Food, Body and Female Subjectivity:

Author(s):  
LI JESSICA TSUI YAN

This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka’s career spanned the industrial development of cinema - from silent to sound, monochrome to colour. Alongside featuring in films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and Kurosawa, Tanaka was also the only Japanese woman filmmaker between 1953 and 1962, and her films tackled distinctly feminine topics such as prostitution and breast cancer. Because her career overlaps with a transformative period in Japan, especially for women, this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives into the Japanese history of women and classical era of national cinema. The first half of the book focuses on Tanaka as actress and analyses the elements and meanings associated with her star image, and her powerful embodiment of diverse, at times contradictory, ideological discourses. The second half is dedicated to Tanaka as director and explores her public image as filmmaker and her depiction of gender and sexuality against the national history in order to reflect on her role and style as author. With a special focus on the melodrama genre and on the sociopolitical and economic contexts of film production, the book offers a revision of theories of stardom, authorship, and women’s cinema. In examining Tanaka’s iconic reification of femininities in relation to politics, national identity, and memory, the chapters shed light on the cultural construction of female subjectivity and sexuality in Japanese popular culture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149
Author(s):  
E. Chelpanova

In her analysis of books by Maya Kucherskaya, Olesya Nikolaeva, and Yulia Voznesenskaya, the author investigates the history of female Christian prose from the 1990s until the present day. According to the author, it was in the 1990s, the period of crisis and transformation of the social system, that female Christian writers were more vocal, than today, on the issues of the new post-Soviet female subjectivity, drawing on folklore imagery and contrasting the folk, pagan philosophy with the Christian one, defined by an established set of rules and limitations for the principal female roles. Thus, the folklore elements in Kucherskaya’s early works are considered as an attempt to represent female subjectivity. However, the author argues that, in their current work, Kucherskaya and other representatives of the so-called female Christian prose tend to choose different, objectivizing methods to represent female characters. This new and conservative approach may have come from a wider social context, including the state-imposed ‘family values’ program.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Valentin Terhoeven ◽  
Christoph Nikendei ◽  
Sandra Faschingbauer ◽  
Julia Huber ◽  
Kymberly D. Young ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by an overgeneralization of food/body-related autobiographical memories (AM). This is regarded as an emotion regulation strategy with adverse long-term effects implicated in disorder maintenance and treatment resistance. Therefore, we aimed to examine neural correlates of food/body-related AM-recall in AN. Methods Twenty-nine female patients with AN and 30 medication-free age-sex-matched normal-weight healthy controls (HC) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while recalling AMs in response to food/body-related and neutral cue words. To control for general knowledge retrieval, participants engaged in a semantic generation and riser detection task. Results In comparison to HC, patients with AN generated fewer and less specific AMs in response to food/body-related words, but not for neutral cue words. Group comparisons revealed reduced activation in regions associated with self-referential processing and memory retrieval (precuneus and angular gyrus) during the retrieval of specific food/body-related AM in patients with AN. Brain connectivity in regions associated with memory functioning and executive control was reduced in patients with AN during the retrieval of specific food/body-related AM. Finally, resting-state functional connectivity analysis revealed no differences between groups, arguing against a general underlying disconnection of brain networks implicated in memory and emotional processing in AN. Conclusions These results indicate impaired neural processing of food/body-related AM in AN, with a reduced involvement of regions involved in self-referential processing. Our findings are discussed as possible neuronal correlates of emotional avoidance in AN and provide new insights of AN-pathophysiology underscoring the importance of targeting dysfunctional emotion regulation strategies during treatment.


Appetite ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline McNamara ◽  
Phillipa Hay ◽  
Mary Katsikitis ◽  
Anna Chur-Hansen

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-147
Author(s):  
Marcus R. Pyle

How do you fashion an identity in a society that, at every turn, tries to snuff you out? In this article, I address Nina Simone's praxis of renaming and reinvention to demonstrate strategies of resistance. To this point, I analyze the musico-poetic setting of Nina Simone’s songs “Images” (1964) and “Four Women” (1965) to argue that her artistic musical choices sonically orchestrate varying issues of Black female subjectivity, identity, and self-making. In Simone’s songs, she refuses to discount the materiality of the Black body; instead, she envelops the Black body with signifiance and significance. The sonic bearers of semantic content become extensions of the Self—transmutable and heterodox. The compositional and poetic subtleties in these songs claim that the gaze of the Other can potentiate exteriority and freedom—what I term the “exo(p)tic.”


Author(s):  
Auxiliadora Pérez Vides

Abstract:Catherine Dunne’s fiction masterly portrays ordinary themes like family relations and the process of identity formation, and she criticises the constraining elements that thwart female subjectivity in Ireland. However, as I intend to argue in this article, by bringing to the fore the diverse ways whereby women transcend the social, psychological or material barriers that the Irish family ideology and the rhetorics of maternity have traditionally set upon them, Dunne emphasizes the need to re-think the social and individual implications that these obstacles entail, insofar as the rearticulation of their conventional significance constitutes a catalyst for women’s attainment of selfdiscovery.Keywords: Catherine Dunne; contemporary Irish women’s ction; female subjectivity; divorce in Ireland; gender awareness.Title in Spanish: “El teatro de la familia”: una aproximación irlandesa a la conciencia de género en la narrativa de Catherine DunneResumen:La narrativa de Catherine Dunne describe temas cotidianos como las relaciones familiares y la construcción de la identidad, y critica los elementos que delimitan la subjetividad femenina en Irlanda. Sin embargo, como intentaré demostrar en este artículo, al resaltar cómo las mujeres trascienden los obstáculos sociales, psicológicos y materiales que la ideología de la familia y la retórica de la maternidad les han impuesto tradicionalmente en Irlanda, Dunne enfatiza la necesidad de cuestionar las implicaciones sociales e individuales de dichas barreras, dado que la rearticulación de su signi cación convencional constituye un elemento de cambio hacia la consecución de la plena conciencia femenina.Palabras clave: Catherine Dunne; narrativa irlandesa contemporánea de mujeres; subjetividad femenina; el divorcio en Irlanda; conciencia de género


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