scholarly journals “The Handmaid’s Tale”: a legal-literary essay

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-147
Author(s):  
Clarice Beatriz da Costa Söhngen ◽  
Danielle Massulo Bordignon
Keyword(s):  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Legal Provisions ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fictional Space ◽  
Second Wave

This paper proposes an analysis of the legal aspects present in the narrative of “The Handmaid´s Tale”, a novel by Margaret Atwood. First published in 1985, and heavily influenced by second-wave feminism, “The Handmaid´s Tale” addresses, mainly, the matter of gender inequality, once it creates a reality in which fertile women are compelled to reproduce through a servitude system. Through a rupture with the Cartesian dichotomy whose dualist notion separates objectivity from subjectivity, reason from emotion, this paper exposes that this oppression is not a literary creation by Atwood, but a reproduction of the power relations put forward in the history of humankind. In this regard, it is explored how Literature can aid the Law in facing the questions that come up in the resolution of legal and social problems. Besides gender inequality, it is possible to spot in the novel several violations concerning the principle of human dignity. Therefore, this research analyzes the legal provisions taken in the fictional space of Gilead, as well as in the country that preceded it, the United States of America, as well as in Brazil. In addition, it studies the symbolic violence to which women are submitted in Gilead and how it relates to the experiences lived by contemporary Brazilian women.

An Anti-Imperialist Feminist's Tale

2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Think Tank ◽  
Policy Studies ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Left Movement ◽  
Second Wave

<div class="bookreview">Roberta Salper, <em>Domestic Subversive: A Feminist Take on the Left, 1960&ndash;1976</em> (Tucson: Anaphora Literary Press, 2014), 236 pages, $20, paperback.</div>Since second wave feminism is the largest social movement in the history of the United States, it is surprising that there are fewer than a dozen autobiographies written by the activists of the late 1960s and early '70s. Roberta Salper's <em>Domestic Subversive</em> is a welcome addition, especially because it is well-written, often with humor, and promises an anti-imperialist feminist analysis.&hellip; <em>Domestic Subversive</em> is a feminist's take on a range of organizations of the left from 1960 to 1976: the student movement in Spain, New Left movement in the United States, Marxist-Leninist Puerto Rican Socialist Party in the United States and Puerto Rico, and a prestigious liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., the Latin American Unit of the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), where she worked as a Resident Fellow.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-4" title="Vol. 67, No. 4: September 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

On Fat Clothes: Unraveling Plus-Size Design Discourse

Design Issues ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Lauren Downing Peters
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Fashion Theory ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article considers the possibilities and limitations of plus-size clothing— a subcategory of ready-to-wear that is deeply embedded in the history of dieting, exercise, standardized sizing, and the industrialization of clothing manufacturing in the United States. In doing so, it draws on fashion theory and disability theory in exposing how plus-size clothing functions as a normalizing mechanism, thereby inhibiting innovation in this sector. The article concludes with a counterexploration of the possibilities of “fat clothes” and the novel w ays of seeing and existing in the world that they might enable.

Write Your Mother

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda C. Seaman
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Japanese Women ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pregnancy And Childbirth ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second Wave

This chapter traces the literary history of Japanese women writing about pregnancy and childbirth, focusing on two key figures in this development. The first is Meiji-era poet Yosano Akiko whose works explored her experiences as an expectant mother and highlighted the unsettling aspects of pregnancy. While Yosano’s works permitted the literary treatment of formerly taboo issues, later writers rejected her lead, instead treating pregnancy as the prelude to motherhood, as a quasi-sacred moment. This persisted until the 1960s and 70s, when writers influenced by second-wave feminism challenged patriarchal society, rejecting the roles of wife and mother. The second was Tsushima Yuko, whose novels and stories explored alternative, mother-centered family models. Since then, writing about pregnancy rests on these two authors: on one side, treatments of pregnancy that emphasize the alien and the disquieting, and on the other, more ironic works, focusing upon the self-assertive and individualistic nature of childbearing.

Collective and Democratic Experiments in the Politics of Knowledge in Britain since 1968:

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 9-31
Author(s):  
Ian Gwinn
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
New Left ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Politics Of Knowledge ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Production ◽  
Second Wave

The tumultuous events of 1968 had a profound and lasting impact on society, culture and politics on a global scale. In Britain, the effects of the upswing in radicalism were powerfully registered in developments and departures in cultural and intellectual life. Recent contributions to the history of the intellectual Left during this period, including the traditions of the New Left, cultural studies, and feminism, have documented many of the decisive shifts in theoretical outlooks and thematic focus. Less frequently acknowledged, however, has been the formation of a distinctive ‘politics of knowledge’, which contested established hierarchies and norms of academic work through forms of collective and democratic practice. This article argues that this project was a decisive outcome and achievement of the post-68 conjuncture, becoming part of a much broader democratising front in the 1970s and 80s that centred upon sites of cultural and intellectual expression. The key features of this alternative apparatus of intellectual production are explored in the context of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, History Workshop, and the scholarly endeavours of second-wave feminism, which paid critical attention to the possibilities, tensions and open contradictions intrinsic to this way of combining politics and intellectual practice.

Jewish Women's Studies

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tal Ilan
Keyword(s):  
Women's Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Society ◽  
The West ◽  
Women’S Studies ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Similar Development

Women's studies, as a discipline within Jewish studies, is relatively new. It appeared in the 1970s, in the wake of a similar development within other fields of academia particularly in the United States — a move that was later to be designated ‘second-wave feminism’. The question of women's status within Judaism, as within any human society is not new. In Jewish sources, it is as old as the story of creation in the first chapters of Genesis, with the description of woman's secondary creation and her implication in the original sin and fall from grace. The human condition has always been one in which women are subordinated to men, and most written cultures have produced documents justifying this condition. Only over the last 200 years has this truism come under criticism, particularly in the cultures of the West, with the advent of ideas about humanism, equality, and democracy.

Teaching Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and the Diamond Sutra

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-172
Author(s):  
Darin Pradittatsanee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Buddhist Text ◽  
History Of

The essay discusses Jack Kerouac’s use of the Diamond Sutra, a major Buddhist text grounding his composition of The Dharma Bums. In addition to a close reading of how the sutra is incorporated in the novel, the essay also presents a brief history of Buddhism in the United States.

From Book to Film

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Christine M. E. Guth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Film History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Mary McNeil Fenollosa’s 1906 novel The Dragon Painter and its 1919 filmic adaptation sit at the intersection of American literary, art, and film history. Simultaneously personal and political, each is a product of its time and place. Together, they tell a story about changing (and unchanging) attitudes that were constituents of the complex and often contradictory history of the reception of Japanese culture and people in the United States. The novel draws on stereotypes of Japan as a primitive country of innately artistic people that at the time of its publication had been made familiar through art and literature. The silent film, produced in Hollywood, by and co-starring Sessue Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki, expanded and complicated the modes of visualizing Japan by featuring a Japanese couple in starring roles. This article addresses the relationship between the novel, an allegory of Japanese cultural loss and renewal, and the film, a romance inflected with American concerns about race, drawing particular attention to gender and Japanism in their reception and interpretation.

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