Gifting a Healing Education Through Writing Life and Art: A Paris Studio Residency

We are two Canadian arts-based educational researchers who collaborated during a studio residency in Paris, France, during May 2015, for ten days. Our residency curriculum included study of feminist poet-thinker Hélène Cixous, taking walks in Paris locales, viewing women’s art, and engaging arts-based inquiry methods such as journaling, life writing and creative embodied practices, as a way to pay attention to and document our daily experiences. We practiced what we call companion pedagogy, with a feminist focus on mothering and gifting relations. We find that arts-based, restorative practices strengthen our wellbeing and resiliency as educators, and also support our desire for a more nurturing, mothering humanity to come forward for gifting a healing education. Healing education begs the question of how to address the resiliency of educators over time through what are increasingly challenging and depleting conditions of institutional cultures and economies. We thus offer creative practices such as studio residencies for collective care and gifting that can nurture a restorative pacing of life, while supporting the resiliency of educators to gift their energies towards creative curriculum visioning and enacting of social change.

Female Island: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Two leading articles of feminist hue – “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976) and “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” (1981) – by two seminal figures, Hélène Cixous and Elaine Showalter respectively, grant a new look at Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Two main themes that come to the fore from these two articles with reference to Rhys’s novel are the male-dominated female zone and the importance of female writing for women. Both critics mention the strong hold of patriarchy on women, which is quite obvious in Antoinette’s condition in Rhys’s novel. Next, both Cixous and Showalter claim that while men see the female domain as a dark space, women should stick to their female domain and express themselves through writing. And this is what Rhys does in her novel; she gives a voice to the mad woman in the attic, Antoinette, who has been put there and tagged mad by her husband. By exploring the similarities between feminist criticism in Cixous’s and Showalter’s articles and Rhys’s novel, this study aims to show that although Wide Sargasso Sea is a revolutionary novel with its ability to give the mad woman back her individuality, it is not strong enough to create a world where this woman can experience her individuality.

Perlawanan Strategis Perempuan terhadap Eksploitasi Laki-laki dalam Novel Claudine en Menage (1902) Karya Gabriele Sidonie Colette

Kehidupan perempuan yang dianggap bergantung kepada laki-laki membuat perempuan diperlakukan semena-mena dan tidak adil. Claudine en Menage (1902) adalah novel karya seorang pengarang Prancis, Colette. Novel ini menceritakan tentang seorang perempuan yang hidup sebagai istri yang mengalami eksploitasi berlapis karena ras, budaya, dan seksualitasnya yang dilakukan oleh orang-orang terdekatnya, yaitu ayah dan suaminya. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengeksplorasi ideologi dari novel terkait dengan perlawanan perempuan terhadap eksploitasi laki-laki dan mengajak pembaca untuk membuka paradigma baru yang lebih luas mengenai perlawanan perempuan tersebut. Penelitian ini menggunakan teori perlawanan perempuan dari Hélène Cixous, yang berpendapat bahwa perempuan dengan keahlian dan kemampuannya menulis mampu keluar dari belenggu penindasan yang mereka alami. Teori interseksionalitas dari Kimberlé Crénshaw, yang menerangkan tentang diskriminasi ganda perempuan yang bersifat interseksional yang memuat aspek ras, budaya, agama, serta seksualitas juga dijadikan lensa pendukung di dalam tulisan ini. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode analisis isi cerita dengan fokus pengumpulan data dan analisis data pada kemampuan perempuan keluar dari belenggu patriarki dan mampu menjadi perempuan independen dengan kemampuan yang mereka miliki.Women's lives are seen as dependent on men, and as such they are prone to abuse and unfair treatment. Claudine en Menage (1902) is a novel written by the French author Colette, which narrates a woman's experiences with racial, cultural, and sexual exploitation at the hands of her father and husband. This study seeks to explore the novel's ideology, as related to its depiction of women's resistance to male exploitation and its invitation to readers to explore broader paradigms about said resistance. This study employs Hélène Cixous' theory of struggle, which holds that women are able to penetrate the barriers of oppression through their writing skills and abilities, and Kimberlé Crénshaw's theory of intersectionality, which holds that sexual discrimination intersects with racial, cultural, religious, and sexuality discrimination. This study uses content analysis methode, with a particular focus on collecting and analyzing data that depict women's ability to shatter barriers of patriarchy and become independent through their own abilities.

Between Mirrors all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body

Just as any body's cells are constantly dying and regenerating, all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body draw its vitality from the teeming traffic of death, the fertile muck of the abject. Such is the suggestion of the title, sourced in Hélène Cixous' work (1991: 41), out of whose spell this life writing marks off its distinctive poetics of the fragment, drawing an ethics of openness from the mining of abjection. To be sure, this is no chronological memoir, building teleologically to a transformation and consolidation of social identity. Quite to the contrary: bold, brave, and disturbingly innovative, this work from Sydney-born Quinn Eades, formerly known as Karina Quinn, performs a body reinventing itself: scarified, 'surgeried', written into and out of, and endlessly reconfigured through the writing. Eades builds their story through a constellation of scenes staging the embodied, yet fractured self, the sujet en procès, the subject-on-trial and -in process (Kristeva 1977) from coruscating scintillation to depressive passivity, through what they call écriture matière -- writing as a material practice. 

The Inherent Link between Gender and Sexuality: A Queer View to the Portrayal of Women in Herland, Things Fall Apart, Bombay Brides, and The Winner Stands Alone

Stevie Jackson and Jackie Jones regarded in her article- Contemporary Feminist Theory that “The concepts of gender and sexuality as a highly ambiguous term, as a point of reference” (Jackson, 131, ch-10). Gender and Sexuality are two most complexly designed, culturally constructed and ambiguously interrelated terms used within the spectrum of Feminism that considers “sex” as an operative term to theorize its deconstructive cultural perspectives. Helene Cixous notes in Laugh of Medusa that men and women enter the symbolic order in a different way and the subject position open to either sex is different. Cixious’s understanding that the centre of the symbolic order is ‘phallus’ and everybody surrounding it stands in the periphery makes women (without intersectionality) as the victim of this phallocentric society. One needs to stop thinking Gender as inherently linked to one’s sex and that it is natural. To say, nothing is natural. The body is just a word (as Judith Butler said in her book Gender Trouble [1990]) that is strategically used under artificial rules for the convenience of ‘power’ to operate. It has been a “norm” to connect one’s sexuality with their Gender and establish that as “naturally built”. The dichotomy of ‘penis/vagina’ over years has linked itself to make/female understanding of bodies. Therefore my main argument in this paper is to draw few instances from some literary works which over time reflected how the gender- female/women characters are made to couple up with a male/man presenting the inherent, coherent compulsory relation between one’s gender and sexuality obliterating any possibility of ‘queer’ relationships, includes- Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Bombay Brides (2018) by Esther David, Paulo Coelho’s Winner Stands Alone (2008) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall apart (1958).