scholarly journals Rewriting the Feminine Construction of a Nation in Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chow Sheat Fun
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Comfort Women ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Active Resistance ◽  
Nora Okja Keller ◽  
Comfort Woman ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Korean Nationalism ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Literary Devices

This essay highlights the way Keller’s novel, Comfort Woman (1997) explores the connection between women’s sexual bodies, colonialism and Korean nationalism. Through the resistance of heroic women characters against patriarchal definitions and feminization of a colonized nation, Keller narrates subversive feminist resistance to humiliating inscriptions of patriarchy and colonialism onto the sexual bodies of women. The text is closely analysed using tools of literary devices, in particular, subversive strategies and the idea of silences as a tool and a theme to convey the unspoken and the unspeakable. Soon Hyo’s passive silences as a comfort woman in the comfort camps and her transformation later to paranormal articulations as a shaman is interpreted as powerful forms of resistance against patriarchy’s inscription upon her body. Her silent passivity, re-interpreted as a form of active resistance becomes more meaningful as she wrestles back the identities and recognition for the thousands of comfort women that would otherwise be forgotten. Comfort Woman inquires into the links between languages, silences and subjectivity, colonial domination and Korean nationalism, sexuality and nation, resisting any attempts at separating the links. Keller invoked the power of performance and silences in the form of “strange” articulations and tropes which were culturally specific as subversive means of re-telling her story and inscribing new meanings onto women’s sexual bodies, thus rewriting the feminine constructions of a nation.

scholarly journals La resistencia a la clausura en los monasterios femeninos de Mallorca durante el siglo XVIII = The Resistance to the Enclosure in the Feminine Monasteries of Majorca during the XVIIIth Century

2017 ◽  
pp. 211
Author(s):  
Francisco José García Pérez
Keyword(s):  
Religious Communities ◽  
Active Resistance ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The Feminine

El fenómeno de la clausura ha estado íntimamente ligado a los monasterios de monjas. Durante la Edad Moderna, las comunidades religiosas tenían que vivir enclaustradas y lejos del mundo exterior. Sin embargo, a lo largo de los siglos, existió una resistencia activa a la clausura. Este artículo pretende analizar, precisamente, la difícil imposición de la clausura en los monasterios de monjas de Mallorca, con incidencia en el siglo XVIII, en un momento en el que los obispos intentaban recuperar el espíritu de Trento, imponiendo nuevamente una clausura que, muchas veces, no se cumplía. AbstractThe phenomenon of enclosure has been intimately linked to Nuns’ monasteries. During the Modern Age, religious communities had to live cloistered and far from the outside world. Nevertheless, over the centuries, there was an active resistance to enclosure. This article seeks to analyze, precisely, the difficult imposition of enclosure in Nuns’ monasteries of Majorca, with incidence in the XVIIIth century, at a moment when the Bishops tried to recover the spirit of Trent, imposing again an enclosure that, often, was not respected.

scholarly journals Understanding Women-Nature Dynamics: Eco-consciousness as a Quest for Identity in Selected Texts from Assam

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paloma Chaterji ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Specific Behavior ◽  
Limited Space ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primary Focus

My paper will explore the constantly changing dynamics of women-nature relationship through social and cultural history of Assam. I will gradually explore the eco-consciousness and the changing principles of my subjects as I shift my focus from the Shakti cult, to the Vaishnavite, to the modern urbanised subjects of the texts. The women characters in these texts will be the primary focus of this study as I begin to explore how they struggle to recognize their individual identity and how their association with nature comes as a response to accommodate what has been rendered passive by patriarchy. I will reflect on how the ever ideal and nurturing image of nature is problematic. The place-specific behavior of the characters in my study will offer a better vision of how women combat the ever presence patriarchal horrors through interaction with nature. Such an interaction reveals how nature actually makes women conscious of their individuality. This study will convey how free spirited nature helps these women overcome their limited space laced with patriarchal beliefs of selfless nurturing where the self is denied. Building on postcolonial critics like Chandra Mohanty, I would like to explore the discursive limits set by the processes of homogenization to which Assamese women have been subjected by a range of texts. This paper will explore the changing configurations of these limits and their implications, especially with regard to their interpellation in patriarchy. Through gendered readings of representative texts like Indira Goswami’s The Man from Chinnamasta and The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tuskar and Mitra Phukan’s The Collector’s Wife, I will try to dismantle the essentialist binaries of nature/culture, men/women. Finally, this paper aims to dilute the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ principles and looks beyond the gynocentric essentialism of both nature and women.

Ponds, the Feminine Divine, and a Shift in Moral Register

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Coralynn V. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Bodies Of Water ◽  
Women's Knowledge ◽  
Feminine Divine ◽  
Women’S Knowledge

This chapter explores the meaning of ponds in Maithil women's tales. In many stories featuring ponds and occasionally, by extension, other bodies of water, female characters demonstrate special capacities. In Maithil women's folktales, ponds are often sites for the articulation of women's insights, as well as social and metaphysical agency in plots featuring male protagonists. Frequently, the trope of ponds shifts the imaginative register toward women's perspectives and to the importance of women's knowledge and influence in shaping their world. The tales in which such register shifts occur can be called “pond-woman tales” and the insightful women characters found in them “pond women.”

scholarly journals Mapping the Woman’s Body in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 105-114
Author(s):  
Lilijana Burcar
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Female Body ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Classroom Situation ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
Woman's Body

This article shows that fixed national identities in Ondaatje’s The English Patient are not only questioned but relinquished in favour of a flux of multiple, incessant becomings, while the specificity of a woman’s identity, far from being decentred and evacuated of its discursively produced socio-symbolic meanings, continues to be addressed in terms of supposedly homogeneous female body and its institutionally sanctified appearances. Imbued with socially marked distinctiveness, such female body consequently gives forth a particular embodiment of feminine which comes to operate as its unproblematic facticity, thus simultaneously narrowing down the scope of identity options from which the feminine is compelled to derive the makeup of its very much truncated existence. The paper then seeks to apply the argument developed here to a classroom situation and students’ creative approach towards redressing the problem of gendering the text at the expense of women characters by lending them their own voice.

scholarly journals Can there be a feminist aesthetic?

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
Claire Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Culturally Specific ◽  
A Value ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Ontological Position

Can there be a feminist aesthetic?” analyzes the difficulty of finding an ontological position from which to write about photography created by women. It interrogates the discomfort of inhabiting, socially, and in art and literature, the position of the embodied feminine, and seeks through aesthetic analysis to mine this discomfort. The essay argues that despite the social and intellectual discomfort of articulating a space of the feminine, in that this space is always already coded as oppressed, there is a value in interpreting photography created by women through the lens of feminist resistance. The article concedes that defining the word woman is always a risk, in that the term reflects manifold and contradictory embodied experiences. And yet, within this avowed risk emerges the only space of possible resistance to oppression, the opportunity to create a rearrangement of the visible so that the category of the oppressed woman, however phantasmatic, is re-envisioned as sovereign. However, each act of re-envisioning woman must be culturally specific. Hence, the essay concludes with an interpretation of Ethiopian photographer Aida Muluneh’s series of images Dinkinesh (or, “you are beautiful”), evoking the remains of an Ethiopian hominid that were long considered to be the oldest of human ancestors. Muluneh reclaims this distant ancestor as Ethiopian, dressing her in an extravagant red gown, using photography to re-envision Dinkinesh’s fall into history, granting this ancestor the power to haunt modernity.

scholarly journals Structural Forms of Feminine Psyche in Scheherazade According to Toni Wolff's Quaternity

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Mitra Mosavat ◽  
Zohre Taebi ◽  
Sara Mosavat
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Techniques

The universality and significance of The Thousand and One Nights is undeniable: the complexity of the book has combined its various literary techniques to create a masterpiece which has been translated by famous figures, and has influenced many writers all around the world. The central figure of The Thousand and One Nights is its female narrator, Scheherazade, whose complex personality has a great potential to be studied. One of psychological theories which can fully present this complexity and multidimensionality is Toni Wolff's quaternity. Wolff, a Swiss analytical psychologist and one of Jung's students, is best known for her paper on four aspects or structural forms of feminine psyche, which are the Mother, the Hetaira, the Amazon, and the Medial. These four aspects, though working independently, form the feminine psyche: if they are put in a balance with each other, the personality is a complete one. The present article is an attempt to apply Wolff's structural forms of feminine psyche in Scheherazade's character: first, the basic tenets of Wolff's quaternity is presented and consequently, her views will be examined in the various stories narrated by Scheherazade, since the four aspects mentioned above are crystalized in women characters of The Thousand and One Nights.

scholarly journals WHAT THEMES “VIBRATE IN THE CORE” OF TWO POEMS OF OSIP MANDELSTAM AND HOW IT HAPPENS (BASED ON THE POEMS “THE LAW OF PINE GROVE…” AND “THE BRISTLES OF SLEEPINESS…”)?

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-143
Author(s):  
Liliya D. Gutrina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Core ◽  
Marina Tsvetaeva ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The Law ◽  
Anna Akhmatova

The present article addresses the interpretation of two poems written by Osip Mandelstam in 1936, namely “The law of pine grove…” (“Sosnovoy roshchitsy zakon…”) and “The bristles of sleepiness…” (“Plastinkoi tonen’koi zhilleta”). Rhythmic and lexical “conflicts” in the poem tissue (E. Etkind) and various types of reiterations act as a key to poem interpretation. It is they that contribute to the actualization of the motif of parting and various female names, including Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, as well as women-characters of literary works (Tatyana Larina, Minvana) in the semantic field of these two poems. Eventually the parting scene, which is repeated in the context over and over again (parting with Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova, Arminius and Minvana’s partings, and Tatiana Larina’s farewell to her native places), develops into the parting act of the lyrical character with their past filled with harmony. The rhythmic conflicts of the poem enable the reader to conclude that Mandelstam’s poem “The bristles of sleepiness…” reconstructs the rhythm of “Onegin stanza”, in which the author changed the rhyme sequence fixed in it. As a result, there emerges the effect of the presence of Pushkin’s harmony between its lines. Similarly to this implicit presence of Pushkin’s harmony, the sea noise which was so dear to the poet and which he was irretrievably deprived of is heard in the sound of wind in Mandelstam’s trees. The “Feminine” theme in the poetic world of a poem acts as a component which softens the shared sense of trouble and reconciles with what is happening. The article also makes an assumption that the two poems make up one lyrical cycle (among other things, the metaplot of the growth of the trees is traced throughout the first poem to the second one).

Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller

1999 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-103
Author(s):  
Seiwoong Oh
Keyword(s):  
Nora Okja Keller ◽  
Comfort Woman
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