scholarly journals Embodied Objects: Chūjōhime’s Hair Embroideries and the Transformation of the Female Body in Premodern Japan

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 773
Author(s):  
Carolyn Wargula
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Japanese Women ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Loved One ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Premodern Japan ◽  
The Many ◽  
Previous Scholarship

The female body in medieval Japanese Buddhist texts was characterized as unenlightened and inherently polluted. While previous scholarship has shown that female devotees did not simply accept and internalize this exclusionary ideology, we do not fully understand the many creative ways in which women sidestepped the constraints of this discourse. One such method Japanese women used to expand their presence and exhibit their agency was through the creation of hair-embroidered Buddhist images. Women bundled together and stitched their hair into the most sacred parts of the image—the deity’s hair or robes and Sanskrit seed-syllables—as a means to accrue merit for themselves or for a loved one. This paper focuses on a set of embroidered Japanese Buddhist images said to incorporate the hair of Chūjōhime (753?CE–781?CE), a legendary aristocratic woman credited with attaining rebirth in Amida’s Pure Land. Chūjōhime’s hair embroideries served to show that women’s bodies could be transformed into miraculous materiality through corporeal devotional practices and served as evidence that women were capable of achieving enlightenment. This paper emphasizes materiality over iconography and practice over doctrine to explore new insights into Buddhist gendered ritual practices and draws together critical themes of materiality and agency in ways that resonate across cultures and time periods.

Women’s Bodies, Femininity, and Spacetimemattering: A Baradian Analysis of the Activewear Phenomenon

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Julie E. Brice
Keyword(s):  
International Business ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Multiple Time ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Hegemonic Femininity

Over the past decade, activewear has become a booming international business and cultural phenomenon. It has simultaneously been critiqued for its pervasive neoliberal, postfeminist, and healthism rhetoric and the ways it continues to (re)produce hegemonic femininity. In this paper, the author drew upon new materialist theory, specifically Karen Barad’s concept of spacetimemattering, to contribute to this body of literature, providing an alternative perspective on the production of femininity and feminist politics within activewear. Using a Baradian-inspired approach, this paper brought various material-discourses and events from multiple time periods into dialogue with the activewear phenomenon to (re)think the production of femininity. Specifically, the analysis explored how activewear entanglements across various spatiotemporalities challenge appearance-based femininity and increase the visibility (and acceptance) of the moving female body. Through this exploration, the author provided a way to (re)imagine feminist politics that are embedded in women’s everyday fitness practices.

Right Thoughts at the Last Moment

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline I. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Historical Records ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Medieval Japan ◽  
Religious Professionals ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Evil Person ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
The Ideal

Buddhists across Asia have often sought to die, as the Buddha himself is said to have done, with a clear and focused mind. This study explores the reception and development in early medieval Japan (roughly, tenth through fourteenth centuries) of the ideal of “dying with right mindfulness” (rinjū shōnen) and the discourses and practices in which it was embedded. By concentrating one’s thoughts on the Buddha at the moment of death, it was said, even the most evil person could escape the round of deluded rebirth and achieve birth in the Pure Land; conversely, even the slightest mental distraction at that juncture could send the most devout practitioner tumbling down into the evil realms. The ideal of mindful death thus generated both hope and anxiety and created a demand for ritual specialists who could help the dying to negotiate this crucial juncture. Examination of hagiographies, ritual manuals, doctrinal writings, didactic tales, diaries, and historical records uncovers the multiple, sometimes contradictory logics by which medieval Japanese approached death. Deathbed practices also illuminate broader issues in medieval Japanese religion that crossed social levels and sectarian lines, including intellectual developments, devotional practices, pollution concerns, ritual performance, and divisions of labor among religious professionals.

Gendered Secularization and the Body Policing of Muslim Women

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raissa Killoran
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Women ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Religious Symbols ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Site

The many usages of the term ‘secularism’ have generated an ambiguity in the word; as a political guise, it may be used to engender anti-religious fervor. Particularly in regards to veiling among female Muslim adherents, the attainment of a secular state and touting of the necessity of dismantling religious symbols have functioned as linguistic shields. By calling a “burka ban” necessary or even egalitarian secularization, legislators employ ‘secularization’ as jargon for political ends, enacting a stance of supremacy under the semblance of progress. Secularization has come to function as a political tool - in the name of it, governments may prescribe which cultural symbols are normative and which are of ‘other’ cultures or religious origins. As such, the identification of some religious symbols as foreign and others as normative is a usage of secularization for normalization of dominant religious expression. In this, there is an implicit neocolonialism; by imposing standards of cultural normalcy which are definitively nonMuslim, such policies attempt to divorce Muslims from Islam.  Further, I intend to investigate the gendered aspect of secularization politics. By critiquing clothing and body policing of women, I will demonstrate how secularization projects use the female body and dress as a site for display. By rendering the female physically emblematic of the honor and virtue of an ‘other’ culture, those enacting secularization norms target women’s bodies to act as visual exhibitions of the dominant culture’s hegemony. Here, we see gendered secularization at work - female bodies become controlled by the antireligious zeal of the state, while the state carries out this control on the predicate that it is the religious group enacting unjust control. As such, the policing of female Muslim bodies is symbolic of the policing of Islam as a whole; it acts as an illustration of an imposed, gendered secularization project.

scholarly journals Transgressive Textualities: Translating References to Gender, Sexuality and Corporeality in Nelly Arcan’s Putain and Paradis, clef en main

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline Henry-Tierney
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Agency ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Gendered Identity ◽  
Translation Practice ◽  
Neutral Tone ◽  
Target Culture

In this paper I examine how transgressive references to gender, sexuality and the body are translated in two texts by the Québécoise writer Nelly Arcan, her debut autofictional narrative Putain (2001) and her final (retroactively auto)fictional title Paradis, clef en main (2009). Throughout her oeuvre, Arcan seeks to liberate women from stereotypical frameworks of reference by asserting women’s gendered, sexual and corporeal subjectivities in previously taboo discourses on prostitution, incest, sexuality, anorexia, matrophobia and suicide. Through her candid and explicit writing style, Arcan elaborates her own specific écriture au féminin which incorporates a linguistic, thematic and physical visualization of women within her texts.These two novels have been translated into English as Whore (2005) by Bruce Benderson and Exit (2011) by David Scott Hamilton respectively. However, analysis of the target texts suggests that neither translator adopts a gender-conscious approach which compromises the specificity of Arcan's idiolect in the Anglophone context. Through a comparative analysis of examples from the source texts and translations under the categories of gender, sexuality and the body, I discuss how the translation practices work counterproductively to obfuscate Arcan’s textual visualisations of women. In terms of references to gendered identity, by removing or neutralising Arcan's grammatically feminised language in Putain, the translator obfuscates Arcan's idea of the importance gender plays in shaping maternal relationships. Similarly, in Exit, Arcan's subversive feminist wordplay is distorted resulting in women being reinserted into patriarchal frameworks of reference. My analysis on Arcan's portrayal of sexuality underlines how sexual euphemisms in the translation downplay the narrator's potential for sexual agency in Whore, while misleading translation choices for feminist neologisms relating to women's sexuality in Exit eschew Arcan's efforts to verbalise women's lived sexual realities. Lastly, inconsistency in the translation of female corporeal vocabulary distorts the neutral tone Arcan employs in Putain to ensure women's bodies are not eroticised and the translator's decision to condense references to the female body in Exit undermines the significance Arcan places on corporeal connections between women. Thereafter, I move on to consider the wider implications of the translative process such as how paratextual elements also have an impact upon Arcan's reception in the target culture. I argue that in both Whore and Exit, the paratranslators intentionally sensationalise the autofictional elements of Arcan's texts. In short, my analysis contends that through a non-gender conscious translation practice, the celebrity of Arcan is promoted in the Anglophone context but to the detriment of Arcan’s écriture au féminin.

scholarly journals The Prisoner of Gender:  Panopticon, Persuasion, and Surveillance of Women in Kavita Kané’s Menaka’s Choice

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
Meenakshi Meenakshi ◽  
Nagendra Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Central Position ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Disciplinary System

In the mythology-inspired novel Menaka’s Choice (2016), Kavita Kané discovers that the female body is continuously perceived both as an object of sexual desire and as an individual being by disrupting the conventional understanding of Apsara Menaka. Using Foucault’s concept of docile bodies and organic individuality the paper studies how power, in the form of ‘system’, imposes docility on women’s bodies. The paper weaves the potential for feminist thought as the novel rediscovers the recondite experiences that have been shrouded for centuries by giving central position to silent agents of Hindu mythology. Eventually, it attempts to analyse the act of seduction from the context of gender and how the individual tries to resist that disciplinary system.

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.

Privatized Bodies in Public Locations

2020 ◽  
pp. 195-213
Author(s):  
Penny Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Day Care Centers ◽  
Neoliberal Governmentality ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Many ◽  
Small Things

Understanding motherhood as practices of mothering not necessarily limited to women’s bodies, this chapter sets out to examine some of the many and various ways in which neoliberalized public spaces enable, encourage, and reproduce motherhood. It asks, specifically, how, where, and why human, mothering bodies are subjected to the neoliberal “gaze,” how this gaze on motherhood privileges certain forms of identity and practice over others, and how this influences, overtly and indirectly, the moral status of “mothers” in neoliberal societies. Neoliberal governmentality has been vastly effective in enacting its own self-reproduction across divergent societies, masking the totalitarianism of its core focus on centralizing the “free” market in social life through clever reconstructions of conflicting social value systems and practices. This can be seen, this chapter argues, in the normalization of highly invasive medical procedures on mothering bodies, in the proliferation of professionalized parenting “experts,” and in the individualization and social segregation of “mothers” themselves. In particular, the author examines how everyday moments in and practices of motherhood have become highly effective normative technologies of neoliberal governmentality. The author takes as a starting point those “small” things about life as a mother (or as someone who mothers) in a neoliberal society in terms of how they represent two interwoven social elements: the impacts of the prejudiced gaze of neoliberal authorities, including hospitals, supermarkets, cafés, trains, and day care centers; and the apparent achievement of limitless neoliberal tolerance and acceptability.

scholarly journals Unwanted appearances and self-objectification: The phenomenology of alterity for women in leadership

Leadership ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-318
Author(s):  
Claire O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Women Leaders ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Women In Leadership ◽  
The Self ◽  
Photo Elicitation ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Self Objectification ◽  
The Impact

This paper introduces the concept of dys-appearance ( Leder, 1990 ) as a way of conceptualising the lived experience of alterity (or Otherness) of women’s bodies in leadership. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study (using interviews and photo-elicitation) it contributes towards growing bodies of literature that emphasise the corporeal and highlight the Othering of the female body in the masculine discourse of leadership. Contemporary leadership scholars have drawn on Merleau-Pontian phenomenology to conceptualise the fundamental reversibility of embodied perception between the leader and the follower, but this analysis has not extended to a consideration of the sexed and gendered body. By focusing on the subjective experiences of women leaders this paper demonstrates the phenomenon of dys-appearance ( Leder, 1990 ) in which the female body, which signifies a socially problematic presence in this context, appears to the subject in a disruptive or unwanted manner within their self-perception. The self-objectification and dys-appearance of the recalcitrant body exerts a telic demand upon the self to rectify its problematic presence and return it to a state of undisruptive normality. This analysis contributes novel insights on the unique or different experiences of leadership for women, and the impact of the problematizing of the female body on their self-perceptions.

Bourdieu and the Body

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Connell ◽  
Ashley Mears
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Class Reproduction ◽  
The Many

Chapter abstract The work of Pierre Bourdieu provides a framework to see how class position is written on the body and expressed through classed styles of walking, talking, gesturing, eating, drinking, and so forth. This chapter considers how Bourdieu’s work on the body has informed and advanced empirical research on the body. From Bourdieu’s perspective, each body is the visible product of the composition and volumes of class-specific capitals accrued over the course of a lifetime, and it can be a powerful resource, or liability, depending upon the fit between one’s bodily capital and the field in which one is positioned. In particular, the chapter considers how women’s bodies have signified status for men’s class projects far more than the reverse, one of the many gendered implications of bodily capital and class reproduction.

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