scholarly journals Editorial: Feminism and Gender in Literary Education

2020 ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Tzina Kalogirou ◽  
Xavier Mínguez López ◽  
Catalina Millán-Scheiding
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Current Issue ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Teaching Approaches ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Gender

The starting point for the making of this current issue were some fundamental questions about the intersection of Feminist Criticism and Gender Theory with Education: What might it mean to read and teach literature through the prism of feminist criticism and/or gender theory? In which texts, ways and methods can we integrate a balanced gender approach into literary didactics? How and in which teaching approaches can we produce some powerful feminist readings of the literary texts, whether they are texts long established by tradition, or contemporary and multimodal ones, belonging to popular culture? And how can these concerns about feminism and gender be adequately addressed and embedded into the literature classroom? Although we knew that all the previous questions could not be effectively addressed in one single issue, we still envisaged a publication with insightful contributions to the overall theme of Feminism and Gender in Literary Education.

Genders

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pelagia Goulimari
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Gender Variance ◽  
Continuous Transition ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 19Th Century

Feminist, queer, and transgender theory has developed an array of fruitful concepts for the study of gender. It offers critiques of patriarchy, the gender binary, compulsory heterosexuality, heteronormativity, and homonormativity, inter alia. New Materialist feminists have analyzed gender variance, continuous variation, and continuous transition through concepts such as rhizome, assemblage, making kin, and sym-poiesis (making-with). Feminists of color and postcolonial feminists have theorized intersectionality—that gender always-already intersects with race, class, sexual orientation, and so on—and gender roles outside the white middle-class nuclear family, such as othermothering and fictive kin. Materialist feminists have studied gender as social class, while psychoanalytic gender theorists have explored gender as self-identification and in terms of the relation of gender identification and desire. Queer theory has explored vexed gender identifications and disidentification as well as heterotopias, counterpublic spaces, and queer kinship beyond the private/public divide. Transgender theory has critiqued transmisogyny and theorized transgender and trans* identities. Indigenous feminist and queer theory has theorized Two-Spirit identities and queer indigeneity in the context of a decolonial vision. Theorists of masculinities have analyzed masculinities as historically specific, plural, and intersectional. Gender studies, in all this diversity, has influenced most fields of study—for example, disability studies in its theorization of complex embodiment, its development of crip theory, and so on. Gender studies, in turn, has greatly benefitted from the study of literature. Literature has been indispensable in the genealogy of dominant gender norms such as the 19th-century norms of the angelic/demonic woman and self-made man. In return, gender theory has offered fresh insights into literary genre, for example the Bildungsroman. Since the development of gender theory, it has taken part in an ongoing dialogue and cross-fertilization with literature, evidenced in self-reflexive and critically informed literary texts as well as in gender theory that includes autobiographical and literary (e.g., narrative, figurative, fictional, poetic) elements.

scholarly journals Det affektive møtet mellom tekst og lesar: Tre postkritiske inngangar til å velja skjønnlitteratur i morsmålsfaget

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Esben Myren-Svelstad
Keyword(s):  
Affect Theory ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Management By Objectives ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Imaginative Literature ◽  
Analytical Category ◽  
Core Practice ◽  
Selection Of

Artikkelen identifiserer val av skjønnlitteratur som ein kjernepraksis i morsmåls-undervisninga, der det i liten grad finst forsking på eksisterande praksis og teoretiske grunnlagsproblem. Det er til det sistnemnde feltet artikkelen søkjer å bidraga, ved å opne opp og nyansere diskusjonen om premissar for litteraturval. Artikkelen er todelt. Den fyrste delen er ei metateoretisk drøfting av dei ulike syna på skjønnlitteratur og litteraturundervisning som er i spel i kanon- og utvalsdebattar. Drøftinga bruker dikotomien kvalitet/representativitet som tankefigur for å klårgjera skiljeliner, samanfall og uteoretiserte premissar i dei ulike haldningane. Med utgangspunkt i dette blir det argumentert for at eit dialogisk syn på litterær kompetanse, saman med postkritisk teori, kan danne eit meir fruktbart utgangspunkt for å reflektere over kva litteraturen gjer i møte med lesarar, og dimed kva for grunnlag ein vel litteratur ut frå. Den andre delen føreslår å didaktisere postkritisk teori ved å skildre tre inngangar til litteraturvalet. Desse inngangane kan sjåast som grunnlag for å velja litteratur, men òg som kategoriar for å skildre kva som skjer i møtet mellom lesarar og dei skjønnlitterære tekstene i morsmålsfaget. Avslutningsvis blir den presumptive konflikten mellom estetisk utforsking og didaktisk målstyring drøfta, og det blir argumentert for at litteratursynet artikkelen skildrar, stør opp under ei problembasert litteraturundervisning. Nøkkelord: litteraturdidaktikk, litterær kompetanse, litterær kanon, litterær etikk, postkritikk, affektteori The affective encounter between text and reader:Three postcritical approaches to the choice of literature in L1 education AbstractThe article identifies the selection of literature as a core practice in L1 education on which there is a limited amount of research on existing practices and theoretical assumptions. Seeking to contribute to the latter, the article suggests ways to open and nuance the discussion around the selection of literature. The article consists of two main parts. The first part offers a metatheoretical discussion of the differing views on imaginative literature and literary education at stake in discussions of the literary canon and literature selection. The discussion employs the dichotomy quality/representativity as analytical category in order to highlight fissures, overlaps and untheorized assumptions in the differing viewpoints. Hence, it is argued that a dialogical understanding of literary competence, in conjunction with postcritical theory, may form a more productive starting point for reflections on what literature does in encounters with readers, and thus on what basis literary texts are selected. The second part of the article suggests a pedagogization of postcritical theory by describing three approaches to the selection of literature. These approaches can be regarded as a basis for selection, but also descriptive categories of what happens in the encounter between readers and texts in the context of L1 education. In conclusion, the supposed conflict between aesthetical exploration and pedagogical management by objectives is discussed, and it is argued that the notion of literature described in the article supports a problem-based literary instruction. Keywords: literary education, literary competence, literary canon, literary ethics, postcritical theory, affect theory

Criss-Cross: Identity and Transformation in Re-reading Billy Elliot

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-551
Author(s):  
Jacqui Miller
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

Billy Elliot (2000) has been widely recognised as an important British film of the post-Thatcher period. It has been analysed using multiple disciplinary methodologies, but almost always from the theoretical frameworks of class and gender/sexuality. The film has sometimes been used not so much as a focus of analysis itself but as a conduit for exploring issues such as class deprivation or neo-liberal politics and economics. Such studies tend to use the film's perceived shortcomings as a starting point to critique society's wider failings to interrogate constructions of gender and sexuality. This article argues that an examination of the identity formation of some of the film's subsidiary characters shows how fluidity and transformation are key to the film's opening up of a jouissance which is enabled by but goes beyond its central character.

Call Your "Mutha"

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Caputi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Mother Nature ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Mother Earth ◽  
Made In

The proposed new geological era, The Anthropocene (a.k.a. Age of Humans, Age of Man), marking human domination of the planet long called Mother Earth, is truly The Age of the Motherfucker. The ecocide of the Anthropocene is the responsibility of Man, the Western- and masculine-identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that masks itself as the exemplar of the civilized and the human. The word motherfucker was invented by the enslaved children of White slave masters to name their mothers’ rapist/owners. Man’s strategic motherfucking, from the personal to the planetary, is invasion, exploitation, spirit-breaking, extraction and toxic wasting of individuals, communities, and lands, for reasons of pleasure, plunder, and profit. Ecocide is attempted deicide of Mother Nature-Earth, reflecting Man’s goal to become the god he first made in his own image. The motivational word Motherfucker has a flip side, further revealing the Anthropocene as it signifies an outstanding, formidable, and inexorable force. Mother Nature-Earth is that “Mutha’ ”—one defying translation into heteropatriarchal classifications of gender, one capable of overwhelming Man, and not the other way around. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American scholarship; ecofeminism; ecowomanism; green activism; femme, queer, and gender non-binary philosophies; literature and arts; Afrofuturism; and popular culture, Call Your “Mutha’ ” contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence of Man’s supremacy over nature, but that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is going away. It is imperative now to call the “Mutha’ ” by decolonizing land, bodies, and minds, ending rapism, feeding the green, renewing sustaining patterns, and affirming devotion to Mother Nature-Earth.

scholarly journals The politics of a ‘Poncy Pillowcase’: Migration and borders in Coronation Street’

Politics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandria J Innes ◽  
Robert J Topinka
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
And Gender

This article examines the ways in which popular culture stages and supplies resources for agency in everyday life, with particular attention to migration and borders. Drawing upon cultural studies, and specific insights originating from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, we explore how intersectional identities such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender are experienced in relation to the globalisation of culture and identity in a 2007 Coronation Street storyline. The soap opera genre offers particular insights into how agency emerges in everyday life as migrants and locals navigate the forces of globalisation. We argue that a focus on popular culture can mitigate the problem of isolating migrant experiences from local experiences in migrant-receiving areas.

“Toxic Masculinity” in the age of #MeToo: ritual, morality and gender archetypes across cultures

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Paul Louis Veissière
Keyword(s):  
Design Methodology ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Archetypes ◽  
Cultural Shifts

Purpose This paper aims to take the “toxic masculinity” (TM) trope as a starting point to examine recent cultural shifts in common assumptions about gender, morality and relations between the sexes. TM is a transculturally widespread archetype or moral trope about the kind of man one should not be. Design/methodology/approach The author revisits his earlier fieldwork on transnational sexualities against a broader analysis of the historical, ethnographic and evolutionary record. The author describes the broad cross-cultural recurrence of similar ideal types of men and women (good and bad) and the rituals through which they are culturally encouraged and avoided. Findings The author argues that the TM trope is normatively useful if and only if it is presented alongside a nuanced spectrum of other gender archetypes (positive and negative) and discussed in the context of human universality and evolved complementariness between the sexes. Social implications The author concludes by discussing stoic virtue models for the initiation of boys and argues that they are compatible with the normative commitments of inclusive societies that recognize gender fluidity along the biological sex spectrum. Originality/value The author makes a case for the importance of strong gender roles and the rites and rituals through which they are cultivated as an antidote to current moral panics about oppression and victimhood.

scholarly journals POSTMODERNITY, SEXUALITIES AND CULTURE: FEMINIST SCRIPTS AND GENDER POP-ICONS (Review of the book: Gaga Feminism. Sex, Gender, and The End of Normal. J. Jack Halberstam. Boston : Beacon Press, 2013. 157 p.)

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-106
Author(s):  
Tetiana Vlasova
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Icon ◽  
Postmodern Feminism ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga as a postmodern cultural icon manipulating with images and symbols has created in her “performances” a kind of new “post”-postmodern feminism, in which she followed the line of feminine anarchists – in politics, arts and culture. “Gaga ideology”, which in fact “embraces a void”, nowadays is vividly presented across alternative forms of popular culture with the subsequent great impact on the generation of millennials.

scholarly journals Abortion, embryos, euthanasia, and gender theory: an anthropological analysis of the Catholic Church’s Bioethics Manual at World Youth Day

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naara Luna
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Embryo Research ◽  
National Commission ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Medically Assisted Reproduction ◽  
The World ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Catholic Church

Abstract The present article analyzes the Keys to Bioethics - JMJ Rio 2013 handbook, produced by the Jerôme Lejeune Foundation and the National Commission for Family Pastoral Care, linked to the National Conference of Bishops in Brazil. This booklet was offered to people attending the World Youth Day that took place in Rio de Janeiro in 2013. It is a student’s guide, created to educate young people about the doctrines of the Catholic Church. The text presents bioethical arguments against abortion in any situation, and defends the human rights of embryos and fetuses through topics such as: prenatal diagnosis, medically assisted reproduction, pre-implantation diagnosis, and embryo research (stem cells). The text also condemns euthanasia and repudiates ‘gender theory’ as false. In essence, it questions individual autonomy. The distribution of this booklet is an example of the activities of the Catholic Church in public spaces.

scholarly journals “The 1990s Wasn’t Just a Time of Bandits; We Feminists Were Also Making Mischief!”

Aspasia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-36
Author(s):  
Julie Hemment ◽  
Valentina Uspenskaya
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Young Women ◽  
The Political ◽  
Educational Project ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twentieth Anniversary ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Distinguishing Features ◽  
East West

In this forum, we reflect on the genesis and history of the Tver’ Center for Women’s History and Gender Studies—its inspiration and the qualities that have enabled it to flourish and survive the political changes of the last twenty years, as well as the unique project of women educating women it represents. Inspired by historical feminist forebears, it remains a hub of intergenerational connection, inspiring young women via exposure to lost histories of women’s struggle for emancipation during the prerevolutionary and socialist periods, as well as the recent postsocialist past. Using an ethnographic account of the center’s twentieth anniversary conference as a starting point, we discuss some of its most salient and distinguishing features, as well as the unique educational project it represents and undertakes: the center’s origins in exchange and mutual feminist enlightenment; its historical orientation (women educating [wo]men in emancipation history); and its commitment to the postsocialist feminist “East-West” exchange.

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