“It Never Happened”: The Perpetuation of Female Powerlessness and Male Superiority in Nigerian Christian Films

Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bimbola Oluwafunlola Idowu-Faith
Keyword(s):  
Gender Issues ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Right To Life ◽  
Social Oppression ◽  
The Past ◽  
Textual Representations ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Male Superiority

The feminine image, as a gendered discourse, requires attention to ethical and gender details so that its textual representations do not promote biases and discriminations but rather counter them. While previous studies have investigated the gendering of the feminine figure in secular Nollywood, few have extended similar investigations to Nigerian Christian/evangelical films. This article attends to this gap with the feminist stylistic/textual analysis of Tumini’s Song (2005) and Never Happened (2008). Chronicling the lives of girls who defy a childhood characterised by abuse and social oppression and grow into womanhood defined by personal fulfilment and the erasure of the past because of their Christian faith, it is implied that the two films advocate sociocultural conditions in which vulnerable females have a right to life and self-fulfilment. However, because the films are sermon films that intend to teach the doctrines of forgiveness and divine retribution, they neither formulate appropriate responses to the breaches of women’s rights nor counter women’s constant vulnerability. Consequently, the films perpetuate female powerlessness and male superiority rather than countering these dynamics. This article concludes that Christian films may need to pay attention to ethical and gender issues alongside their intent to proselytise.

Memory and Artistic Dissent: An Analogical Reading of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Atwood’s Surfacing

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-386
Author(s):  
Shadi S. Neimneh ◽  
Motasim O. Almwajeh
Keyword(s):  
Gender Issues ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Memory Functions ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
And Gender ◽  
And Function ◽  
Future Growth

This article examines the intersections between memory and artistic vision in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), two novels resonating with feminist tensions and gender issues. Investigating two anxious female artists—Lily Briscoe in Woolf’s novel and the unnamed narrator of Atwood’s novel—the researchers argue that memory functions as a source of order and recuperation. Against patriarchal norms, memory allows for psychic healing, liberation and a fresh start. It engenders a space that can correct the wrongs of the past and help the female characters explore their imaginative abilities and enhance their self-esteem. Digging into the past, these artistic figures redeem their lives from the ravages of time, war and patriarchal oppressions. This approach allows for the liberation and the future growth of the artistic visions of the two painters. Each artist, however, reacts differently to the resurfacing of the painful past. For instance, in To the Lighthouse (a modernist text), Lily embraces art as a form of redemption and thus finishes her painting through her positive memory of Mrs Ramsay. However, the unnamed artist in Surfacing (a postmodern manifestation of art) renounces art and destroys her drawings in the process of coming to terms with her past. This article situates both texts within modernist and postmodernist notions on the value and function of art in order to explicate the essential junctions between memory and art and, therefore, demonstrate dissident artistic responses oscillating between (modernist) espousal and (postmodernist) repudiation.

Early Modern Medicine

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Rütten
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Modern Medicine ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Radical Revision

This article focuses on Western medicine, which, in the form of learned medicine, represents one of the three higher faculties on the basis of a certain canon of Greek and Arabic texts. It presents that from a methodological perspective, women's studies, gender studies, and gender behavioural studies have contrasted the cruder forms of biologizing and ontologizing the feminine with differentiated societal models of constructing sexuality. This approach has led to a radical revision of early modern medical historiography. The history of early modern medicine is further complicated by an imposing diversity of methodological approaches and by growing caution about unsubstantiated generalizations. The past century of exploration into early modern medicine has dictated the various methodological approaches that have held their ground in the research landscape up to the present day.

Acquiring penmanship and writing skills from the first to fifth grade of primary school: Joined-up writing vs. Comenia Script

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Olga Kučerová ◽  
Anna Kucharská
Keyword(s):  
Primary School ◽  
Error Rate ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Fifth Grade ◽  
Point Scale ◽  
The Past ◽  
School Year ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Developmental Dynamics ◽  
The Given

Abstract The project presented here deals with a typical human means of communication – writing. The aim of the project is to map the developmental dynamics of handwriting from the first to the fifth grade of primary school. The question remains topical because of the fact that several systems of writing have been used in the past few years. Our project focuses on comparing the systems of joined-up handwriting (the standard Latin alphabet) and the most widespread form of printed handwriting: Comenia Script. The research can be marked as sectional; pupils took a writing exam at the beginning and at the end of the 2015/2016 school year. The total number of respondents was 624 pupils, evenly distributed according to the school year, system of writing and gender. To evaluate handwriting, the evaluation scale of Veverková and Kucharská (2012) was adjusted to include a description of phenomena related to graphomotor and grammatical aspects of writing, including the overall error rate and work with errors. Each area that was observed included a series of indicators through which it was possible to create a comprehensive image of the form handwriting took in the given period. Each indicator was independently classified on a three-point scale. Thanks to that, a comprehensive image of the form of writing of a contemporary pupil emerged.

Who’s holding up the sky? On Rymba, a novel by A. Bushkovsky

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-158
Author(s):  
A. V. Zhuchkova
Keyword(s):  
Gender Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Flood Zone ◽  
The Social ◽  
Russian North ◽  
And Gender

The article deals with A. Bushkovsky’s novel Rymba that goes beyond the topics typical of Russian North prose. Rather than limiting himself to admiring nature and Russian character, the author portrays the northern Russian village of Rymba in the larger context of the country’s mentality, history, mythology, and gender politics. In the novel, myth clashes with reality, history with the present day, and an individual with the state. The critic draws a comparison between the novel and the traditions of village prose and Russian North prose. In particular, Bushkovsky’s Rymba is discussed alongside V. Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora [ Proshchanie s Matyoroy ] and R. Senchin’s The Flood Zone [ Zona zatopleniya ]. The novel’s central question is: what keeps the Russian world afloat? Depicting the Christian faith as such a bulwark, Bushkovsky links atheism with the social and spiritual roles played by contemporary men and women. The critic argues, however, that the reliance on Christianity in the novel verges on an affectation. The book’s main symbol is a drowning hawk: it perishes despite people’s efforts to save it.

Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa: What Lessons Can We Learn?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt ◽  
Fred Mawunyo Dzanku ◽  
Aida Cuthbert Isinika
Keyword(s):  
Gender Gap ◽  
Cash Income ◽  
Crop Diversification ◽  
Grain Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
Development Agenda ◽  
Yield Gaps ◽  
Rural Africa ◽  
And Gender ◽  
High Share

Smallholder-friendly messages, albeit not always translated into action, returned strongly to the development agenda over a decade ago. Smallholders’ livelihoods encompass social and economic realities outside agriculture, however, providing opportunities as well as challenges for the smallholder model. While smallholders continue to straddle the farm and non-farm sectors, the notion of leaving agriculture altogether appears hyperbolic, given the persistently high share of income generated from agriculture noted in the Afrint dataset. Trends over the past fifteen years can be broadly described as increasing dynamism accompanied by rising polarization. Positive trends include increased farm sizes, rising grain production, crop diversification, and increased commercialization, while negative trends include stagnation of yields, persistent yield gaps, gendered landholding inequalities, gendered agricultural asset inequalities, growing gendered commercialization inequalities, and an emerging gender gap in cash income. Regional nuances in trends reinforce the need for spatial contextualization of linkages between the farm and non-farm sectors.

Children’s Lives and Deaths in Merovingian Gaul

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-213
Author(s):  
Émilie Perez
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
New Method ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
The Past ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Grave Goods

The role of children in Merovingian society has long been downplayed, and the study of their graves and bones has long been neglected. However, during the past fifteen years, archaeologists have shown growing interest in the place of children in Merovingian society. Nonetheless, this research has not been without challenges linked to the nature of the biological and material remains. Recent analysis of 315 children’s graves from four Merovingian cemeteries in northern Gaul (sixth to seventh centuries) allows us to understand the modalities of burial ritual for children. A new method for classifying children into social age groups shows that the type, quality, quantity, and diversity of grave goods were directly correlated with the age of the deceased. They increased from the age of eight and particularly around the time of puberty. This study discusses the role of age and gender in the construction and expression of social identity during childhood in the Merovingian period.

The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Of Color ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Free Women

The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the Handbook’s six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars from multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. They demonstrate a way to extend this more capacious vision of history forward, setting an intellectual agenda informed by intersectionality and transnationalism, and new understandings of sexuality.

scholarly journals A Survey of the Knowledge of Truffles among Polish Foresters and Implications for Environmental Education

Forests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 365
Author(s):  
Dorota Hilszczańska ◽  
Aleksandra Rosa-Gruszecka ◽  
Bogusław Kosel ◽  
Jakub Horak ◽  
Marta Siebyła
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Education ◽  
Forest Ecology ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Hypogeous Fungi ◽  
The Public ◽  
Age Cohorts ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ecology Education ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Tuber Spp

While the use of truffles in Poland has a long tradition, for historical reasons this knowledge was almost lost. Currently, truffles and truffle orchards are again receiving public attention. For example, the Polish State Forests supported the establishment of truffle orchards by the Forestry Research Institute. In recent years, knowledge concerning these unique hypogeous fungi has been disseminated systematically through scientific and popular publications, films, and electronic media. This study investigates the awareness of economically and culinary valued truffle fungi (Tuber spp.) among more than 1400 Polish foresters. The results show that 70% of interviewees were familiar with historical and contemporary information about growing and using truffles in Poland. Based on respondents’ age, education, type of work, and gender we attempted to identify whether these elements were associated with the state of knowledge about truffles. The results indicated that younger foresters were better informed about the presence of truffles in Poland and also about their use in the past in Polish cuisine. Environmental education was an important source of knowledge about truffle harvesting and the soils that are conducive to truffle development. Foresters who have provided forest ecology education and who are 36–65 years of age generally possessed better knowledge about truffles than other age cohorts. More than 30% of respondents expressed interest in educational courses to improve their knowledge of truffles. The results point to the need for forestry education concerning truffles and indicate the need for fostering sustainable agroforestry-centered initiatives disseminating this knowledge to the public.

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