Embodied Antillean women

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-148
Author(s):  
Josephine Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Women's Sexuality ◽  
Women’S Sexuality

This article explores the intersection of gender and cultural identities in two novels, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972) and Suzanne Dracius’s L’Autre qui danse (1989). Through comparative and close analyses, this article demonstrates that these two Antillean francophone women writers reject and renegotiate sexist and essentialist tendencies, in particular the auto-exoticization and disembodiment of women characters across the body of Antillean literature. These tendencies are notably present within Antillanité and Créolité, two dominant concepts of twentieth-century Antillean literature and thought. This article first explores these two writers’ responses to auto-exoticization, demonstrating how their literary treatment of women’s sexuality diverges markedly from hypersexualized portrayals of women by certain Créoliste authors. The article also examines the representation of Creole cuisine and language, and calls into question Antillean literature scholar Celia Britton’s argument that these two elements tend to reduce Antillean texts to ‘edible’ objects of exotic pleasure. In its second section, this article investigates Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacité. It suggests that Schwarz-Bart and Dracius adapt Glissant’s opacité to present women as impervious human subjects whose bodies do not make them exotic stereotypes but rather figures of resistance to masculine violence and colonialism.

Girl Wonder: Nathalia Crane, Poetic Prodigy of the 1920s

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
PAUL BRADLEY BELLEW
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Women's Sexuality ◽  
Young Girls ◽  
Women’S Sexuality ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Us

Largely forgotten today, from approximately the late 1910s through the 1930s, at least a dozen young girls brought out numerous books in the US. But there was one girl who was particularly talented and successful: Nathalia Crane, who published her first collection of poetry when she was just eleven years old in 1924. This article analyzes both her work and her reception from her first success through the subsequent controversy over her authorship instigated by a local Brooklyn newspaper. In the process, the article demonstrates the complicated connections between perceptions of girlhood and women's sexuality as they relate to political agency in the early twentieth-century United States.

In the Shadows of the Middle East’s Wars, Oil, and Peace: the Construction of Female Desires and Lesbianism in Middlebrow Egyptian Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-172
Author(s):  
Hanan Hammad
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women's Sexuality ◽  
Oil Boom ◽  
Women’S Sexuality ◽  
Socioeconomic Changes ◽  
Sexual Desires ◽  
Arab Israeli Conflict ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
Egyptian Literature ◽  
Wide Readership

Abstract This article employs the fictional writings of the Egyptian author Iḥsān ‘Abd al-Quddūs (1919–1990) to analyze the textually tangled anxiety over women’s sexuality and rapid political and socioeconomic changes in postcolonial Egypt and the Arab-East. Arguably one of the most prolific writers in Arabic in the twentieth century, ‘Abd al-Quddūs has achieved wide readership, and producers have adapted his books to popular commercial films and TV shows. Breaking taboos on women’s sexual desires, ‘Abd al-Quddūs’s work has been influential in shaping the popular notion about lesbian love wherein frustration with the postcolonial realities—inscribed by the Arab-Israeli conflict, Oil Boom, and globalization—have become entangled with the fear of women’s mobility and liberation.

Sexualities and Sport

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Women's Sexuality ◽  
Women's Sport ◽  
Women’S Sexuality

What were the historical concerns about women’s sexuality in sport? For the first three decades of the twentieth century, argues historian Susan K. Cahn in Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, there were fears that sport would incite women’s...

Research Recommendations for Applying Vitamin A-Labelled Isotope Dilution Techniques to Improve Human Vitamin A Nutrition

2014 ◽  
Vol 84 (Supplement 1) ◽  
pp. 52-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherry A. Tanumihardjo ◽  
Anura V. Kurpad ◽  
Janet R. Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Vitamin A ◽  
Vitamin A Deficiency ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
The Body ◽  
Pool Size ◽  
Serum Retinol ◽  
Vitamin A Status ◽  
Status Assessment ◽  
Total Body

The current use of serum retinol concentrations as a measurement of subclinical vitamin A deficiency is unsatisfactory for many reasons. The best technique available for vitamin A status assessment in humans is the measurement of total body pool size. Pool size is measured by the administration of retinol labelled with stable isotopes of carbon or hydrogen that are safe for human subjects, with subsequent measurement of the dilution of the labelled retinol within the body pool. However, the isotope techniques are time-consuming, technically challenging, and relatively expensive. There is also a need to assess different types of tracers and doses, and to establish clear guidelines for the use and interpretation of this method in different populations. Field-friendly improvements are desirable to encourage the application of this technique in developing countries where the need is greatest for monitoring the risk of vitamin A deficiency, the effectiveness of public health interventions, and the potential of hypervitaminosis due to combined supplement and fortification programs. These techniques should be applied to validate other less technical methods of assessing vitamin A deficiency. Another area of public health relevance for this technique is to understand the bioconversion of β-carotene to vitamin A, and its relation to existing vitamin A status, for future dietary diversification programs.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

Double Affirmation: Medievalism as Christian Apologetic in the Arthurian Poetry of Charles Williams

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-96
Author(s):  
Sørina Higgins
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
European History ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Charles Williams ◽  
Embodied Theology

In his unfinished cycle of Arthurian poems, Charles Williams developed a totalizing mythology in which he fictionalized the Medieval. First, he employed chronological conflation, juxtaposing events and cultural references from a millennium of European history and aligning each with his doctrinal system. Second, following the Biblical metaphor of the body of Christ, Blake’s symbolism, and Rosicrucian sacramentalism, he embodied theology in the Medieval landscape via a superimposed female figure. Finally, Williams worked to show the validity of two Scholastic approaches to spirituality: the kataphatic and apophatic paths. His attempts to balance via negativa and via positiva led Williams to practical misapplication—but also to creation of a landmark work of twentieth century poetry. . . . the two great vocations, the Rejection of all images before the unimaged, the Affirmation of all images before the all-imaged, the Rejection affirming, the Affirmation rejecting. . . —from ‘The Departure of Dindrane’ —O Blessed, pardon affirmation!— —O Blessed, pardon negation!— —from ‘The Prayers of the Pope’

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