scholarly journals How Damsels Love: The Transgressive Pleasure of Romance

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 146-159
Author(s):  
Renata Elizabetta Ntelia
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Female Character ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Psychological Dimension ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Male Discourse

In this article, I look at contemporary romances as a source of transgressive pleasure that may inspire its audience to reject patriarchy. I focus solely on romances between a man and a woman with emphasis on the psychological dimension of the female character upon her trajectory from an object of desire to the man’s ideal partner. I argue that the pleasure of romance is, indeed, a means towards the dismissal of patriarchy. Drawing on feminist theory, I contend that romance constitutes a nucleus of a feminine ideal that women may use as a comparative reference point for their real-life relationships, revealing any problematic and inadequate behavior of real-life partners. Even though romance pertains to the prescripts of patriarchy, I argue that it can be seen as an intertext: a product of the interlanguage used to translate the male discourse to the female bodily experience. In producing and consuming the romance, women can contrast this experience of the feminine ideal with the lack of pleasure patriarchy entails for them. In this respect, the romance possesses a transgressive power that may facilitate women’s realization of their dissatisfaction and the refusal of their role as emotional labor.

scholarly journals THE HUNGER GAMES IS A UTOPIA? THE FEMININE AS A BRIDGE TO THE RETURN TO NATURE IN CONTEMPORARY DYSTOPIA

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 743-758
Author(s):  
Ânderson Martins Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Female Character ◽  
Strong Bond ◽  
Hunger Games ◽  
The Hunger Games ◽  
The Feminine

ABSTRACT Contemporary dystopia has distinguished itself from the canonic texts of the genre since it has problematized technology and is permeated by posthumanism. This update in the dystopian genre has a utopic subtext within the narrative. In it, utopia is only achieved by a return to nature; such a connection between humanity and nature will only be restored by the feminine who will work as a bridge to a posthuman relation among species. This paper will start from the contributions of Derrida (1997, 2008), Dunja M. Mohr (2007), Rita Terezinha Schmidt (2017) and Cary Wolfe (2009) to analyze the trilogy Hunger Games (2008, 2009, 2010), aiming to discuss epistemologically the utopic subtext. The paper will show that Rue and Katniss will create a strong bond with nature, being the last female character responsible to lead society to a posthuman utopic place.

scholarly journals College Students, Motivation, and Success

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Becky J. Cox
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Is Success ◽  
Students Success

Many people spend a large portion of their lives striving to be successful, chasing success. But what is success? Success means different things to different people. How do we get to be successful? Why do some young adults choose to go to college? Does graduating from college offer a better opportunity for being successful? What motivates college students to go to class day after day, to complete hours of assigned work? What motivates us to be successful? This article reviews the parameters of motivation and what motivation means to different honors-level college students. Additionally, students are asked to determine why they make the choices they do. These topics were the focus in the motivational speech “Think – Understand - Succeed” utilizing the #1 National Bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell (2008) as a main reference point. Comparisons were made between real-life situations and those found in Outliers.   Keywords: College Students, Success, Motivation, Culture, Family

When things go wrong: the implications for facilitators of work integrated learning placements in international destinations

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Agnew ◽  
Elizabeth Abery ◽  
Sam Schulz ◽  
Shane Pill
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Critical Incidents ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Integrated Learning ◽  
Analysis Model ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Work Integrated Learning ◽  
Staff Wellbeing ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

PurposeInternational work integrated learning (iWIL) placements for university students are widely promoted within universities. However, they cannot be offered and sustained without a great deal of time and effort; most commonly the responsibility of an assigned university facilitator. Preparation and support are essential for a positive student experience and iWIL outcome. However, not all experiences and outcomes are positive, or predictable.Design/methodology/approachPersonal vignettes of university iWIL facilitators are used to create a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) of experiences and outcomes where placements have been affected by unexpected or unprecedented “critical incidents” and the impact incurred on these academics. The vignettes are analyzed according to the Pitard (2016) six-step structural analysis model.FindingsAnalysis of the vignettes identifies a resulting workload cost, emotional labor and effect on staff wellbeing. Due to the responsibility and expectations of the position, these incidents placed the university iWIL facilitator in a position of vulnerability, stress, added workload and emotional labor that cannot be compared to other academic teaching roles.Practical implicationsIt is intended through the use of “real life” stories presented in the vignettes, to elicit consideration and recognition of the role of the iWIL facilitator when dealing with “the negatives” and “bring to light” management and support strategies needed.Originality/valueResearch is scant on iWIL supervisor experience and management of “critical incidents”, therefore this paper adds to the literature in an area previously overlooked.

Women and Domesticity in the 1950s

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Gamber
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Female Population ◽  
Social Science Theory ◽  
Science Theory ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Popular Television

Two images dominated popular portrayals of American women in the 1950s. One was the fictional June Cleaver, the female lead character in the popular television program, “Leave It to Beaver,” which portrayed Cleaver as the stereotypical happy American housewife, the exemplar of postwar American domesticity. The other was Cleaver’s alleged real-life opposite, described in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) as miserable, bored, isolated, addicted to tranquilizers, and trapped in look-alike suburban tract houses, which Friedan termed “comfortable concentration camps.” Both stereotypes ignore significant proportions of the postwar female population, both offer simplistic and partial views of domesticity, but both reveal the depth of the influence that lay behind the idea of domesticity, real or fictional. Aided and abetted by psychology, social science theory, advertising, popular media, government policy, law, and discriminatory private sector practices, domesticity was both a myth and a powerful ideology that shaped the trajectories of women’s lives.

Rules and their Discontents

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Herzog
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Codes Of Ethics ◽  
Organizational Contexts ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Psychological Dimension ◽  
Iron Cage ◽  
Moral Perspective ◽  
The Right ◽  
Organizational Rules ◽  
Do The Right Thing

Drawing on real-life examples and the philosophical literature on moral rules, this chapter discusses the problems that can arise because organizations are rule-based structures. From a moral perspective, rules are double-edged: there are good moral reasons to obey them, especially in organizational contexts, but they are blunt tools that can do injustice to the underlying social reality, which is far more fine-grained and complex than rules could ever grasp. In addition, rules have a psychological dimension, especially when they are tied to incentives: they can refocus our attention, and crowd out the intrinsic motivation to do the right thing. To live with the ‘iron cage’ of organizational rules, individuals and organizations need to remain attentive to their double-edged character, and install mechanisms for preventing injustice to atypical cases. This analysis also throws light on the use of ‘codes of ethics’ in organizations.

Materialism, autonomy, intersectionality: revisiting Virginia Woolf through the Wages for Housework perspective

2022 ◽  
pp. 146470012110627
Author(s):  
Asako Nakai
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Wage System ◽  
Material Basis ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Political Opinions

Virginia Woolf's 1938 essay Three Guineas contends that the material basis is indispensable for women not only to survive but also to voice their political opinions. Woolf proposes three strategies for women to take. First, women should assert their right to have access to independent income, and for this purpose they should demand that the state pay for their reproductive work that often limits their opportunity to do waged work. Second, they must object to the very wage system which is indeed in complicity with patriarchy, and through which women are doubly exploited as unwaged or under-waged workers. And third, women must remain outside male-dominated movements and must organise an autonomous group even if they share the same cause with male workers; intersectional association will be possible only when each exploited group empowers itself and regains its own voice. This article examines how this highly materialist aspect of Woolf's feminism was revisited by the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s. By so doing, it argues that despite its facade of literary modernism and alleged elitism, Woolf's text contributes to real-life movements and continues to inspire people of different class backgrounds in different times. Discovering the connection between Woolf and Marxist feminism alters our way of seeing the history of feminist theory: the history is never a linear progress from one wave to another but a complex and interwoven narrative, in which once-forgotten ideas can travel across time and space, resurging as new ideas in different contexts.

lack a penis she has the joy (Jouissence) of her own embodied knowledge. In the same move 'the masculine' is relieved of the fear of castration, he need no longer define himself in relation to a mythical order. The perpetual, fearful repetition of masculist discourse can be replaced by fluid, multiple, contextual possibilities. We need to construct new desiring subjects in the ruins of the phallogocentrically enforced dualism. (Braidotti 1994b: 56) For archaeologists the potential of these new embodied subjectivities is enormous. In subversive moves we are freed to think in completely different ways as completely different knowing subjects, we are no longer fixed as masculine or feminine, in relation to reason and emotion, active or passive. In this new pre-phallocentric conceptual framework there are no dichotomous value structures in place, multiplicity and fluidity rule. When we identify ourselves as whole, complex agents, actively engaging with the social and cultural gendered categories we deny the confines of phallocentric opposition. The starting point for the project of sexual difference is the political will to assert the specificity of the lived female bodily experience . . . the project of sexual difference engages a will to reconnect the whole debate on difference to the bodily experience of women. (Braidotti 1994b: 140) I do not naively believe that simply by wishing the dichotomous structures away that they will disappear, but that we can disrupt the taken-for-granted nature of these phallocentric erections by asserting gendered locations which express multiplicity at the same time as asserting confident embodied knowledge. In this way the feminine will no longer be that which is lacking. As Judith Butler says: The feminine marks the limit of representability which would undo the pre-suppositions of representation itself. (Butler 1993b: 19) As academic archaeologists we are of course enmeshed in the symbols and meanings of the dominant masculist discourse, and in consequence we have 'known' ourselves and the world we live in relation to androcentric, phallocentric and heterosexual norms. If we are to tell radically different stories about the material culture with which we work we must make a terrifying leap into the interpretative spaces which are as yet largely inexpressible. We will use words which are already occupied by masculist meanings, and 'describe' social engagements in terms already dominated by the central, invasive phallus. We will in short be misunderstood. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

2016 ◽  
pp. 40-41
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Embodied Knowledge ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Value Structures ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Social Engagements

scholarly journals A discourse analysis of the College of Early Childhood educators communications: how do they shape the professional identity of Ontario's registered early childhood educators?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chanequa Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Professional Identity ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Early Childhood Educators ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory

The College of Early Childhood Educators (CECE) regulates registered early childhood educators (RECEs) in Ontario, Canada. The CECE distributes numerous communications to RECEs, whereby the text (both implicitly and explicitly) works to situate ECEs within a particular professional identity. This research study applies discourse analysis to code and categorize text from 66 communications disseminated by the CECE to RECEs. I identify five key discourses as well as several discursive strategies used to reinforce the discourses that contribute to the construction of a professional identity for Ontario RECEs. This study also employs two theoretical frameworks, feminist theory and critical race theory (CRT), to examine “what is not being said” by the CECE about the realities of RECE working conditions. I offer a counter-discourse to provide a narrative account of how particular RECE working conditions and real life professional experiences collide with the five discourses, and create a professional crisis in a current patchwork system. Keywords: professional identity, discourses, constructionism, feminist theory, critical race theory (CRT)

scholarly journals “She Isn’t Going to Give Up”: Women’s Resilience in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane – A Feminist Reading

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-28
Author(s):  
Ana-Blanca Ciocoi-Pop
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Social Unrest ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The Face ◽  
Vantage Points

Abstract While Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane is most often analyzed from the vantage points of postcolonialism as a text dealing primarily with the plight of the Bangladeshi immigrant community in London, it is difficult, if not downright impossible, to overlook the crucial role women and feminine resilience (in the face of not only patriarchy, but also racism, religion and social unrest) play in the novel. In actual fact, the story can much easier be read as the plight of women in their quest for self-determination and identity than as a novel about cultural clashes in the multicultural metropolis. The present essay sets out to prove that feminism is actually at the forefront of Ali’s novel, and that the feminine characters in Brick Lane stand for a post-feminist reflection on the (still) gasping abyss between theoretical gender equality and real-life sexism.

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