scholarly journals Wonder Woman: Feminist Icon of the 1940s

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelica Delaney ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Empowerment ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Sexual Autonomy ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Wonder Woman ◽  
American Society ◽  
Creative Team

The purpose of my research concerning the super heroine Wonder Woman is to identify the circumstances under which the comic was created, why its creator was set on using the medium of comics, the messages he was trying to communicate to American society regarding the roles of women, and why it has maintained its fan base from the 1940s to the present. My use of feminist and iconographic analysis provided me with a wealth of information concerning how this avant-garde comic series contested the widely accepted conventions concerning women with its sarcastic images and pejorative text. Creator William Moulton Marston in collaboration with comic artist Harry Peter set into motion a wave of feminist nuances within their comic run of Wonder Woman that aided the epoch of female empowerment during the 1940s. The text coupled with the artwork created a cohesive whole upon which the creative team could instill their views on contemporary society. Wonder Woman's personage gave both men and women an icon of what a woman was capable of should she possess an air of social, political, and sexual autonomy. I came to the conclusion that upon creation, Marston infused an image of a strong-willed woman among his contemporaries that he hoped would one day overtake its widely traditional submissive counterpart, and not only in the realm of comics.

scholarly journals Representation and Agency of Aging Superheroes in Popular Culture and Contemporary Society

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Kateřina Valentová
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Cultural Expressions ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many

The figure of the superhero has always been regarded as an iconic representative of American society. Since the birth of the first superhero, it has been shaped by the most important historical, political, and social events, which were echoed in different comic issues. In principle, in the superhero genre, there has never been a place for aging superheroes, for they stand as a symbol of power and protection for the nation. Indeed, their mythical portrayal of young and strong broad-chested men with superpowers cannot be shattered showing them fragile or disabled. The aim of this article is to delve into the complex paradigm of the passage of time in comics and to analyze one of the most famous superheroes of all times, Superman, in terms of his archetypical representation across time. From the perspective of cultural and literary gerontology, the different issues of Action Comics will be examined, as well as an alternative graphic novel Kingdom Come (2008) by Mark Waid and Alex Ross, where Superman appears as an aged man. Although it breaks the standards of the genre, in the end it does not succeed to challenge the many stereotypes embedded in society in regard to aging, associated with physical, cognitive, and emotional decline. Furthermore, this article will show how a symbolic use of the monomythical representation of a superhero may penetrate into other cultural expressions to instill a more positive and realistic portrayal of aging.

scholarly journals On Studies of Task Bifferentiation between Men and Women in the Scandinavian Iron Age

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-172
Author(s):  
Louise Ströbeck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Specific Task ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
Activity Areas ◽  
Grave Goods

Reiterated and cursorily criticised generalisations of attributes for male and female in grave goods, have since the first half of the nineteenth century created an oversimplified yet politically intricate image of a specific task differentiation between men and women in prehistory. Ideals of male and female roles and tasks in the interpreter’s contemporary society have been described as universals in terms of binary oppositional pairs, or spheres, such as private/domestic-public. The dichotomies used for analysing and attributing male and female tasks have given preference to stereotypes, and the very formulation of the oppositional concepts for activity areas expresses ideological valuations ofmale and female. This article stresses the need for analysing the origin of concepts, and it seeks new and alternative ways of perceiving task differentiation.

Nature’s Highway

Big Sur ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelley Alden Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Government Regulations ◽  
Henry Miller ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Big Sur ◽  
National Media ◽  
Monterey County ◽  
Popular Representations ◽  
National Newspaper

Chapter 2 examines the transformative effect of the opening of Highway 1 in 1937. This chapter argues that planning foresight positioned Big Sur to become one of the state’s best-preserved coastlines, while popular representations of its dramatic natural elements provided the justification for such preservation. Before the highway opened, Monterey County established some of the first ordinances in the nation to prohibit billboards and require well-designed construction along the highway. Tourists responded with enthusiasm, drawn by Jeffers’s powerful verse and countless national newspaper stories extoling Big Sur’s beauty. In 1944 the avant-garde writer Henry Miller settled in Big Sur. Like Jeffers’s work, Miller’s representation of Big Sur left the impression that people belonged in and to this landscape. The highway set Big Sur on an irrevocable course toward participation in contemporary society, but aesthetic zoning, praise from the national media, and accounts from residents like Miller, all worked to blur the modern aspects of this coastal destination. Visitors to Big Sur sought a glimpse of the frontier that had supposedly closed four decades earlier, but ironically, the frontier they encountered derived at least in part from government regulations that responded to California’s phenomenal growth.

scholarly journals In Search of the Postmodern Utopia: Ben Okri’s In Arcadia

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Graeme Fox
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Empty Universe

This essay explores how Ben Okri’s most recent novel, In Arcadia(2002), attempts to reconstruct the possibility of utopia in the face of a fragmentation of identity and destruction of determinate certainties affecting contemporary society in the aftermath of postmodernism. By tracing the intertextual relations existing between this work and earlier works in an intellectual/literary tradition that extends from Theocritus and Virgil through Dante, More, Milton, Sannazzaro, Sidney and others, Fox shows how Okri develops the proposition that men and women confronting an ‘empty universe where the mind spins in uncertainty and repressed terror’ can recover sanity through art. Even though, in Okri’s vision, the world may be ‘a labyrinth without an exit’, presided over by Death without any hint of transcendence, men and women, he concludes, can recover paradise through the ‘painting of the mind’ which can creative complete forms that can be fed into ‘spirit’s factory for the production of reality’. This generative activity, which is at the heart of the Arcadian vision, in Okri’s view, has the power to make life a place of ‘secular miracles’, despite the limitations imposed upon it by the realities of finitude and death. The essay concludes by suggesting that Okri’s concept of utopia is very close to Kant’s idea of Aufklärung as expounded by Michel Foucault –– that is, neither a world era, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment, but rather a process of which men and women are at once elements and agents, and which occurs to the extent that they decide to be its voluntary actors. While in some respects Okri’s vision is strikingly similar to certain of its antecedents, it is thus nevertheless distinctively postmodern in the ways in which it is inflected.

Introductory Remarks by Susan Franck

2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 289-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Franck
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
International Adjudication ◽  
American Society

The American Society of International Law (ASIL) agreed, in 2017, that it was appropriate to have an entire panel at the Annual Meeting dedicated to exploring the value of women in international adjudication. Although the panel occurred at 9:00 a.m. on the Saturday before Easter, we were pleased that the room was sufficiently packed—with men and women—that there was standing room only.

scholarly journals No Major Differences in Recovery After Hip Fracture Between Home-Dwelling Female and Male Patients

2019 ◽  
Vol 109 (3) ◽  
pp. 250-264
Author(s):  
A. Lahtinen ◽  
J. Leppilahti ◽  
H. Vähänikkilä ◽  
S. Kujala ◽  
J. Ristiniemi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Hip Fracture ◽  
Activities Of Daily Living ◽  
Mortality Risk ◽  
Daily Living ◽  
Walking Ability ◽  
Residential Status ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Male Patients ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Society Of Anesthesiologists

Background: Studies comparing recovery of men and women after hip fracture have reported conflicting results, some reporting worse recovery in male patients, while others found no differences between genders. Methods: Recovery was compared in 105 male and 433 female patients with hip fractures and in age-matched groups of patients 50 years or older, who were home-dwelling and received similar rehabilitation. Residential status, walking ability, hip pain and activities of daily living function were recorded at admission and 4 and 12 months postoperatively, along with mortality and re-operations. Results: No differences were observed between men and women 4 and 12 months postoperatively regarding residential status (p = 0.181 vs p = 0.883), mortality rates (p = 0.232 vs p = 0.880) or total activities of daily living scores (p = 0.546 vs p = 0.435). Walking ability was better among male patients prefracture (p < 0.001) and 4 and 12 months after fracture (p < 0.001, p = 0.031, respectively). In age-matched pair analysis, no differences were found regarding mortality, residential status, walking ability, or ADL score. Cox regression analysis identified mortality risk factors as being age, prefracture ADL score, American Society of Anesthesiologists score 4–5 and place of rehabilitation. Sex was not mortality risk factor. Interpretation: Home-dwelling male and female patients had similar courses of recovery from hip fracture, although there were singular differences in specific activities of daily living functions and postoperative pain. There were no differences in mortality, even when prefracture characteristics were considered. Mortality was higher among older patients and who had high American Society of Anesthesiologists scores and low prefracture activities of daily living scores.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Wierzbicki
Keyword(s):  
International Politics ◽  
American Music ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
White People ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter explains how music is considered less as a phenomenon unto itself than as a manifestation of the conditions under which it emerged or receded. The music under consideration represents a wide range of styles that attracted the attention of a wide range of audiences, which sounds have little in common. What these types of music do have in common is the fact that all of them sprang up in a particular cultural environment: the postwar Fifties. A great many forces—technology; the economy; domestic and international politics; relationships between black and white people, between men and women, between young and old—animated American society during the Fifties. The lenses through which the whole of American music in the Fifties is examined here represent forces whose interconnected dynamics between 1945 and 1963 are linked to the fact that, for America, the war ended the way it did.

scholarly journals The Sex Side of Civil Liberties:United States v. Dennettand the Changing Face of Free Speech

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura M. Weinrib
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
The Body ◽  
Executive Board ◽  
Sexual Autonomy ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Government ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

It was the policy of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) during the 1920s to contest only those obscenity regulations that were “relied upon to punish persons for their political views.” So stated a 1928 ACLU bulletin, reiterating a position to which the organization had adhered since its formation in 1920. For the majority of the ACLU's executive board, “political views” encompassed the struggle for control of the government and the economy, but not of the body. The early ACLU was not interested in defending avant-garde culture, let alone sexual autonomy.

Ideology and Sexuality among Victorian Women

1986 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-170
Author(s):  
Nancy S. Landale ◽  
Avery M. Guest
Keyword(s):  
Rapid Change ◽  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Social Surveys ◽  
The Past ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Opposite Sex ◽  
Effective Contraception ◽  
American Society

In recent years, American society has engaged in what is frequently described as a “sexual revolution” involving significant changes in relationships between men and women. As a result of extensive social surveys, we know that both specific behaviors and the prevailing ideology regarding appropriate standards of behavior have been subject to rapid change. In the past two decades, rates of sexual intercourse and intimacy have increased (Hunt, 1974; Westoff, 1974), use of effective contraception has become widespread, and it is increasingly accepted that a physical and emotional attraction between members of the opposite sex might lead to a sexual relationship. In short, participation in sexual activity has come to be seen as a natural outgrowth of the enjoyment of sex.

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