Bach and the Soprano Voice

The chapter begins with a simple question: given the fact that Bach’s music for sopranos was composed almost exclusively for boys, why have early music practitioners—including those endorsed in 2018 by the Bach Leipzig Archive—become so accustomed to using female sopranos? Taking account both of the rhetorical strategies that Bach uses in a representative group of soprano arias (choice of affect, use of topoi, scoring, and vocal writing) and the use of female sopranos in this repertory in concert, radio, and recordings since the nineteenth-century revival, this chapter proposes that Bach imbued his soprano arias with an intrinsic sense of femininity—passion, optimism, desire, compliance, modesty, and submission—that was central to his expression of Lutheran theology and that emerges as no less vital for listeners, even long after the original theological context had lost its relevance. The chapter also shows how Bach’s unacknowledged capacity for representing female subjectivity has influenced even the most historically informed performance practices.

PARA ALÉM DE UM TETO TODO SEU: O CASO ELISA LISPECTOR

RESUMO: Elisa Lispector escreveu inúmeros romances e contos, recebendo prêmios por alguns deles. A escritora, embora tenha explorado a construção de uma subjetividade feminina, é quase sempre lembrada pelos escritos autobiográficos, principalmente o romance No exílio de 1948. A crítica esteve mais atenta às narrativas que iluminavam episódios da vida de sua irmã caçula, Clarice Lispector, do que às especificidades de sua escrita. A obra e a trajetória de Clarice Lispector causaram sombra não só à obra de sua irmã como às de outras escritoras do mesmo período. Neste artigo, questionamos o papel da crítica no apagamento do nome de Elisa Lispector na literatura brasileira que tomou o caso Clarice como excepcional, negando às escritoras, de um modo geral, um espaço para debater seus textos e subjetividades. Além da vinculação da obra da escritora à obra de sua irmã pela crítica literária, analisamos como a tradição literária falocêntrica contribuiu para este apagamento. Elisa Lispector contribuiu para o debate acerca do baixo número de publicações de escritoras, evocando Virginia Woolf e Simone de Beauvoir. Atuou para que as escritoras pudessem ter uma tradição em que se ancorar. Analisamos os romances O muro de pedras publicado em 1963, O dia mais longo de Thereza de 1965, A última porta de 1975, Corpo a corpo de 1983 e do conto “Uma outra temporada no inferno” de seu último livro O tigre de bengala publicado em 1985, demonstrando como a escritora explorou os processos de emancipação feminina e os conflitos comuns a esta fase de transição.BEYOND A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN: THE CASE ELISA LISPECTORABSTRACT: Elisa Lispector has written numerous novels and short stories, receiving awards for some of them. The writer, although she explored the construction of a female subjectivity, is almost always remembered for autobiographical writings, especially the novel No exílio of 1948. The criticism was more attentive to the narratives that illuminated episodes of the life of her younger sister, Clarice Lispector, than to the specificities of her writing. Clarice Lispector's work and trajectory cast a shadow not only on her sister's work but also on those of other writers of the same period. In this article, we question the role of criticism in the elimination of Elisa Lispector's name in Brazilian literature, which took Clarice as exceptional, denying writers, in general, a space to debate their texts and subjectivities. In addition to linking the writer's work to her sister's work by literary criticism, we analyze how the phallocentric literary tradition contributed to this elimination. Elisa Lispector contributed to the debate about the low number of writers' publications, evoking Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. It worked so that the writers could have a tradition in which to anchor themselves. We analyze the novels O muro de pedras published in 1963, O dia mais longo de Thereza of 1965, A última porta of 1975, Corpo a corpo of 1983 and the short story "Uma outra temporada no inferno" from her last book O tigre de bengala published in 1985, demonstrating how the writer explored the processes of female emancipation and the conflicts common to this phase of transition.Keywords: Elisa Lispector; feminist criticism; Brazilian literature.

Bride kidnapping in Northern Kyrgyzstan as the initial stage of subjectivity-forming process Bride kidnapping in Northern

Kyz ala kachuu (Kyrgyz: кыз ала качуу) translated as “to take a young woman and run away” is a form of women kidnapping for marriage purposes in Kyrgyzstan (Kyrgyz Republic). This term applies to either of the performed actions: kidnapping with permission from the future wife, and without her consent. In this article, I propose an anthropological interpretation of bride kidnapping, using the concept of ‘person-making’. In my analysis, I go beyond the act of kidnapping itself, which I present as part of a wider social process. Drawing on my fieldwork in Northern Kyrgyzstan, I show that marriage through kidnapping is the first stage in the social process of building female subjectivity and the way ofreproduction of Kyrgyz families. The reproduction takes place through the acquisition, familiarization, and constitution of subjectivity resulting from the collective agency of all the family members.

CONSTRUCTION AND ALIENATION: RESEARCH ON FEMALE IMAGES IN WEBCAST

In recent years, webcasting has developed in a spurt, giving birth to a large number of camgirl communities. The interconnection of virtual fields and real spaces has made the appearance of webcast subjects a social phenomenon worthy of attention. The network media empowers people and brings new fields and opportunities for the development of female subjectivity. Camgirls based on identity and subjective expression participate in the process of constructing their own image. In the diverse and fluid cyberspace field and in the age of entertainment, the conspiracy of image capital and visual consumption has continuously created and produced a subculture in the live broadcast field, causing the construction of female images from "subjective fiction." The shift to "symbol alienation" has caused the female body to be continuously desired, materialized, symbolized, disciplined and peeped. Behind the image of the network camgirl, it conveys the changes of human society and culture, the variation of the real space and the network field, and it is worthy of our reflection and discussion.

Nina Simone as Poet and Orchestrator

How do you fashion an identity in a society that, at every turn, tries to snuff you out? In this article, I address Nina Simone's praxis of renaming and reinvention to demonstrate strategies of resistance. To this point, I analyze the musico-poetic setting of Nina Simone’s songs “Images” (1964) and “Four Women” (1965) to argue that her artistic musical choices sonically orchestrate varying issues of Black female subjectivity, identity, and self-making. In Simone’s songs, she refuses to discount the materiality of the Black body; instead, she envelops the Black body with signifiance and significance. The sonic bearers of semantic content become extensions of the Self—transmutable and heterodox. The compositional and poetic subtleties in these songs claim that the gaze of the Other can potentiate exteriority and freedom—what I term the “exo(p)tic.”

Penelitian Feminis dalam Kajian Budaya:Titik-Temu dan Kontribusi

Gender studies have generated a perspective called feminist research that is not merely research on women, but also research for women. Driven by a will to prioritize women’s experiences and, therefore, the aim to emphasize the importance of their subjective experiences, feminist researchers tend to apply qualitative research methods by placing great emphasis on women as subjects of knowledge. The differences in disciplinary backgrounds and the methodological and epistemological positions of feminist are also increasingly blurred by the mutual borrowing of concepts and thoughts across disciplines, especially from literary theory, history, and cultural studies. In cultural studies, with its recent development recently, feminist research tends to be more oriented towards the basic assumptions of poststructuralism and/or postmodernism. They reject the perspective of a monolithic woman so that, therefore, there is no single and unitary truth about the story of woman’s reality. In this regard, culture is an important issue on the academic and political agenda of feminists. Not only is culture inseparable from gender and power factors, but it can also produce a better understanding of subjectivity. By understanding gender specifically as discourse, they do not deny the possibility of female subjectivity that is multiple, fragmented, and open up opportunities for differences and variations. Compared to the other feminist research positions, feminist cultural studies seem more hybrid, radical, and subversive.