scholarly journals Cassandra Rios e a lésbica genuína em Eu sou uma lésbica (1980)

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina Castellanos Gonella
Keyword(s):  
Judith Butler ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Adult Woman ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Love Relationship ◽  
Lesbian Sexuality ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Children’S Sexuality

In this article, I analyze the novel, Eu sou uma lésbica (1980), by Brazilian author Cassandra Rios (1932-2002). I examine how Rios's text discusses the lesbianism and sexuality of Flávia, the protagonist of the novel, as well as the sexual and love relationship that the seven-year-old Flávia has with an adult woman. The work of authors such as Judith Butler, Marilyn R. Farwell, Teresa De Lauretis, Adrianne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and Jeffrey Weeks informs my theoretical framework. I propose that the novel presents Flávia's sexuality as natural and genuine in order to challenge traditional discourses surrounding lesbianism and children’s sexuality. While the representation of lesbian sexuality in children is transgressive and empowering, as it establishes same-sex desire among women as natural and dating back to infancy, I contend however that the novel’s treatment of adult lesbian sexuality perpetuates traditional corporal, racial, and class hierarchies.

The Changeling Legend and Queer Kinship in Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-311
Author(s):  
Molly Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Family Violence ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Adult Woman ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Trauma Survivor ◽  
Gender Presentation

In Caitriona Lally's debut novel Eggshells (2015), the narrator Vivian Lawlor is an adult woman with a quirky personality living in North Dublin, who believes herself to be a changeling. Throughout the novel, Vivian travels various paths in Dublin looking for specific ‘thin places,’ creating ‘an alternative map of Dublin’, as Claire Kilroy's review puts it. Folklore is often used as a code for hiding aspects of Irish life that are unspeakable, and in Eggshells the changeling story is a coded testimony of family violence in which the changeling figure is labelled as nonhuman. Rejected by family, she looks to queer models of kinship as outlined by Judith Butler, through transformative portals and a companion who is a fellow trauma survivor. This essay argues that, while her experience of traumatic family violence is silently coded within the changeling story, Vivian strategically deploys changeling legend to embody a nonconforming gender presentation.

Persuasion: Fellow Creatures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Morris
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Persuasion overtly foregrounds the self as embodied: physical accidents and sickness are recurrent. Sir Walter Eliot’s belief in the time-defying bodily grace of nobility is subject to Austen’s harshest irony. The transition from vertically ordered place to horizontal space in Persuasion is more extreme than in any other of the completed novels. Anne Elliot’s movement from social exclusiveness to socially inclusive possibility allows Austen to challenge gender and class hierarchies traditionally held to be inborn. Her writerly experimentation expands the possibilities of narrative perspective to encompass the porous boundaries of the physical, the emotional and the rational that constitute any moment of consciousness. Her focalisation techniques in the text look directly towards Woolf’s stylist innovations. A chain of references to guns and shooting gathers into the novel contentious contemporary discursive networks on class relations, notions of masculinity and the nature of creaturely life.

Homosexuality in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams: Demythologising the Imaginings and Universalising the Reality

Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adetunji Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Black African ◽  
Sex Preference ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Sex Orientation ◽  
The Right

Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams offers an extensive treatment of homosexuality, a preoccupation which, until recently, is rare in black African fiction. On this account, as well as its depth and openness, the work has attracted some critical attention. It has been read from a masculinity perspective, as a coming-out novel, as a national allegory, as a work that challenges the notion of fixed sexuality, as a work that normalises same-sex sexuality, and so forth. Unlike these studies, this article examines the representation and disquisition around same-sex preference in the novel, with a view to demonstrating how some myths about homosexuality are exploded in the groundbreaking work, and showing that the narrative could also be apprehended as intellectual advocacy for the right to same-sex orientation.

scholarly journals “Go where the Love Is”: Failed Emotional Negotiations of Space and Identity in Tessa McWatt's This Body

2013 ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Elena Igartuburu García
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Subjective Perception ◽  
Love Relationship ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
The Way ◽  
Normative Ideals

Identity, space and emotions, although traditionally all traditionally naturalized and delinked from the construction of one another, might also be read as formed by intertwined processes that are guided and shaped by hegemonic powers. Nonetheless, as they delineating difference within and among themselves, the consideration of these three fields and the way they work together in these shaping opens up new ways to approach the split between normative categories of identity, assigned location and adequate feelings, and their subjective perception. Tessa McWatt’s novel This Body presents the reader with two Guyanese characters, Victoria and her nephew Derek, that undergo, at many different levels, this split between subjectivity and a socially and culturally given subject position. Challenging normative ideals, Victoria struggles with her categorization as Other; an endeavour marked by her trajectories and experiences as she negotiates and redeploys a physical as well as a social space of her own in the city of London. Still, her love relationship with a British man would make her drift towards assimilation inasmuch as this affair relocates Victoria within dominant gender, ethnic and class hierarchies.

scholarly journals A Tradução Intersemiótica na construção da personagem Holly Golithly em Breakfast at Tiffany’s: entre o romance e o cinema

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (44) ◽  
pp. 246-259
Author(s):  
Sinara De Oliveira Branco ◽  
Mariana Assis Maciel
Keyword(s):  
Image Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Multimodal Corpus ◽  
The Relationship

The purpose of this text is to analyze the intersemiotic construction of Holly Golithly in two contexts: the novel and the film Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). Along the film adaptation, the focus will be on the observation of how people and places influence her behaviour, taking into consideration the relationship between the imagetic and the verbal contexts (word-image relationship). The theoretical framework used is based on the Theory of Adaptation; the Intersemiotic Translation; Subtitling; Image Analysis and Film Narrative. The multimodal corpus compiled involves the selected scenes from the film, offering frames and subtitles, as well as excerpts from the novel. Results have shown how the character has changed in the film adaptation regarding her construction in the film narrative. With the application of intersemiotic translation, it was possible to observe how the analysis of the scenes and subtitles help with the construction and the interpretation of the character.

Precariousness, kinship, and care: Becoming human in Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942096798
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Female Subject ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article employs Christine L. Marran’s notion of “obligate storytelling” to examine the poetic structures of vulnerability in Canadian author Claire Cameron’s novel The Last Neanderthal (2017). The theoretical backbone of ideas on the materiality of being suggested by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Erinn C. Gilson, and Matt Edgeworth, among others, solicits a reading which foregrounds the moral upshot of conceiving the body as an affective centre of life and an arc of anthropogenesis. By following this trajectory, I attempt to show how in troping the archeological dig as a biosemiotic archive, Cameron exposes the structural homologies between the lives of her two female protagonists, a twenty-first-century scientist and a Neanderthal, whose bones she has unearthed. The novel’s use of narrative bifocality offers a visceral construction of subjectivity, which takes its bearings from the shared experience of corporeal vulnerability. By thus imaginatively unspooling the affective links between the neoliberal female subject and her Neanderthal cousin, the novel calls upon us both to rescale our conceptions of creaturely life and rethink our narratives of human origins.

Queer Timing

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Potter
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Institutional Processes ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
Lesbian Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Film Texts

This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to lesbian representation, initially by reframing the emergence of lesbian figures in cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s as only the most visible and belated signs of an array of strategies of sexuality. The emergence of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema is not a linear progression and consolidation but rather arises across multiple sites in dispersed forms that are modern and backward-looking, recursive and anachronistic. In this tumultuous period, new but not always coherent sexual knowledges and categories emerge, even as older modalities of homoeroticism persist. The book articulates some of the discursive and institutional processes by which women’s same-sex desires and identities have been reorganized as impossible, marginal or—perhaps not so surprisingly—central to new forms of cinematic representation and spectatorship. Complicating the critical consensus of feminist film theory and history, the book foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to historically distinct cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality. It articulates across its chapters the emergence of lesbian sexuality—and that of its intimate “other,” heterosexuality—as the effect of diverse discursive operations of early cinema, considered as a complex assemblage of film texts, exhibition practices, modes of female spectatorship, and reception.

Narrating eros and agape

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-30
Author(s):  
Zsolt Bojti
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Hungarian Academy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
Secondary Reading ◽  
Innovation And Technology ◽  
General Readership ◽  
Gay Literature

AbstractFin-de-SiècleA Hungarian version of the present paper was published as “Erósz és Agapé: Erotextus Edward Prime-Stevenson Imre: Egy emlékirat című regényének expozíciójában” (2019) in Literatura affiliated with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Supported by the ÚNKP-19-3 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology.” gay literature in English operated with a double narrative: one narrative offers a historical (and “innocent”) reading available to general readership; the other offers a personal (often illicit) reading available to the susceptible and initiated readers only. The double narrative, thus, allowed authors to give subtle visibility to same-sex desire in their works that would evade censorship. This paper argues that there is a similar double narrative in the exposition of Imre: A Memorandum by the American music critic and émigré writer Edward Prime-Stevenson. The double narrative of the novel, however, differs from that of prior gay literature. I argue that Prime-Stevenson thought it was a literary sin that prior gay literature offered a sensual, erotic, or even pornographic, subversive secondary reading to susceptible readers. In my reading, Prime-Stevenson consciously planted cues in the exposition of the novel, thus, created an erotext to trigger a similar subversive and illicit reading of his text. However, Prime-Stevenson used this technique to demonstrate that purely erotic literary representations denigrate same-sex desire; therefore, in what followed, he presented a different, agapeic view on same-sex desire. The paper substantiates that Prime-Stevenson’s intention was to break away from earlier narrative “traditions” of gay literature to offer a naturalised and legitimised representation and “script” of “homosexuality” per se. Prime-Stevenson did so in a crucial period of time, as the term “homosexual” just barely entered the English language and its pejorative connotations may not have been set in stone. The paper, as a result, casts a new complexion on sexuality as a literary phenomenon and the relevance of a complex narrative structure composed of “snares” and “false snares” in the exposition of Imre, which plays a crucial role in Prime-Stevenson authoring one of the very first openly homosexual novels in English, which has a happy ending.

scholarly journals “It’s All One Big Fantasy”: The Critique of Modernity in Dostoevsky’s Novel The Idiot

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Katya Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Final Word ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Russian Idea

The opposition between Europe and Russia runs through Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, culminating in Mme Epanchina’s declaration that both Europe and the Russians who travel to Europe are “one big fantasy” [Dostoevsky, 2002, p. 615]. In the novel, Dostoevsky uses the exile trope as a literary tool for expressing his Russian idea. Although the spiritual underpinnings of Dostoevsky’s nationalism have been well studied, the secular side of this concept bears further exploration. Peter Wagner argues that nationalism constitutes a response to the nostalgia that is developed in exile following one’s breaking away from tradition. Nineteenth-century nationalism specifically “was an attempt to recreate a sense of origins in the face of the disembedding effects of early modernity and capitalism” [Wagner, 2001, p. 103]. By applying Wagner’s theoretical framework to Dostoevsky’s narrative, the author demonstrates that in its secular essence, Dostoevsky’s nationalism is not a merely localized manifestation of a uniquely Russian sentiment, but a symptom of a larger phenomenon that was taking place in late nineteenth-century Europe. Because Mme Epanchina gets to say the final word in Dostoevsky’s novel, her role and the subtleties of her message will be the primary focus of the present analysis.

scholarly journals «I Will Eat You and Spit You Out»: A Reading of the ‘Lesbian Machine’ in Dacia Maraini’s Lettere a Marina

altrelettere ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Casadio
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Narrative Space ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition

This article analyzes the «lesbian-machines» (Grosz 1995, 184) at work in Dacia Maraini’s novel Lettere a Marina (1981) and collection of poems Mangiami pure (1978). To this purpose, I engage with two conceptions of desire within the western philosophical tradition. Firstly, examining the development of the metaphor of cannibalism or ‘eros fagico’, I argue that Maraini avoids the ontologization of the notion of desire considered as a lack and thus disengages it from its historical association with the denigration of the female other. Secondly, conceiving desire as a force of production, relational and creative, I explore a particular use of metaphors in the novel which leads to bodily transformations or metamorphosis, without, however, reaching the subject’s imperceptibility through progressive identification. The co-presence and re-elaboration of two, apparently incompatible, theories of desire underline female same-sex desire’s potential to be thought and actualized as a lack and a production, its tendency to annihilate and being annihilated as well as its creative impulses. As a result, Dacia Maraini’s Lettere a Marina and Mangiami pure complicate and destabilize the fixity of representational categories, expanding discourses on lesbianism and lesbian desire. Indeed, the convolution of negative and positive dilates the domain of desire and multiplies its possibilities, carving out a «narrative space in which women might desire differently» (Ross 2015, 16), beyond the heterosexual norm and in diverse ways, who and how they please.

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