Intra-Gender Complicity and the Objectification of Woman in Djebar’s A Sister to Scheherazade

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-42
Author(s):  
Folasade Hunsu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Gender Oppression ◽  
Character Representation ◽  
The Relationship

This paper considers the inhuman treatment women mete to fellow women using the character representation in A Sister to Scheherazade. It attempts to establish that women contribute greatly to their own oppression in the society by critically analyzing the actions of women characters in the narration. S. L. Barky's explication on the idea of objectification is employed to explain the relationship between female characters in the primary text and to establish the spur of oppression in the text, and by implication, identify the oppressors; whereas Patricia H. Collins's concept of binary thinking is used to describe the intentions of the identified oppressors. The analysis of the primary text reveals various needs of the major characters and how they attempt to achieve such needs of theirs by giving up the protagonist. It reveals further that the deeds of the major female characters in the primary text are the reasons the protagonist suffers. The paper, therefore, concludes that as in the case of the protagonist in the text, the objectified is not only used as a means to an end but is a victim of collective and intra-gender oppression.

In a word, I’ve been there

2019 ◽  
pp. 246-256
Author(s):  
A. K. Zholkovsky
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Core Problem ◽  
Typical Solution

In his article, A. Zholkovsky discusses the contemporary detective mini-series Otlichnitsa [A Straight-A Student], which mentions O. Mandelstam’s poem for children A Galosh [Kalosha]: more than a fleeting mention, this poem prompts the characters and viewers alike to solve the mystery of its authorship. According to the show’s plot, the fact that Mandelstam penned the poem surfaces when one of the female characters confesses her involvement in his arrest. Examining this episode, Zholkovsky seeks structural parallels with the show in V. Aksyonov’s Overstocked Packaging Barrels [Zatovarennaya bochkotara] and even in B. Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago [Doktor Zhivago]: in each of those, a member of the Soviet intelligentsia who has developed a real fascination with some unique but unattainable object is shocked to realize that the establishment have long enjoyed this exotic object without restrictions. We observe, therefore, a typical solution to the core problem of the Soviet, and more broadly, Russian cultural-political situation: the relationship between the intelligentsia and the state, and the resolution is not a confrontation, but reconciliation.

scholarly journals Female agency in the films of Jean Renoir

2021 ◽  
pp. 095715582110129
Author(s):  
Barry Nevin
Keyword(s):  
Gender Relations ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Gender Representation ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Male Power ◽  
Jean Renoir ◽  
The Relationship

Although Jean Renoir’s oeuvre has been extensively debated since the emergence of the politique des auteurs in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, his representation of gender relations has sustained less discussion than his signature formal style. This article posits that Renoir’s films provide a valuable means of identifying how gender, specifically female identity, affects temporal trajectories in cinema. First, it illustrates Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of crystallisation and situates it in relation to current scholarship on gender representation in the director’s work. Second, it conducts a close analysis of the relationship between female identity and crystallisation through a close analysis of the central female characters of La Règle du jeu (1939) and The Golden Coach (1952). This article ultimately argues that whether these characters belong to an upper-or lower-class stratum, they are subordinated to male power, which plays a determining role in the range of potential futures available to them.

scholarly journals CELIE: A PORTRAYAL OF AN AFRO-AMERICAN WOMAN'S REJECTION OF TRADITIONAL VALUES

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Ekawati Marhaenny Dukut ◽  
Nuki Dhamayanti
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
American Women ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
The World ◽  
Color Purple

The world of literature can be a medium of expressing the writer's expressions and ideas. Universal topics such as, love, death, and war often become subject mailers in the world of literature. In the novel, of The Color Purple. Alice Walker describes the oppression experienced by Afro American women in the female characters of Celie, Nellie, Shug Avery, Sofia, and Mary Agnes who faced sexual discrimina!ions in a patriarchal society. Womanhood, education, and lesbianism are factors that help the Afro American women to free themselves from traditional values. The Color Purple puts into words the process of its main character, Celie, who tries to reject and escape from the male domination of her world. The other Afro American women characters that help Celie to find her selfidentity represent the manifestation of the rejection of the traditional values. This article. which uses the socio-historical alld feminism approach. is intended to analyse the Afro-American women's rejection of traditional values by focusing on the major character of' Walker's The Color Purple. Celie. as she develops from being a victim of traditional values to the rejoiceful discovery of her selfidentity.

scholarly journals Hybridity and the Shape of the New African Woman

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-361
Author(s):  
Regie Panadero Amamio
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
African Literature ◽  
African Woman ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Gender Oppression ◽  
Dark Continent ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
African Writers ◽  
The Many

Hybridity is argued as an intricate combination of attraction and repulsion that describes the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. This combination creates a challenge to and disruption of the monolithic power exercised by the colonizers of Africa who (mis)represented the land as a Dark Continent. Such monolithic power underpins the portrayal of the colonizers’ patriarchal tradition within which women characters in creative works by Africans are commonly situated. The inclusion of women as part of the many subjects of power strengthens the discourse on hybridity in African literature. To question power is to see men and women both apart and together as ambivalence that defines the idea of hybridity in the African literary tradition. In this paper, the employment of deconstruction in the  analysis of women characters in five selected stories by African writers reveals a new consciousness in African literature using the Dark Continent metaphor as a mirror of  the female aesthetics. In this sense, the use of women’s bodies in the short stories does not only point to the issue of gender oppression but also to a power that is disrupting and slowly dismantling the long-entrenched patriarchal stance forcing the male characters to question their current worldview and position. Overall, this paper has established that contemporary African literature on women recognizes the hybridized identity and shape of the new woman, consequently proving that the so-called Dark Continent is nothing but a myth.

Autonomy in the Kitchen?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Lindenfeld ◽  
Fabio Parasecoli
Keyword(s):  
Political Agency ◽  
White Female ◽  
Lead White ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Domestic Environments ◽  
The Relationship

Considers instead the relationship between women and food, in professional and domestic environments. Cooking is presented as a way for women to assert themselves and their independence, while at the same time allowing unconventional negotiations of gender, class, and race with their environment. Fried Green Tomatoes (Avnet, 1999), No Reservations (Hicks, 2007) and its German predecessor Mostly Martha (Nettelbeck, 2001), Waitress (Shelly, 2007), The Ramen Girl (Robert Allan Ackerman, 2008), and Julie & Julia (Ephron, 2009) present the lead (white) female characters as powerful and autonomous, but the films collectively work to undermine the characters’ political agency at the expense of their ability to function in the kitchen. As such, they tend to privilege a heterosexist perspective and elevate white characters over characters of color.

Indecipherable Lostness

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-179
Author(s):  
Benedict Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Knowledge System ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
American Character ◽  
Ethical System ◽  
System P ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the play with genre in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010), a film which troubles the relationship between many familiar signifiers of the western genre—including its mute characters—and their customary significations. The film does not simply rearrange meanings; binary Manichaeism is not replaced by an alternative ethical system, female characters do not become active narrative drivers, and the Native American character does not become heroic. Instead, meaning is complicated, as inarticulate silence disrupts the settlers’ sense of identity and the Native American becomes an inscrutable signifier for both salvation and destruction. This chapter argues that genre is used as a critical (rather than textual) apparatus for marshalling films into pre-arranged significance that relies on the seamless operation of genre signifiers. Meek’s Cutoff makes visible the complications at work in all westerns, invites a reappraisal of these eccentric films, and critiques genre as an ideological knowledge system.

scholarly journals Failures of Domesticity in Contemporary Russian-American Literature: Vapnyar, Krasikov, Ulinich, and Reyn

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
American Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The West ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Women's Gender Roles

Hybrid literature has flourished in the Russian diaspora in the last decade and much of it is semi-autobiographical, concerned with the reconfiguration of identity in emigration. It dwells productively on the translation of the self and (more broadly) on the relationship between center and margin in the post-Soviet, transnational world. Gender roles are subject to contestation, as writers interrogate and reconsider expectations inherited from traditional Russian culture. This article situates Russian hybrid literature vis-à-vis Western feminism, taking into account Russian women’s particular experience of feminism. Four female writers of contemporary Russian-American literature – Lara Vapnyar, Sana Krasikov, Anya Ulinich, and Irina Reyn – inscribe failures of domesticity into their prose. Their female characters who cannot or do not cook or clean problematize woman’s role as nurturer. Home (geographic or imaginary) carries a semantic load of limitation and restriction, so failure as a homemaker may be paradoxically liberating. For female characters working in the West to support their families in Russia, domesticity is sometimes even more darkly cast as servitude. Rejection of traditional Russian definitions of women’s gender roles may signal successful renogotiation of identity in the diaspora. Although these writers may express nostalgia for the Russian culture of their early childhood, their critique of the tyranny of home is a powerful narrative gesture. Failures of domesticity represent successful steps in the redefinition of the self and they support these writers’ claim to transnational status.

scholarly journals Across community barriers: female characters in Vimala Devi’s short stories

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. e45888
Author(s):  
Cielo Griselda Festino
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Story Collection

This article brings a reading of the short-story collection Monção [Monsoon] ( 2003) by the Goan writer Vimala Devi (1932-). The collection can be read as a short-story cycle, a group of stories related by locality, Goa, character, Goans, from all walks of life, and theme, in particular women´s milieu, among other literary categories. In her book, written from her self-imposed exile in Portugal, Devi recreates Goa, former Portuguese colony, in the 1950s, before its annexation to India. A member of the Catholic gentry, Devi portrays the four hundred years of conflictive intimacy between Catholics and Hindus. Our main argument is that Devi´s empathy for her culture becomes even more explicit in Monção when her voice becomes one with that of all her women characters. Though they might be at odds, due to differences of caste, class and religion, Devi makes a point of showing that they are all part of the same cultural identity constantly remade through their own acts of refusal and recognition. This discussion will be framed in terms of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s theory of autobiography (2001) as well as the studies on Goan women by the Goan critics Propércia Correia Afonso (1928-1931), Maria Aurora Couto (2005) and Fátima da Silva Gracias (2007).

Why did Qajar elites become such enthusiastic patrons of ta'zīyah? A simple question with a complex answer

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
Kamran Scot Aghaie
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
Relative Independence ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
Qajar Period ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract The Qajar elites of Iran used various Shi'i religious rituals to bolster their legitimacy, but ta'zīyah was the Qajar ritual par excellence. This article argues for the key role played by the following factors. First, the relationship between the Qajar elites and the elite ulamā was often contentious. Second, since the ulamā controlled most religious spaces and rituals, it was difficult for the Qajar elites to sponsor rituals independently of the ulamā, and third, since the ulamā had conflicting and ambivalent attitudes towards certain Shi'i rituals, because of the practices of dressing up and representing holy Shi'i persons (including males dressing up as female characters), and because of the injurious aspects of rituals like qamah zanī and zanjīr zanī. Finally, hierarchies of status within the ulamā developed throughout the Qajar period, following the victory of the Ūsūlīs over the Akhbārīs in Iraq and Iran. A combination of these factors meant that the highest-ranking ulamā typically did not sponsor rituals like ta'zīyah, which provided a unique opportunity for Qajar elites to promote their legitimacy, with relative independence from the elite ulamā.

scholarly journals Power Analysis in The Handmaid’s Tale

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 248
Author(s):  
Meijiao Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Power Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Power Theory ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Relationship

<em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> is one of Margaret Atwood’s most popular novels. As a dystopian novel, it describes an absurd society in the future and explores themes of subjugated women in a patriarchal society and the various means by which these women resist and attempt to gain independence. By applying Michael Foucault’s power theory, this paper analyzes the power situations in Gilead, revealing the relationship between power and body, also aims to analyze the relation between female characters’ status and power in the novel to reveal the cruelty of the totalitarian government and patriarchal society.

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