Headscarf and Veiling Glimpses from Sumer to Islam

This volume – which stems from an international conference held at the University of Graz on March 2, 2020, just before the outbreak or the COVID-19 pandemic – represents a small, but specifically targeted contribution to a field of research and discussion that has increasingly come to the fore in the last two decades, regarding the practice of covering or veiling womens’ heads or faces over different times and places. “Dress is never value free”, as anthropologists state, and veiling functions as an assertion/communication of relationship dynamics in terms of gender, social and cultural identity, phases and stages of life (puberty, marriage, death) or of religious beliefs – even reaching to a typical dichotomy of our times, the female condition between tradition and modernity.

Differential allocation in a gift-giving spider: males adjust their reproductive investment in response to female condition

Background When males are selective, they can either reject low-quality females or adjust their reproductive investment in response to traits that indicate female quality (e.g., body size or condition). According to the differential allocation hypothesis, males increase their reproductive investment when paired with high-quality females (positive differential allocation) or increase their reproductive investment when paired with low-quality females (negative differential allocation). This hypothesis has been proposed for monogamous species with biparental care, and most empirical studies focus on birds. Here we used the polygamous spider Paratrechalea ornata, in which males offer prey wrapped in silk as nuptial gifts, to test whether males adjust their reproductive investment in gift size, pre-copulatory and copulatory courtship, and sperm transfer in response to female body condition. Results Males exposed to females in good body condition added more flies to the gift, stimulated these females longer with abdominal touches during pre-copulatory courtship, and had longer pedipalp insertions than males exposed to females in poor body condition. Female condition affected neither silk investment in nuptial gift wrapping nor the quantity of sperm transferred by males. Finally, females in good body condition oviposited faster after copulation and laid more eggs than females in poor body condition. Conclusions We provide experimental evidence that males of a gift-giving spider exhibit positive differential allocation in three key aspects of their reproductive investment: the size of the nutritious gift, duration of pre-copulatory courtship, and duration of pedipalp insertions, which is regarded as a form of copulatory courtship in spiders. This positive differential allocation is likely associated with the benefits of copulating with females in good body condition. These females are more fecund and oviposit faster after copulation than females in poor body condition, which under natural field conditions probably reduces the risk of multiple matings and thus the level of sperm competition faced by the males. As a final remark, our findings indicate that the hypothesis of differential allocation also applies to species with a scramble competition mating system, in which males heavily invest in nuptial gift construction, but not in parental care.

Misoginia e exaltação da mulher em obras literárias clássicas da Coroa de Aragão

Resumo: O processo de valorização da condição feminina, que apresentava um progresso discreto, mas promissor na primeira metade do século XIII, retrocedeu nos séculos seguintes de modo não linear nem uniforme. Ao mesmo tempo que o chamado “amour courtois” se manifestava nos estratos superiores da sociedade e as mulheres, idealizadas, começavam a receber um tratamento menos brutal do que em outros tempos mais antigos, também se desenvolveu, a nível teórico e psicológico, uma mentalidade de desprezo e condenação da mulher. Duas obras literárias clássicas da Coroa de Aragão XV dão um exemplo muito claro dessa duplicidade contraditória. Em Lo Somni (1399), um capítulo é clara e agressivamente misógino, enquanto mulheres exemplares são celebradas e glorificadas em outro capítulo. Em Curial e Güelfa (c. 1448), o protagonismo feminino é notório, mas várias passagens são extremamente críticas em relação às mulheres, bordejando a misoginia. Palavras-chave: Condição feminina, misoginia, literatura catalã, Lo Somni, Curial e GüelfaAbstract: The process of valorization of the feminine condition, that presented a discreet and promising progress in the first half of the 13th century, regressed in the following centuries in a non-linear and uniform manner. At the same time that the so-called “amour courtois” developed in the upper strata of society and idealized women began to receive less brutal treatment than in earlier times, a mentality also developed, on a theoretical and psychological level, of contempt and condemnation of women. Two classic literary works of the Crown of Aragon give a very clear example of this contradictory duplicity. In “Lo Somni” (1399), one chapter is clearly and aggressively misogynistic, while exemplary women are celebrated and glorified in the other chapter. In “Curial e Gelfa” (c. 1448), the female role is notorious, but several passages are extremely critical of women, bordering on misogyny. Keywords: female condition, misogyny, catalan literature, The Dream, Curial and Guelfa

Situating Arab women’s writing in a feminist ‘global gothic’: madness, mothers and ghosts

This article sketches a new way of approaching some contemporary Levantine (Egyptian and Lebanese) feminist texts. Extending Glennis Byron’s notion of the ‘global gothic’, I examine Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) as examples of an Arab feminist Gothic approach, which serves as a framework to theorise difficult and pressing questions that feminism poses regarding women’s rights. Arab feminist Gothic writers use the jahiliyyah period, or the ‘time of ignorance’, as a folkloric referential backdrop for texts which theorise the female condition under contemporary patriarchal society. The presence of ghosts, madness, doubles in the form of the folkloric qarina spirit-doubles and dreams can be read as part of a local Gothic feminist mode. This as-yet unacknowledged Arab feminist Gothic tradition, while emerging from debates over statehood and postcolonial subjectivities, delves into the intensity of personal traumas through the lens of women’s relationships to other women, especially mothers and daughters. Taking Arab feminist fiction as its focus, this article models how feminist scholarship can use genre, particularly the Gothic, to trace artistic feminist theorising in non-western contexts.

La visión de la mujer y la feminidad en los artículos de María Luz Morales publicados en ‘La Vanguardia’ (1921-1936)

Desde que en 1921 la firma de María Luz Morales irrumpe en el diario La Vanguardia, del que llegará a ser di­rectora durante unos meses en 1936, aparece como una de las primeras mu­jeres que trabajan en la redacción de un periódico en España. En estos prime­ros años, publica en el diario barcelo­nés diferentes tipos de artículos. Entre ellos, y desde su mismo debut, desta­can algunos dedicados a la “condición femenina”, en los que se vislumbra un esfuerzo para que la mujer no se recluya en el entorno doméstico y acceda libre y habitualmente a la cultura, a la educa­ción, al mundo laboral y, con todo ello, a la libertad de expresión. Esta posición se complementa con otra que tiene que ver con la maternidad, para la que reclama una serie de valores que considera femeninos: la ternura, el amor y la imaginación. Morales reclama una infancia sin el rigor de la obediencia y la disciplina, armada más bien de creativi­dad y cultura. En conjunto, la periodista defiende en sus artículos una feminidad activa y culta, independiente, conserva­dora y con un fuerte activismo social que, sin embargo, rechazaba las etiquetas. La primera, ser considerada feminista. The Vision of Women and Femininity in María Luz Morales’ Articles Published in ‘La Vanguardia’ (1921-1936) When María Luz Morales’s byline ap­peared in 1921 in the newspaper La Vanguardia, of which she would be the editor for a few months in 1936, she be­came one of the first women to work in the newsroom of a newspaper in Spain. In those first years, she published diffe­rent types of articles in La Vanguardia. From the very first, some articles dealing with the “female condition” stand out. In these, there is a discernible appeal for women not to enclose themselves in the domestic environment and to have free and regular access to culture, to education, to the workplace and, con­sequently, to freedom of expression. This stance is complemented by another related to motherhood, for which she claims a series of values that she con­siders feminine: tenderness, love, and imagination. Morales appeals for a childhood without the rigor of obedience and discipline, built rather on creativity and culture. On the whole, the journalist defends in her articles a femininity which is active and cultured, independent, conservative and with a strong social activism that nevertheless rejects labels. The first: to be considered a feminist.

La recepción de Lucie Delarue-Mardrus en la Edad de Plata: tensiones en torno a autoría y feminidad

"The aim of this work is to reflect on the construction of the woman writer as a public figure based on the case of Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and her projection in Spain, placing her in the framework of the tensions that surround the female condition at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although her work is translated and reviewed, it is her public figure the element that focuses the attention of the critics, as confirmed by the various references by prominent chroniclers (Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Isabel Oyarzábal, María Luz Morales or Teresa de Escoriaza). This phenomenon allows us to see the key elements of the feminine authorial construction, as the incorporation of strategies of the emerging idea of celebrity and its use as an essential mechanism to deal with the difficulty of being a woman in the public sphere"

Women and leprosy: interferences and experiences*

Objective: to know the interferences of leprosy in women's lives and how they reinvent themselves in coping with the disease. Method: a descriptive study with a qualitative approach. The theoretical-methodological framework adopts an approximation to the cartographic method and some concepts of schizoanalysis, which were used to analyze the data. The tools used to produce the data were the interview and the logbook. The interviews were conducted from July to November 2019, at the participants' homes. Results: the group consisted of nine women. To display the data, we were inspired by Deleuze's ideas about difference and repetition. The results were organized in three thematic axes that address the lives of these women affected by leprosy, which accompany concerns, anxieties and worries about the effects of the disease. The transformations in the female body, the financial maintenance itself due to the comorbidities caused by leprosy and its difficulties in guaranteeing rights are elements strongly pointed out by women. Conclusion: there is overlap and interference of the female condition in a patriarchal society that still accompanies it. We bet on the strength of becoming-a-woman and the need to consider them in their singularities and in their context for producing care permeated by meetings of the affirmation of the power of life.

Christine de Pizan

In creating her own particular style and legitimizing her status as a literary woman, a reflection on the female condition emerges from her work. This chapter considers two key texts: Cité des dames and Epistre Othea. The author's aim in the latter may not initially seem to be the exploration of women's dignification, since we are dealing with a text in which a goddess, called Othéa, teaches the young Hector morality. The creation of a new female mythological figure, however, establishing a parallel with Plutarch, as well as the positive reappraisal of some mythological characters reveals that Epistre Othea implicitly proposes a reflection on female rehabilitation. The introduction into this corpus of Ovide moralisé and the 15th century translation of Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris, which served as a reference for Pizan, is therefore highly significant.