Contemporary Danmei Fiction and Its Similitudes with Classical and Yanqing Literature

Danmei, aka Boys Love, is a salient transgressive genre of Chinese Internet literature. Since entering China’s niche market in 1990s, the danmei subculture, predominantly in the form of original fictional creation, has established an enormous fanbase and demonstrated significance via thought-provoking works and social functions. Nonetheless, the danmei genre is not an innovation in the digital age, in that its bipartite dichotomy between seme ‘top’ and uke ‘bottom’ roles bears similarities to the dyad in caizi-jiaren ‘scholar-beauty’ anecdotes featuring masculine and feminine ideals in literary representations of heterosexual love and courtship, which can be attested in the 17th century and earlier extant accounts. Furthermore, the feminisation of danmei characters is analogous to an androgynous ideal in late-imperial narratives concerning heterosexual relationships during late Ming and early Qing dynasties, and the depiction of semes being masculine while ukes being feminine is consistent with the orthodox, indigenous Chinese masculinity which is comprised of wen ‘cultural attainment’ epitomising feminine traits and wu ‘martial valour’ epitomising masculine traits. In terms of modern literature, danmei is parallel to the (online) genre yanqing ‘romance’ that is frequently characterised by ‘Mary Sue’ and cliché-ridden narration.

Engendering Political Labour: Findings from a Kerala Village

Literature on Indian politics has largely under-examined the role of the family in shaping party politics with the exception of the studies on dynasticism. There is a paucity of research that looks at the complex ways in which intimate lives and party politics are intertwined. This article contributes to the existing feminist analyses of Indian party politics by conceptualizing politics and political labour in a way that does not exclude the role of the family. It presents the case study of a village in northern Kerala, which has been witnessing heightened political conflicts to show how personal experiences and family disputes get politicized. As domestic and political spheres bleed into each other, political parties become hugely dependent on feminine ideals and women’s everyday labour, affects and sociality to survive electoral competitions. Yet, the patriarchal family and masculinized local party leadership use gender ideologies to celebrate hypermasculine political participation, undervalue women’s labour and limit their political aspirations.

“Doing Their Bit”: The USO in New Jersey During World War II

The participation of NJ women during World War II encompassed a wide array of new challenges and responsibilities. Not only were women moving into newly opened employment opportunities, but they also joined military branches, worked for the defense industry, and even played professional baseball. However, paid positions were only part of the story. Volunteerism was a significant, even integral part of the war effort, both on the home front and abroad. For women who volunteered as hostesses, the USO upheld feminine ideals of emotional labor and caregiving, emphasizing the activities that prepared young women to be wives and mothers. The ideological safety of USO work during WWII has served as a barrier to comprehensive academic consideration of their contributions on a national, regional, and local level. Demographic variations of USO clubs have yet to be analyzed comprehensively on a state-by-state basis. Research on NJ’s USO groups forms a unique narrative of women’s volunteerism and civic engagement, which upheld social constructs of femininity while impacting the war effort, especially the morale of the military, significantly.

How Not to Aim the Camera Downward. Representing the Feminized Working Poor

The identity of the working-class woman is a particularly precarious one, as stereotypical western feminine ideals are not associated with any of the archetypical trades of the working class, which has instead embodied the masculine ideal of the manual, industrial labourer. In this essay, I argue how the struggle of working-class femininity extends to gender roles of the (former) working class more generally, investigating how this becomes apparent in photographic representations of council housing communities in contemporary art, taking Richard Billingham’s body of work Ray’s a Laugh (1996) and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work The Notion of the Family (2001-14) as case studies. Both Billingham’s and Frazier’s work deal with the identity of the working poor from the inside: they represent the decline of the working class and the demise of blue-collar communities, lacking investment and falling prey to the dismantling of the welfare state. The image of the post-war, post-industrial (and post-feminist) underemployed female has been analysed principally by sociologists and media studies researchers in relation to reality TV programmes, which produce and represent the working class female body as abject. I will therefore employ cultural theory as well as sociological research studies by Beverly Skegg, Imogen Tyler, and Angela McRobbie to identify stereotypes of working-class femininity in visual culture to then assess their relationship to lens-based artistic representations of the working class. The analysis of working-class masculinity and its place in the post-industrial, precarious labour market has been even more limited especially regarding art (let alone photography), with the exception of Angela Dimitrakaki’s essay "Masculinity, Art, and Value Extraction" (2019). The article draws on her discussion as well as on Norbert Trenkle’s "The Rise and Fall of the Working Man" (2008) to investigate Frazier’s and Billingam’s depictions of male family members and show how the decline of the working class, through deindustrialisation, precarisation, and the dismantling of the welfare state, has impacted the image of working-class masculinity.

The dialectical nature of Cindy Sherman’s fashion photographs

This article seeks to interrogate the increasingly prevalent consideration of fashion photographs as ‘artworks’, independent of their commercial function. Using Cindy Sherman’s fashion photographs as a case study, I argue that they cannot be read either as a straightforward subversion of the fashion industry or, conversely, as totally subservient to it. While most of the writings about these works have focused on the ways in which they interrogate media constructions of feminine beauty ideals, the reasons for their embrace by the fashion industry have been largely neglected. I seek to address this lacuna by arguing that the challenging nature of Sherman’s fashion photographs, far from being antithetical to their commercial function, is precisely their source of appeal to the fashion industry. Her images are sought after by the fashion world, not because they adhere to the promotional tropes conventionally seen in fashion advertising but because they seek to distance themselves from them. This paradox can be explained by the fact that the economic success of elite industries such as haute couture rests increasingly on their ability to promote themselves as being ‘above’ commerce. It is this double-edged nature of her fashion photographs that enables them to operate simultaneously as critical interrogations of feminine ideals of beauty in an art world context, and as promotional tools within the fashion industry.

Towards a ‘Vedic Feminine Renaissance’

The sense of justice and equity towards women is considered among the best indicators that reflect the socio-cultural development of a civilisation. The position and status of women, as reflected in literature naturally serves as a test to gauge the sensibilities and cultivation of each associated age. It is matter of general agreement that the feminine ideals of womanhood during the early Vedic age remain exalted and exemplary. The Vedic narratives elevate the ephemeral spirit of womanhood, which progressively lost its sheen in successive stages. While the contemporary feminine polemics consistently unravel unhackneyed theories, generic in nature, we are lacking in such an orientation which targets specifics of local, regional and traditional culture. Feminists in India are no exception, and have largely adopted the theories of Feminism emanating from the discourse of the West. The Indian Vedic repository contains instances which testify the epitome of womanhood at its best. However, the Indian ethos of feminism imbedded firmly in the Vedic roots remain largely inaccessible in the contemporary feministic theory. The need for adapting ‘global feminism’ to the ‘classical Indian taste’ remains an unobserved concern. This paper explores the possibilities inherent in the study of classical mythic literature and their potential for stimulating ‘local theories’ of feminism in India through a study of selected feminine ideals present in the early Vedic narratives. Can study of ancient Vedic literature inspire a reawakening in Indian feminism, just as the study of classical Greek literature did for the West during Renaissance in Europe - is a question, this paper seeks to address.

Manifesting Millions

Women’s spiritual entrepreneurship offers a new way of practicing capitalism in keeping with values traditionally coded as “feminine.” Operating as both a movement and a classification, spiritual entrepreneurship represents a capacious set of business practices centered on the belief that making money can be spiritually fulfilling. This possibility is actualized when spiritual entrepreneurship focuses on the traditionally feminine ideals of teaching and nurturing and utilizes spiritual practices such as meditation, manifesting, and mindfulness. This article explores the logics and rhetoric of women’s spiritual entrepreneurship in three prominent categories where these discourses are found: multi-level marketing, self-help products and guides, and women’s business coaching. Examples from each of these categories demonstrate how women’s spiritual entrepreneurship operates in the contemporary United States through shared ideals and religious practices.

Gender in Merovingian Gaul

The relationships between gender, sex, and sexuality are far more complex than is often acknowledged, whether in modern politics or in publications about medieval history. In a Merovingian context, this can be shown from various stories from the works of Gregory of Tours and from the archaeology of cemeteries. The spaces within which what we might term non-normative gendered identities could be enacted in Merovingian Gaul is examined via a discussion of the development of gendered norms from the classical Roman period to the seventh century. It is argued that a Roman concept of gender that focused on a single civic masculine ideal gradually evolved, not least through the emergence of more politically effective rival forms of masculinity, into a more binary sixth-century construction with separate masculine and feminine ideals. It is proposed that widespread changes around 600 led to a reversion to a more “monopolar” construction of gender but that the masculine ideal that was its focus was now overwhelmingly martial. Developments in the ecclesiastical ideas of gender and sexuality are explored in parallel to these secular changes, and it is suggested that they frequently led in interestingly different directions.

The Short Story Series of Annie S. Swan for The Woman at Home

This chapter investigates the ten short story series about working women which the Scottish popular novelist, Annie S. Swan published in the women’s magazine, The Woman at Home, between 1893 and 1918. The format of the short story series, pioneered by Conan Doyle in The Strand, lent itself particularly well to periodical publication given its patterning of periodicity and repetition with variation. The chapter shows how Swan drew on these features to depict the experiences of professional and working women while deferring the closure of the marriage plot. Although the individual stories are often moralizing, predictable and conservative in their foregrounding of women as wives and mothers, the series in their entirety emphasise the expertise and professionalism of their female protagonists. In seeking to marry an advocacy for women’s work with a more traditional domestic ideology, Swan’s story series participate in The Woman at Home’s middlebrow negotiation of the new gender roles and feminine ideals that were being debated at the time.

Sounding Feminine

This book examines the uses and meanings of women’s voices in British society and musical culture between 1780 and 1850. As previous scholars have argued, during these decades patriarchal power increasingly came to rest upon a particular understanding of the essentially different nature of male and female physiology and psychology. As a result, this book contends, the female voice—believed to blend both physical and mental attributes—became central to maintaining, and challenging, gendered power structures. The book argues that the varying ways women used their voices—the sounds that they made, as much as the words they spoke or sang—were understood by contemporaries as aural markers of different kinds of femininity. Consequently, contemporary divisions over feminine ideals were both expressed and contested through women’s use of their voices and audiences’ responses to them. Following an introduction that lays out the book’s theoretical frameworks and main arguments, the first three chapters explore how contemporary responses to different styles of female vocality were shaped by class, religious, and national discourses, through an exploration of conduct literature, letters, diaries, life-writing, and music criticism and reportage in newspapers and periodicals. Two case studies then extend the argument further through detailed analysis of the use and meaning of women’s voices on the part of both amateur and professional female singers respectively. A closing epilogue draws together the book’s major themes and discusses their implications for the gender history of this period.