Silencing the single woman: Negotiating the ‘failed’ feminine subject in contemporary UK society

Despite a growth in single women in UK society over the past two decades, single femininity continues to be highly stigmatised. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of the heterosexual matrix and applying this to qualitative interview data with 25 single women, I argue that single femininity is produced as abject through processes of silencing which render the single female a ‘failed’ subject and reinscribe heteronormative coupled femininity. Yet while deeply painful, such ‘failures’ may also be productive, offering moments where the boundaries of heteronormative feminine subjectivity and hierarchies of intimate life are troubled and transformed. This article complicates understandings of stigma and resistance through a nuanced analysis of processes of abjectification and ambivalence.

Dysfunction, Deviancy, and Sexual Autonomy: The Single Female Detective in Primetime TV

As the number of single women has grown within Anglo-American society, there has been a proliferation of discourses around single women within popular culture. At the same time, there has been a resurgence in female-centered media representations of detectives. This article asks what cultural work the convergence of the single woman with the unconventional figure of the detective performs, and what this means for contemporary feminine subjectivities, exploring how she is constructed in three primetime TV crime dramas: The Bridge, The Good Wife and Fargo. I argue that while the single female detective foregrounds discourses of professionalism, rationality, and sexual autonomy, she simultaneously reinscribes patriarchal discourses of heteronormative coupledom and normative femininity through her social dysfunction, vulnerability and deviance, rendering the single woman a threat to femininity. Yet, at times, her liminal positioning allows her to occupy a more transgressive feminine subjectivity and subversively trouble the gender binary.

Seduzioni e scenari veneziani

This paper analyses the exploratory and evolutionary path of the protagonist Jules – i.e. all her perceptions in the relationships with men and women – in the light of the dissolution of the postmodern self and the nomadism as a phenomenon of change in terms of gender, role and behaviour. In this sense, the categories of masculine and feminine in their narrative figurations, the materiality of the body and the physical and sexual instincts of the young Jules are investigated, demonstrating how this 1964 novel by Milena Milani seems to implicitly anticipate the process of giving a new meaning to the feminine subjectivity that was to accelerate remarkably from the 1970s onwards.

SELF-TRACKING ‘FEMTECH’: COMMODIFYING & DISCIPLINING THE FERTILE FEMALE BODY

This paper engages with feminist political economists to explore questions of affective labour and value-production in self-tracking technologies designed for the female body (‘femtech’). Self-tracking femtech is largely characterised by smartphone applications and smart devices that track user data relating to menstruation, fertility periods, sexual activity, ovulation, hormones, and health and wellbeing. This data can be collected through self-reporting or through automated transmission from sensory devices attached to the body. By reflecting on my own experiences with these technologies, this paper argues that users of self-tracking femtech perform the labour of reproducing our bodies and our affective relations in ways that are amenable to both capitalist and patriarchal structures of power. Situated within the broader shifts of care and social reproduction, self-tracking femtech can be understood as affective infrastructures that re-stabilise gender norms and continue to unevenly push the burden of reproduction onto a class of unpaid women. I explore the ways that affective experiences are shaped and modulated by self-trackers to (re)produce and discipline the fertile and sexual female body to be $2 a productive labouring body and heterosexually attractive feminine subjectivity. The labour of reproduction is further intertwined here with the labour of producing data for digital media industries that generates profit in the advertising marketplace. By examining co-constitutive and paradoxical forms of value at play, I dually situate self-tracking femtech within broader political struggles and locate the spaces of agency in our everyday entanglements with digital media technologies.

Analyzing Feminine Subjectivity in Male Jingoistic Society: A Critical Study of Naheed's A Bad Woman's Story

The present study tends to explore the feminine subjectivity as a heart-throbbing phenomenon for men that keeps on prevailing in a patriarchal society. This is an exploration into the life of Pakistan's renowned writer, poet and human activist, Kishwar Naheed. Her autobiographical writing Buri Aurat ki Katha (A Bad Woman's Story) probes into the life of a female character who is being restrained by society due to her achievements and fame but gender discrimination prevailing in society compelled her to consider herself a stigma. Naheed is taken as a representative character to project the reality of a patriarchal society that denies feminine subjectivity in society. It covers gynophobia over men's mind towards women powerful and independent existence in society. This study contextualizes within the border of feminism theory that covers threat to female identity by throwing light to the perspective taken by Kristeva's views on feminism, majorly focusing on male jingoistic society. The present inquiry spotlights the ways in which women suffer through threatened, identity crisis, abuse, and oppression that further leads woman's journey of life restrained under social commands.

Beyond a Single World: Pedagogy and Relating in Difference

The central notion of my analysis is that the relational values that are privileged by the feminine, if properly addressed in school, could foster a more inclusive and embodied way of addressing the fundamentally masculine origin of knowledge, curriculum planning as well as daily school rituals and cultures. For this reason I evoke the horizon of sense as captured by Irigaray in her two-ness of the world to designate a positive place for feminine subjectivity in the relational economy of the you and I, her and him. The economy of the placenta is evoked as a new form of connectedness enfolding a new kind of communication in a pedagogical interaction - where multiplicities and differences are privileged over sameness. ‘Touch’ is given primacy in the formation of a dialogue that does not appropriate but instead evokes the sharing of a desire in the two-ness of the world.

I think I’m happy, she thought, but am I real?

I am interested in the possibilities of redressing the absence of feminine subjectivity in the discourses surrounding Iris Murdoch’s philosophical and fictional writing. @cartography_for_girls is an Instagram account set up to share some of the expressions of feminine subjectivity sourced from within Murdoch’s 26 novels, originally published between 1954 and 1995. Murdoch’s incorporation of her particular metaphysical thinking into the reflections, deliberations and doubts of her fictional women characters made me wonder how these philosophically loaded impressions might fare on the affect- and information-driven social networking platform Instagram. ‘I think I’m happy, she thought, but am I real?’, for example, is an interior thought that resonates in ways more than metaphysical against the backdrop of Web 2.0, and is one of 100 posts shared daily from 21 October 2017 to 23 January 2018.

The Potential of Travel as Nomadic Practice. The Situated and Embodied Female Subject in Ulla Bjerne’s Novel to dare being...

This article focuses on the novel att våga vara… [to dare being…] (1948) based on the life of the explorer Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), by the Swedish author Ulla Bjerne (1890–1969). Annotations in her diary as well as Eberhardt’s diary and biography, are in addition taken into account, read as examples of female situated embodiment and part of a feminist nomadic practice, as elaborated by Rosi Bradidotti, in Bjerne’s aim to give representation to a new type of woman. It entails resistance to hegemonic, fixed and exclusionary views on feminine subjectivity, the affirmation of movement and the process of becoming, and the construction of new conceptions and images of women. The central hypothesis in the article is that travelling in att våga vara… has a potential to nomadize the female subject both literally and figuratively, in the quest to give representation to a situated, embodied female subjectivity, in both body and word.

Flight from the Womb

Although chick lit, epitomized by novels such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, has been analyzed by feminist critics as an example of postfeminist culture, the transnational spread of the genre has resulted in transformations that invite fresh consideration. In the Indian context, chick lit emerged in the aftermath of economic liberalization, contributing to the configuration of a new feminine subjectivity—“the single woman in the city.” This article argues that the discourse of singleness in Indian chick lit is deployed not so much to solve the problem of singleness through marriage but to resolve the tension between the demands of “Indian tradition” on middle-class young women and their desire for a selfhood inflected by neoliberal discourses of autonomy. This dichotomy is symbolized in the novels in the tension between mothers and daughters and plays out primarily across the domains of choice of spouse, food, and dress. While tradition and modernity are conceptualized as binaries, the single women in these novels seem to be wrestling with a way of articulating a selfhood without having to pick a side. In their refusal to conform to ideas of Indian selfhood wherein individualism is circumscribed by autonomy, the “single woman” presents, if not ideally represents, the idea of synthesis.