‘Hoist the Colours!’ Framing Feminism through Charismatic White Leadership in the Fantasy Blockbuster

2018 ◽  
pp. 58-85
Author(s):  
Kendra Marston
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Leadership Potential ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
White Femininity ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Looking Glass

This chapter explores the manifestation of melancholic white femininity in fantasy films featuring proto-feminist heroines. The protagonists of The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass experience feelings of burden in relation to the expectations placed upon aristocratic, white women. They dream of alternate magical lands that will allow them their freedom and are rewarded through a series of events that allow them to enter these magical spaces, subsequently transgressing idealised standards of white, upper-class femininity. The protagonists form bonds with victims of oppression in these fantastical spaces, and ultimately come to realise that their freedom from gender norms will occur upon realising their long-dormant leadership potential and liberating the inhabitants of the magical zone. Feminism here is recognised as a type of social charisma with white hegemonic power structures not deposed but rather reframed through the coming-of-age journey and benevolent intentions of a melancholic, white heroine.

Diana and Beyond

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raka Shome
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
White Women ◽  
Immigrant Woman ◽  
Cultural Relevance ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
White Female ◽  
The People ◽  
White Femininity ◽  
The Media ◽  
Theoretical Issues

The death of Princess Diana unleashed an international outpouring of grief, love, and press attention virtually unprecedented in history. Yet the exhaustive effort to link an upper-class white British woman with “the people” raises questions. What narrative of white femininity transformed Diana into a simultaneous signifier of a national and global popular? What ideologies did the narrative tap into to transform her into an idealized woman of the millennium? Why would a similar idealization not have appeared around a non-white, non-Western, or immigrant woman? This book investigates the factors that led to this defining cultural/political moment and unravels just what the Diana phenomenon represented for comprehending the relation between white femininity and the nation in postcolonial Britain and its connection to other white female celebrity figures in the millennium. Digging into the media and cultural artifacts that circulated in the wake of Diana's death, the book investigates a range of salient theoretical issues surrounding motherhood and the production of national masculinities, global humanitarianism, transnational masculinities, the intersection of fashion and white femininity, and spirituality and national modernity. The book's analysis explores how images of white femininity in popular culture intersect with issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and transnationality. Moving from ideas on the positioning of privileged white women in global neoliberalism to the emergence of new formations of white femininity in the millennium, the book explains the late princess's never-ending renaissance and ongoing cultural relevance.

Kenotic Gestures

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 198-218
Author(s):  
Michelle Voss Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Gender Norms ◽  
Spiritual Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Christian Love ◽  
Love Of God ◽  
Shed Light

Christians sometimes take Christ's ken?sis, or self-emptying, as the pattern for Christian love of God and neighbor. Feminist critics suspect that this model reinforces unhealthy gender norms and oppressive power structures and contest the nature and extent of this template. Interreligious study can shed light on the debate. The Gau??ya Vai??ava tradition employs the categories of Indian aesthetic theory to explain how types of loving devotion (bhakti rasa) toward Krishna are evoked and expressed. The subordinate and peaceful modes of love for Krishna can serve as a heuristic for understanding Sarah Coakley's and Cynthia Bourgeault's retrievals of ken?sis in spiritual practice. A comparative reading suggests that objections to Coakley's version, which resembles the subordinate love of God, are more intractable due to the rootedness of its aesthetic in oppressive human experiences, while Bourgeault's reclamation of ken?sis aligns with a peaceful or meditative mode of love that feminists may more readily appreciate.

The Erotic Family: Structures and Narratives of Milk Kinship in Premodern Japanese Tales

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Sachi Schmidt-Hori
Keyword(s):  
Connective Tissue ◽  
Indirect Method ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
The Core ◽  
Premodern Japan ◽  
Wet Nurse

This essay proposes that “milk kinship,” which upper-class individuals in premodern Japan formed with their milk kin—a menoto (wet nurse) and a menotogo (foster sibling)—occupies the core of an institutionalized erotic fosterage. In this “menoto system,” the surrogate mother's lactating body and erotic-affective labor became the connective tissue to bind two interclass families, creating a symbiosis that fortified the existing sociopolitical power structures. Around the tenth century, many vernacular tales started to feature menoto characters. While a typical menoto is the protagonist's homely, asexual, motherly confidante, her derivative construct—the menotogo of the protagonist—is often cast in an erotic light. In the four texts examined in this essay, menotogo valorize their erotic agencies to benefit their charges through sexual-affective labor or through an indirect method. The latter entails the formation of a “love square” in which two menotogo become lovers and then help their respective charges do the same.

scholarly journals Brokers and Tours: Selling Urban Poverty and Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-14
Author(s):  
Eveline Dürr ◽  
Rivke Jaffe ◽  
Gareth A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Urban Poverty ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Tourism Product ◽  
Slum Tourism ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Urban Deprivation

This article explores how so-called “slum” tourism commodifies poverty and violence, transforming urban deprivation into a tourism product. In particular, we pay ethnographic attention to the role of brokers who mediate encounters between residents and tourists. The article explores how brokers—tour guides, art curators and civil society organizations—work to mediate power structures and enact a specific representational-performative politics. In so doing, brokers play a key role in aestheticizing and performing poverty and violence and converting disadvantaged spaces into a tourist product. We argue that brokers are vital to the reproduction of existing inequalities and to the formation of new social relationships and subjectivities.

Ordering Antinomy: An Analysis of Early Mormonism's Priestly Offices, Councils, and Kinship

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Flake
Keyword(s):  
Gender Norms ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Divine Presence ◽  
Power Struggles ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Stated Goal ◽  
Essential Question ◽  
Structural Coherence

AbstractMormonism's founder Joseph Smith created a complex and hieratic priestly structure within a radically democratizing nation. His stated goal was to convey to all the faithful what he believed to be his own powers of prophecy and priestly mediation of divine presence. Thus, out of historiographic arguments about where to place Mormonism within the narrative of antebellum religious polity there arises a potentially more essential question: how did early Mormonism sustain any structural coherence, much less the order it was famous for? This essay argues that Smith avoided the atomization of his movement by creating three power structures and assigning every believer a status in each. Thus, status was not absolute or static: it shifted as the person moved among the three sites of power. Or, in other words, the degree and nature of the authority held by anyone at any give time was particular to the locus of the power – office, council, or kinship – not the person. These shifting status relationships stabilized Mormonism's potentially self-destructive antinomianism and, as a historiographical matter, have been mistaken for populism. The power struggles this occasioned within his movement, particularly over Smith's inclusion of women in his priestly hierarchy, weakened his vision of reciprocal authority and shifting jurisdiction. Compromised by romanticized gender norms, but not abandoned, this power structure continues to constitute the governing structure of Mormonism, leaving it still republican in style, not substance. Historiographically, it is hoped that this closer analysis of Mormonism's polity illuminates the existence of alternatives to regnant tropes on the nature of antebellum religion and contributes to better understanding of the means by which at least one perfectionist religion has survived notwithstanding its radically antinomian tendencies.

Australian governments protecting children in detention: A view through the looking glass

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
Max Liddell ◽  
Chris Goddard
Keyword(s):  
Child Protection ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Children And Families ◽  
Australian Government ◽  
The South ◽  
Immigration Detention ◽  
Child Protection Workers ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Looking Glass

This article analyses the Australian Government’s communications on children in immigration detention, particularly those detained at Woomera and Baxter Detention Centres. The authors examine paradoxes and ‘double-bind’ theory; theory which analyses communications which continually put the target of them in the wrong and allow no escape. The analysis uses selected passages from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’ to highlight the nature and impact of such communication. The authors conclude that the Australian Government has consistently used paradoxical communication. In doing so it has placed children and families in detention, child protection workers, the South Australian Government, and sometimes external critics in a communication trap from which it is difficult to escape. Other bodies such as Courts have also demonstrated much paradox in their behaviour and communications on detention issues.

White Femininity in the Nation, the Nation in White Femininity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raka Shome
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
White Women ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
White Femininity ◽  
Global North ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
New Britain

This book examines how the narrative of white femininity transformed Princess Diana into a simultaneous signifier of a national and global popular. Situating the discussion of white femininity and national modernity in the New Labor cultural scape of 1997 that promoted the rhetoric of a New Britain, the book analyzes the different facets of white femininity that the Diana phenomenon mobilized and stabilized in the production of a (new) national narrative of Britishness in the 1990s and beyond. It also considers a constellation of images of privileged white women in order to illustrate a larger formation of white femininity through which many neoliberal logics of national identity and citizenly belonging were being rewritten in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; how national identity intersects with celebrity culture, cultural politics, and global struggles over (what constitutes) modern subjectivity; and how representations, articulations, and actions of privileged white women of the Global North impact, inform, and intersect with larger geopolitics.

Not No Rapunzel

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-347
Author(s):  
Laura Halperin
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Third World ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Outright Rejection ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
American Folklore ◽  
Looking Glass

Abstract In this article, Laura Halperin reads Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street as a disidentificatory, revisionist, and intersectional collection of fairy tales. Halperin builds on critical scholarship about The House on Mango Street and fairy tales and inflects a U.S. Third World feminist analysis by examining how the narrative draws attention to the ways gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class are entwined. Rather than view the text as an outright rejection of the dubious premises and promises provided by fairy tales—individualist, (hetero)sexist, classist, and racist ones—she argues that the book references such tales at length to highlight their widespread power while also challenging their problematic ideologies. The simultaneous engagement with and contestation of these stories are what makes Cisneros’s text revisionist and disidentificatory, and Cisneros’s attention to the particular concerns faced by impoverished females of color makes the text intersectional. The two tales with which Cisneros most explicitly engages are “Cinderella” and “Rapunzel,” and the two central images in her collection are shoes and windows. The House on Mango Street also references other stories and rhymes, including “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Peter Pan,” “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and The Little House, just as it invokes Mexican (American) folklore and Greek and Roman mythology. Cisneros’s mimetic repetition of these narratives underscores their pervasiveness and allure while critiquing the myths they advance.

White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary McD. Beckles
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
The Caribbean
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