scholarly journals The Hysteric Belongs to Me: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 45-63
Author(s):  
Noémi Albert

The term hysteria has undergone several substantial changes throughout its history. A charged concept, deemed for a long time as pejorative and offensive to womanhood, it has lately been re-appropriated for literature under the concept of the “hysterical narrative.” This new trend purports to redeem hysteria and, together with it, redeem the feminine and show all its complexity. Helen Oyeyemi’s 2007 novel, The Opposite House, conflates the private and the public in two female characters, one human, the other divine. Through this double perspective the work self-reflexively re-evaluates hysteria both in the self and in the community.

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Hana Ghani

Monsters are perceived as humanity’s enemy that should be eradicated. However, based on Jeffrey Cohen’s Monster Theory (1997), monsters play an important role in understanding humanity’s fears and anxieties. Monstrosity hinges upon the binary opposition of the Self and the Other, in which the Other is seen as a threat to the Self. With this in mind, this article addresses the female monsters of two medieval texts: Beowulf and Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. This paper aims to examine the female monsters, Grendel’s mother and Morgan the Fay, as a cultural reference to unravel the patriarchal anxieties of the time. Grendel’s mother represents a threat to the homosocial hierarchal bonds of Medieval society. Meanwhile, Morgan the Fay signifies danger to knighthood, chivalry, and courtly romance. At the same time, this paper also aims to continue the critical analysis and literature of the female characters in both texts with a heavy emphasis on their Otherness.


Author(s):  
Stacy Wolf

This chapter examines the eight female characters inCompany, what they do in the musical, and how they function in the show’s dramaturgy, and argues that they elicit the quintessential challenge of analyzing musical theater from a feminist perspective. On the one hand, the women tend to be stereotypically, even msogynistically portrayed. On the other hand, each character offers the actor a tremendous performance opportunity in portraying a complicated psychology, primarily communicated through richly expressive music and sophisticated lyrics. In this groundbreaking 1970 ensemble musical about a bachelor’s encounters with five married couples and three girlfriends, Sondheim’s female characters occupy a striking range of types within one show. From the bitter, acerbic, thrice-married Joanne to the reluctant bride-to-be Amy, and from the self-described “dumb” “stewardess” April to the free-spirited Marta,Company’s eight women are distillations of femininity, precisely sketched in the short, singular scenes in which they appear.


Tempo ◽  
1966 ◽  
pp. 2-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelio de la Vega

For a long time now—long when we consider the quick, changing time-scale of our days—electronic music has been with us. The public at large usually remains cold, confused or merely dazed when faced with any new aesthetic experience. Critics, musicologists and the like still seem, as usual, to be unable to predict what will happen to this peculiar, mysterious and often anathematized way of handling musical composition, while many traditionally-minded composers consider it a degrading destruction of the art of music. On the other hand, the electronic medium seems to attract a long, motley caravan of young, inexperienced and often unprepared ‘beatnik type’ self-titled composers, who believe that the world began yesterday and that you only have to push buttons and prepare IBM cards to obtain magical results. Probably not since Schoenberg proclaimed the equal value of the twelve semitones of our sacred but by now obsolete tempered scale has twentieth-century music been faced with such a bewilderment.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 268-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra Gimlin

While violence among the fans of competitive sports has received much scholarly attention (e.g., Elias & Dunning, 1986; Giulianotti, 2005), far less has been written about aggression targeted at community athletes like public runners. Yet accounts of such harassment figure prominently in runners’ own narratives. This article explores the phenomenon of runner harassment through these accounts and my own experiences as a long-time public runner, drawing first from the literature on fan aggression and second, from sociological work concerning behavior in public places more generally (e.g., Gardner, 1980, 1995; Goffman, 1963). It argues that jogger harassment can be understood in relation to the particular bodily form that running takes—that is, to the sweating, disheveled, panting body of public running—which both violates rules of public vs. private bodily display and signals an unacceptable degree of “involvement” (Goffman, 1963) in the activity and, ultimately, the self.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
Nisar Alungal Chungath

Identity is not a fixed and frozen prison-house for the self, but a liquid continuum, affected and shaped by the ‘outside’ or the world. The self, which is situated and which undergoes revisions and transformations, keeps identity as a frame within which it makes sense of things. On the one hand, there is a ‘history’ within which an identity is rooted and through which meaning-making is made possible, and on the other hand, every person aspires to be a ‘universal’ and recognition-worthy human being. Both inherent identity and inherent universality of the self should be considered in their interactions in the public sphere, which has been traditionally viewed as a space of discrete individualities. The ontological force of this argument aside, the paper demonstrates that reduction of an identity without crediting its aspiration for universality and consideration of universality without crediting the historical underpinnings of identity are both acts of violation. 


Author(s):  
Isabel Gil Naveira

ABSTRACT During the 1970s Chicana feminist movement, Chicanas rejected the widely established image of the Virgin of Guadalupe vs. Malinche, which limited the liminal position they were claiming. In this essay I will examine Rudolfo Anaya’s treatment of female characters in his novel Bless Me, Ultima (1972), bringing to light the latent disruption of this duality. It is my contention that Anaya’s aim is establishing a dialogue between the self and the other(s) through liminal practices, spaces and times, which leads to a transformation of liminality into new opportunities for female characters in novels and hence to a deconstruction of Chicanas’ roles in society.KEYWORDS: liminality; deconstruction; Virgin; Malinche; Chicanas; gender rolesRESUMENDurante el movimiento feminista de las chicanas en los años 70, las chicanas rechazaron la ampliamente establecida imagen de la Virgen de Guadalupe frente a Malinche, que limitaba la posición liminal que reclamaban. En este artículo examinaré el tratamiento de los personajes femeninos de Rudolfo Anaya en su novela Bless me, Ultima (1972), sacando a la luz la latente alteración de esta dualidad. En mi opinión el objetivo de Anaya es establecer un diálogo entre el yo y la otra/las otras a través de prácticas, espacios y tiempos liminales, lo que lleva a una trasformación de la liminalidad en nuevas oportunidades para los personajes femeninos de las novelas y por ello a una deconstrucción de los roles de las chicanas en la sociedad.PALABRAS CLAVE: liminalidad; deconstrucción; Virgen; Malinche; Chicanas; roles de género


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 0137-0147
Author(s):  
Eider Madeiros ◽  
Letícia Simões Velloso Schuler ◽  
Mariana Pinheiro Ramalho ◽  
Hermano de França Rodrigues

This paper aims to essay an open and constructive dialogue between the very rupture that the trans female body evokes and the recent concept of “feminine of no one”, through an inductive approach that the latter could make it possible to be kept in a state of infiniteness, of openness, of incompleteness, of non-wholeness, the aspect that characterizes the surrounding and expressive territories of each one of the specific bodies that allow themselves to be situated more leaned onto the feminine. Based on the contributions of Bento (2008), Jorge and Travassos (2018), from the brief precepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and on an interview with Leonardo Valente, the author of Charlotte Tábua Rasa (2016), we intend to discuss insofar how the body of a trans woman in a Brazilian politics fictional scenario would be able to draw the difficult boundaries on the discourses, possessions and the domains of language between the self and the other towards the trans-sexualities which dedicate their efforts to reinscriptions and the fissures that are celebrated through the transgressive resilience of the feminine.


Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Tracey Reimann-Dawe

Between 1848 and 1914 a wave of German academic explorers traveled to Africa, enticed by the promise of geographical, anthropological and botanical discoveries. These Afrikareisende (African explorers) composed narrative accounts of their journeys, which at the time were the main channel for disseminating their experiences to the public. This article focuses on three works from the first three decades of German exploration of Africa prior to German unification in 1871. The common aim of scientific discovery unified Afrikareisende and their passage through foreign space. An inextricable feature of this scientific ideology is the connection to rational, linear time. This article demonstrates how the perception and relevance of time is employed to transfer knowledge of the Self and Other to a German readership. This knowledge reflects not only the explorers’ experience of their personal identity but also the tentative beginnings of a collective German identity as it is defined in colonial space.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (138) ◽  
pp. 15-22
Author(s):  
Huda Aziz Muhi Al-shammari ◽  
Nidaa Hussain Fahmi Al-Khazraji

The abuse of women is an issue that persists throughout the ages till the present time because people are still living in a world of a dominated idea which is known as man is the self and woman is the other. So the objective of this research paper is to argue this global issue using Van Dijk's Ideological Square (1998) as a framework so as to examine the ideologies that underline the use of language in The Handmaid’s Tale. It is hypothesized that the ideology of oppression is exposed in the novel throughout using the ideological strategies of positive- self presentation and negative-other presentation. Ultimately, it concludes that the novelist employs both, male and female, characters to consistently ridicule and offer negative coverage about women and to increasingly align and offer favorable comments about men to present the world of patriarchy from a different perspective.


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