scholarly journals Female, Black, and Able: Representations of Sojourner Truth and Theories of Embodiment

2012 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Minister
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
White Men ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Sojourner Truth ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

<p>Sojourner Truth exists in American popular culture as a strong contributor to the movements for abolition and women&rsquo;s rights. In order to maintain this image of strength and make the case that black women are just as capable as white men, Truth intentionally elided her disabled right hand. This article explores representations of Sojourner Truth in relation to her nineteenth century context and, in particular, social stigmas regarding race, gender and disability. The interpretations of pictures, a painting, and two events contained in Truth's Narrative suggest that Truth argued against gender and racial oppression by operating with an ideology of ability that suggested that both women and African-Americans are strong, powerful, and able. As Truth maintained an ideology of ability in order to subvert gender and racial hierarchies, she offers a case study into the benefits of intersectional approaches to historical studies.</p><p>Key Words</p><p>Sojourner Truth, disability, race, gender, feminism, nineteenth century</p>

Samson and the Making of American Martyrs

Black Samson ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior ◽  
Jeremy Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Political Compromise ◽  
Social Advancement ◽  
John Brown

By the 1850s, some abolitionists had begun to use the term “Samson” to refer to those involved in insurrections by enslaved persons. By the dawn of the Civil War, they extended that term to describe real-life persons who fought to end slavery. In the last half of the nineteenth century, poets, clergy, scholars, and other intellectuals began to identify biblical Samson with historical individuals who challenged racial oppression in America. The biblical hero had already become a potent symbol of African Americans’ collective strength in the fight against slavery and other barriers to social advancement. Eventually, he became associated with those who took up this struggle through passionate rhetoric, violence, and, at times, political compromise. In the process, persons like John Brown, Fredrick Douglass, Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and Booker T. Washington became memorialized as larger-than-life Samson figures.

Ordinary Masochisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Theoretical Examination ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Ordinary Masochisms argues for literary alternatives to pervasive dictatorial norms about masochism that first surface in Victorian literature, reach their pioneering pinnacle in the modernist moment, and are expressly mourned in post-modern texts. In particular, the literary works discussed all challenge the more popular term “sadomasochism” as a conglomerate form of perversion that was named and studied in the late nineteenth century. Underscoring close textual analyses with modern theories of masochism as empowering, this book argues that Charlotte Brontë Villette (1853), George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin (1886), D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), and Jean Rhys’s Quartet (1928) all experiment with masochistic relationships that extend far beyond reductive early readings of inherently feminine or sexually aberrant masochism. Ordinary Masochisms begins with a historical and theoretical examination of masochism’s treatment during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries before moving to an examination of the Biblical tale of Samson and Delilah in conjunction with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), from which masochism garners its name. An intermediary chapter treats Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (1903) as a case study transitioning between sexological and psychoanalytical discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the conclusion about Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981) addresses masochism’s seeming inability to recuperate itself from categories of deviance, despite the success of contemporary popular culture representations. The book closes with a brief consideration of masochistic reading, a subtle undercurrent of the project as a whole.

“Rational Amusement and Sound Instruction”: Constructing the True Catholic Woman in the Ave Maria, 1865-1889

1998 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penny Edgell Becker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Systematic Examination ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Official Ideology ◽  
Meaning Systems ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the relationship between gender ideology and popular culture in one particular time and place—a Catholic family magazine called the Ave Maria during the latter part of the nineteenth Century. This case study yields an interpretive sociological account of how women were portrayed in this magazine, an account that sheds light on our understanding of the construction and negotiation of religious ideologies. When I speak of “ideology,” I refer to highly articulated and explicit meaning Systems that construct and regulate patterns of conduct. “Official ideologies” are endorsed and promoted by organizational officials and/or community elites.A systematic examination of Ave Maria from 1865 to 1889 reveals that two-thirds of the articles reproduce some version of the official ideology of the True Catholic Woman. On the other hand, about one-third of the articles produce what I call “alternative interpretations”—“alternative” because they are critical of the limits that the official versions placed on women's character, activity, or autonomy.

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