tweets three key narratives emerged, constructed by the online activists who took part in the campaigns: Solidarity in Feminist Sisterhood; Gender Equality; and A Call for Justice. The tweets are analysed under these themes showing that the meanings constructed by the activists helped advance the African feminist cause. The paper concludes with the lessons to be drawn from the campaigns, which show social media’s scope for advancing the goals of African feminism.

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