scholarly journals Tomboys: Performing gender in popular fiction

Image & Text ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Gardiner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Gender Performativity ◽  
Hunger Games ◽  
Children And Young Adults ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Katniss Everdeen ◽  
The Impact

In the nineteenth century, new characters exploded onto the pages of popular novels: forthright, self-reliant and self-aware girls who became known as tomboys. Like Jo March storming through the pages of Little women, these brave and boisterous young women charmed and astonished readers, and profoundly influenced generations of girls. This article examines the impact of the tomboy in literature, its confluence with other, older, archetypes such as the cross-dressing warrior maid, and its development alongside other proto-feminist heroines of the nineteenth century: the Female Gentleman and the Plucky Girl. The article interrogates not only the character traits of fictional tomboys, but also the narrative arcs and tropes with which they were often associated, such as the Tamed Tomboy, who, like Jo March, comes to learn the real meaning of womanhood, as defined through her mother and sisters, in marriage; and the Incorrigible Tomboy, like George in the Famous five books, who resists all efforts to be treated "like a girl". The article further explores the continued relevance of these famous nineteenth- and twentieth-century tomboys, whose performances of gender and sexuality echo in recent fiction for children and young adults through characters such as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger games trilogy, the genderfluid Micah in Justine Larbelestier's Liar, or overtly queer heroines such as Kaede in Malinda Lo's Huntress. What has the tomboy in literature meant to twenty-first century understandings of gender performativity? And, importantly, what stories about gender - what possible lives - do these characters construct for the young women who read them?

‘How I Managed’

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-155
Author(s):  
Tamara S. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Infant Care ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Advice Literature ◽  
Authorial Persona ◽  
The Impact

The second chapter explores how nineteenth-century parenting publications shaped popular narratives of babyhood and baby care. A critical analysis of the power of the print media in producing as well as spreading rapidly commodified advice material allows us to reconsider the still persistent phenomenon of competing books on babies in its historical context. The expanding market of expert instructions reconfigured images of babyhood, codifying the baby as a source of anxiety that required clinical knowledge and intervention. Women writers of popular childrearing manuals such as Eliza Warren, the main rival of the bestselling Isabella Beeton, packaged infant care advice in narratives, at once trading on and endeavouring to reshape this market. A crucial link between putatively professional, systematically presented, parenting instructions and the interpolation of infant care advice in popular fiction, Warren’s full-scale childrearing manual in narrative form, How I Managed My Children from Infancy to Marriage (1865), provides a test case of the shifting focus on personal experience and new expert knowledge in the selling of parenting publications. Since the nineteenth-century market for these publications was informed by a general move to hands-on, practical advice, Warren’s strategies in creating her authorial persona to market a mother’s experience formed a symptomatic and influential component in the impact of advice literature both on perceptions of baby care and on the literary baby.

“I hunt. He bakes.”: Constructing and Deconstructing Gender Identity in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games Trilogy

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Rakchuda Thibordee
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Gender Performativity ◽  
Hunger Games ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
The Hunger Games ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Katniss Everdeen

This article aims to investigate the construction of the gender identity of the young-adult female protagonist in The Hunger Games trilogy. Through the lens of Judith Butler’s gender performativity, both male and female characters in the trilogy manifest different perspectives of masculinity and femininity through the deconstruction of the gender binary. Similar to the muttation of the mockingjays, the female protagonist hybridizes masculinity and femininity. Katniss Everdeen embraces both masculine and feminine attributes simultaneously, and this adoption promotes an alternative way of performing gender. Gender, hence, becomes a choice for characters to perform to present themselves. In this regard, Judith Butler’s gender performativity is applied to analyze Katniss’s gender identity that deconstructs the ideologies of the traditional gender binary. The adoption of gender performativity may encourage awareness and empowerment of gender equality in the trilogy.

Shifting Boundaries: Gender in Pinhua Baojian

NAN Nü ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Starr
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Identity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sexual Role ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Female Prostitutes ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Boy Actors ◽  
Shifting Boundaries

AbstractGender transformations in Pinhua baojian reveal a much broader examination of gender and sexuality than allowed for by discussions of the work as a homosexual novel. This paper examines some of the complexities of the gendered representations of boy actors in the novel, seen in their marriage unions, in cross-dressing episodes, and particularly in parallels with female prostitutes of other nineteenth-century courtesan fiction. The coerced adoption of a feminine gender identity and homosexual sexual role by the boy actors, together with their gradual remasculination during the course of the novel, expose masculinity and femininity as highly socialized constructions and act as comment on the wider nineteenth-century marriage economy.

He looks so cute: The discourse of heterosexual relationship initiation by female youth in Nigeria

Sexualities ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 136346072096129
Author(s):  
Eyo O Mensah
Keyword(s):  
Young Women ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Heterosexual Relationships ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Gender Performativity ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Gender Barriers ◽  
Relationship Initiation ◽  
Heterosexual Relationship

In many cultural traditions in Africa and beyond, it is taboo for women to initiate sexual offers to men. However, with the new wave of gender fluidity, exposure to media, and affiliation with modernity, some young women in Nigeria initiate heterosexual relationships with their choice of partners. This article explores the nuanced narratives, motivations and experiences of young women in such relationships from a qualitative ethnographic approach using participant observations, focus group and semi-structured interviews. The study is rooted in gender performativity, a postmodern feminist approach to gender and sexuality which allows an individual to express his or her sexual identity and roles based on preference, freedom and responsibility. The results, based on linguistic evidence, show that through initiating sexual relationships, young women find a source of empowerment and agency that challenges their stereotyped passive roles, breaks down gender barriers in normative heterosexual relationships, and thus expand the boundary of their femininity.

scholarly journals Magazine Culture, Girlhood Communities, and Educational Reform in Late Victorian Britain*

2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (570) ◽  
pp. 1169-1195
Author(s):  
Kathryn Gleadle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Young Females ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Process Understanding ◽  
Educational Career ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This article argues for the importance of restoring girls’ aspirations and self-education to narratives of Victorian educational reform. Studies typically focus upon the efforts of professionals, politicians and campaigners in plotting the pioneering changes to girls’ education in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here it is contended that the success of these developments depended upon a new generation of girls with the confidence and ambition to take advantage of the new opportunities to sit examinations and attend university. To do this, the article excavates the neglected phenomenon of the manuscript magazine. It examines how young females used well-established periodicals to advertise their own amateur magazines. Inviting readers to contribute to their ventures, they constructed independent networks of collaborative cultural endeavour. Manuscript magazines, it will be suggested, need to be understood as part of a ‘magazine culture’ widely embraced by Victorian girls. To tease out the small but subtle ways in which magazine culture could enhance the aspirations of young women, the article focuses upon the extraordinary diary archives of Eva Knatchbull-Hugessen (1861–95). The educational career of Knatchbull-Hugessen, who was an early student at Newnham College in the 1880s, exemplifies the impact which engagement in girlhood culture could engender and the significant role played by magazines, both professional and amateur, in this process. Understanding teenage responses to educational reforms requires a recalibration of our analytical lens to focus not upon grand narratives of feminist awakening but rather upon the small subjective shifts which typically underlay young females’ decisions.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Reading Stratigraphical Woodscapes in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 210-223
Author(s):  
Anna Burton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local History ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Geological Work ◽  
Gideon Mantell ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Visual Cultures

In The Woodlanders (1887), Hardy uses the texture of Hintock woodlands as more than description: it is a terrain of personal association and local history, a text to be negotiated in order to comprehend the narrative trajectory. However, upon closer analysis of these arboreal environs, it is evident that these woodscapes are simultaneously self-contained and multi-layered in space and time. This essay proposes that through this complex topographical construction, Hardy invites the reader to read this text within a physical and notional stratigraphical framework. This framework shares similarities with William Gilpin's picturesque viewpoint and the geological work of Gideon Mantell: two modes of vision that changed the observation of landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This comparative discussion at once reviews the perception of the arboreal prospect in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures, and also questions the impact of these modes of thought on the woodscapes of The Woodlanders.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

Liszt at the Piano: The Impact of Iconography on mid-Nineteenth Century Musicology

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Suzanne Marie Francis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Maximum Benefit ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Impact

By the time of his death in 1827, the image of Beethoven as we recognise him today was firmly fixed in the minds of his contemporaries, and the career of Liszt was beginning to flower into that of the virtuosic performer he would be recognised as by the end of the 1830s. By analysing the seminal artwork Liszt at the Piano of 1840 by Josef Danhauser, we can see how a seemingly unremarkable head-and-shoulders bust of Beethoven in fact holds the key to unlocking the layers of commentary on both Liszt and Beethoven beneath the surface of the image. Taking the analysis by Alessandra Comini as a starting point, this paper will look deeper into the subtle connections discernible between the protagonists of the picture. These reveal how the collective identities of the artist and his painted assembly contribute directly to Beethoven’s already iconic status within music history around 1840 and reflect the reception of Liszt at this time. Set against the background of Romanticism predominant in the social and cultural contexts of the mid 1800s, it becomes apparent that it is no longer enough to look at a picture of a composer or performer in isolation to understand its impact on the construction of an overall identity. Each image must be viewed in relation to those that preceded and came after it to gain the maximum benefit from what it can tell us.

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