Walking, Haunting, and Affirmative Aesthetics: The Case of Women without Men

The digital sphere overflows with platforms that gather women’s testimonies of being harassed, not feeling welcome, or not being accommodated in the urban spaces. The street is a gendered space. However, literature, films, and digital media have repeatedly denounced, challenged, and counteracted the unbalanced relations of power and how they affect people of different genders, sexualities, ages or ‘races’. Through the analysis of Shirin Neshat's film Women without Men (2009), I explore several forms of what I call 'affirmative aesthetics', the aesthetic and narrative reconfiguration of spatial and power relations. Haunting as a filmic form in particular serves as a way to create a space for oneself, to make visible what patriarchal narratives made invisible.

Walking, Haunting, and Affirmative Aesthetics: The Case of Women without Men

The digital sphere overflows with platforms that gather women’s testimonies of being harassed, not feeling welcome, or not being accommodated in the urban spaces. The street is a gendered space. However, literature, films, and digital media have repeatedly denounced, challenged, and counteracted the unbalanced relations of power and how they affect people of different genders, sexualities, ages or ‘races’. Through the analysis of Shirin Neshat's film Women without Men (2009), I explore several forms of what I call 'affirmative aesthetics', the aesthetic and narrative reconfiguration of spatial and power relations. Haunting as a filmic form in particular serves as a way to create a space for oneself, to make visible what patriarchal narratives made invisible.

Cultural and linguistic struggles and solidarities of Emirati learners in online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented shifts in higher education worldwide, with some nations more adversely affected than others. Since the onset of the crisis, almost all education abruptly moved to ‘emergency remote teaching and learning’. While the United Arab Emirates has been praised for its swift and effective responses, unique cultural and linguistic dynamics in this region present additional challenges for teaching and learning. This article presents empirical data from a qualitative phenomenological case study investigating female Emirati university students’ ( n = 69) perspectives on the use of video cameras and microphones in online classes. Students’ reflective writing and researcher observations in autumn 2020 revealed discomfort using video cameras and microphones due to a range of cultural and linguistic factors. Such factors include Islamic beliefs relating to modesty, home as a gendered space, noise considerations, concerns about privacy, struggles with language in their English-medium instruction university and fear of judgement from peers. Data are interpreted thematically using intersectionality together with Goffman’s theories of everyday interaction, stigma and relative deprivation, through which complexities of learner identities are explored. Practical suggestions are made on ways to adapt online learning to better suit the cultural and sociolinguistic realities of periphery and Global South contexts. It is argued that greater efforts need to be made toward inclusion of marginalized learners during the COVID-19 period.

An Analysis of Gendering of Space in Historical Hospitals of Anatolia

Medical ethics, clinical practices, as well as privacy considerations affected the gender-space relationship in spaces of healing. Researchers to date have been analysed the historical hospitals of Anatolia in terms of their architecture, planning, art history, history of medicine, and even in terms of their functional systems, but not yet regarding their gendered space segregation. There are also limited studies related to the gender, religion, and secularism in historical hospitals outside of Anatolia. Hence, in this paper, historical hospitals of Anatolia have been chosen as case studies and analysed from the point of gendered perspective including how privacy, religion, culture, and gender issues shaped their architecture and planning. In Ottoman Empire, it is known that among the palace elites, there was limited access of women patients to the male doctors, but documented evidence of female attendants being employed in Ottoman hospitals belongs to later periods. In Ottoman dynasty there were also female patrons constructed hospitals for women and for the general public, demonstrating the power and status of women in the Ottoman palace. In addition, based on travellers’ accounts, old drawings, gravures, and archival resources, it is understood that there were separate units for women in Anatolian historical hospital. Those units included the patients’ rooms, wards, latrines, and even courtyards. The research showed that in Anatolian hospitals as the spaces for physical healing and medical training, gendered-space segregation have been acknowledged, at least to some extent in some certain space arrangements.

Gendered Space

This chapter considers the meeting place of the Therapeutae, described in Philo of Alexandria’s De Vita Contemplativa, as represented by Eusebius of Caesarea. Since Eusebius read Philo’s treatise as indicating an early Christian community, he sees a church here, with gendered space, affirming this is Christian practice. The ministries of Christian women overall then need then to be considered within a gendered construct of space and movement. While the appropriate ‘place’ for women in the earliest congregations depends on how meeting spaces are configured (for meals, charity, teaching, healing, and prayer), the recent work of Edward Adams has contested the ubiquitous house-church model and allowed for more cognitive templates for how gendered space was constructed. The third-century ‘Megiddo church’ seems to suggest a divided dining hall for women and men, in line with gendered dining as a Hellenistic norm, with centralized ritual space.

GENDERED SPACE IN THE JAVANESE NOBLE HOUSE OF PANGERAN MERTADIREJA III

Javanese traditional house are built to reflect the microcosm and microcosm of the Javanese philosophy of living. For the Javanese, duality and balance are two important concepts, which is reflected spatially through the how their houses are organized: inside and outside, left and right, rest area and activity area, as well as masculine and feminine spaces. This research discusses the meaning of gendered space in the house nDalem Pangeranam Mertadireja III. Gendered space is the main focus of discussion because gendered activities both shape and are shaped by gendered spaces. Ndalem Pangeranan Mertadireja III is a traditional Javanese house built in 1901 by the 17th Banyumas Regent, Pangeran Adipati Aria Mertadireja III. The house is located in Banyumas, Central Java. The purpose of this study is to analyze how gender is reflected in space, and how gendered resistance can then be observed spatially. This research concludes that within the Mertadireja house, masculine spaces are open, clean, and located in the front and right side of the house. In contrary, feminine spaces are closed, dirty, and located in the back and left side of the house. However, resistance is reflected spatially when women make use of masculine spaces.

Introduction

This introductory chapter establishes foundations of the book: who formed the priesthood of art (Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Amalie Joachim, Joseph Joachim) and the birth of artistic priesthood from the art-religious spirit of German Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. In particular, this chapter introduces the notion that the artistic priesthood occupied a kind of alternative gendered space—neither fully masculine nor feminine—and that desirable characteristics of an artistic priest (devotion, humility, spiritial leadership) could be gendered in various ways in musical-critical discourse. After midcentury, changes in music aesthetics and gender roles created pressure to understand Romantic notions of musical priesthood as antiquated and outmoded. In short, Brahms offers a case study in the intersection of art-religious values with a gender dichotomy that became increasingly prescriptive over the second half of the nineteenth century.