scholarly journals La représentation du corps féminin : ostracisme, stéréotypes et concupiscence dans David’s Story de Zoë Wicomb

2015 ◽  
pp. 31-41
Author(s):  
Férial Khella
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Women Warriors ◽  
Zoe Wicomb ◽  
Work Tasks ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
A Site

This article explores Zoë Wicomb’s complex representation of the Black female body in her first novel David’s Story, which deals mainly with the condition of the female guerrilla fighter during and after the struggle for liberation. These women warriors have served the nation and have contribu-ted to its liberation through their bodies, but have also been silenced and ignored in the post-apartheid era. In addition, they have been subjected to multiple forms of physical and sexual violence by their own comrades within the Anti-apartheid Movement. The Black female body, as it appears in the novel, is a site of power, oppression, violence, and even complicity. The pre-sent work tasks itself, firstly, with analyzing not only how the author deconstructs the stereotypical images of the strong female guerrilla but also those concerning Coloured women’s bodies which have been marked by racial and sexual differences, focusing here especially on the question of concupiscence. Then, I will concentrate on the way the female body is represented and inscribed in language. Finally, I will analyze Zoë Wicomb’s narrative techniques by considering the impossibility of representing the body in the absence of discourse.

scholarly journals Oppression and Female Body: A Feminist Critique of the Novel 'Half the Sky'

2021 ◽  
Vol VI (I) ◽  
pp. 79-85
Author(s):  
Ayesha Khaliq ◽  
Mamona Yasmin Khan ◽  
Rabia Hayat
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Sampling Technique ◽  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Interpretive Paradigm ◽  
A Site ◽  
Body Theory

The female body is more than often used as a site to perpetuate violence and oppress women in patriarchal societies. The current study aims to explore how patriarchal oppression targets the female body and how it enforces women to become subalterns having no voice in the selected fictional work, Half the Sky by Kristoff and WuDunn. For this purpose, Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Bryan Turner's The Body theory (1984) are used as theoretical frameworks to explore the selected novel. The research is descriptive qualitative, and placed within the interpretive paradigm. The data for the present study is in the form of textual paragraphs, which is taken from the selected novel and is collected through the purposive sampling technique. The study argues on women's oppression and violence. The findings of the study revealed that the dominancy of male counterpart in every field of life is the basic reason for women oppression which leads to the women being subalterns.

The role of the female body in contesting and negotiating space in sports for women in rural and urban Zimbabwe

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-113
Author(s):  
Obert Bernard Mlambo ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Girl Child ◽  
School Sports ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Gender Ideals ◽  
A Site ◽  
Embodied Practice

This article examined attitudes, knowledge, behavior and practices of men and society on Gender bias in sports. The paper examined how the African female body was made into an object of contest between African patriarchy and the colonial system and also shows how the battle for the female body eventually extended into the sporting field. It also explored the postcolonial period and the effects on Zimbabwean society of the colonial ideals of the Victorian culture of morality. The study focused on school sports and the participation of the girl child in sports such as netball, volleyball and football. Reference was made to other sports but emphasis was given to where women were affected. It is in this case where reference to the senior women soccer team was made to provide a case study for purposes of illustration. Selected rural community and urban schools were served as case references for ethnographic accounts which provided the qualitative data used in the analysis. In terms of methodology and theoretical framework, the paper adopted the political economy of the female body as an analytical viewing point in order to examine the body of the girl child and of women in action on the sporting field in Zimbabwe. In this context, the female body is viewed as deeply contested and as a medium that functions as a site for the redirection, profusion and transvaluation of gender ideals. Using the concept of embodiment, involving demeanor, body shape and perceptions of the female body in its social context, the paper attempted to establish a connection between gender ideologies and embodied practice. The results of the study showed the prevalence of condescending attitudes towards girls and women participation in sports.

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.

French Women, Italian Art, and Other “Advocates of the Body” in Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing

2010 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothy Z. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Religious Paintings ◽  
Italian Art

Displays of sanctified eroticism in The Minister's Wooing reveal Harriet Beecher Stowe's conviction that the body is inherently holy. The author's experience of religious paintings and her observation of French women in Europe deepened her belief that the female body is an instrument of spirituality, as can be traced in the novel.

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.

Sexuality as a Site of Memory and the Metaphysical Dilemma of Being a Colored Girl

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. H. Stallings
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Black Aesthetics ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
A Site

This chapter discusses partying as an alternative model of intimacy, black aesthetics, and art inclusive of nonhuman being. It studies eroticism and representations of sex work through the plays of Lynn Nottage and the films of feminist pornographer Shine Louise Houston as cultural recognitions of sex that is mediated through “demonic grounds.” Nottage and Houston devise fictional plots and women characters that confirm how and why sexuality exists as a site of memory for some black women. Women's bodies and sexualities are their canvases and creative tools. Although the end result may become representations for national ideology or products to be consumed, the process of creating out of the body and sexuality is in and of itself evidence of power that exceeds the human.

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

2018 ◽  
pp. 72-100
Author(s):  
Kimberly Lamm
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Angela Davis ◽  
The Us ◽  
Iconic Images ◽  
American Media ◽  
A Site

Chapter 2 analyses Angela Davis’s written reflections on her transformation into the ‘imaginary enemy’ of the US nation-state. A spectacle in the most consequential sense, the iconic images of Davis telegraphed across American visual culture in the early 1970s, many of which highlight her Afro, demonstrate that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies of racial and sexual difference can take visual form. Beginning with the FBI’s ‘Wanted’ poster of her, this chapter tracks the images of Davis that circulated through the American media and came close to inscribing the accusation of her criminality into legal truth and commonly held belief. I argue that Davis’s ordeal demonstrates that visual culture serves as a site where the pathologies of racism and sexism compound each other and force black women into positions of subordination, and that it therefore offers a powerful context for understanding the stakes of Piper’s textual interventions into the iconicity of the black female body. Reading a range of Davis’s writings (her autobiography, her letters to George Jackson, her own defence statement) in relation to Piper’s artwork, this chapter shows that Davis also deployed language to contest the legacies of ‘ungendering’ and undo the visual logics that have determined black women’s visibility..

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