Female Authority Figures in Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend

Little girls and young women are Dorothea Tanning’s recurrent archetypes, defining and structuring her conceptual archive concerning gender and the feminine. A celebrated painter and sculptor who shaped her artistic vision in the proximity of the historical avant-gardes, Tanning was also a writer who revealed the mystery and estrangement of family ties in Chasm: A weekend, a novel she started writing in 1943 and published six decades later, in 2004. This singular book offers a privileged dialogue between literature and art, as several episodes revisit and translate the high tension of some of her most representative paintings. From within a feminist framework, the article will discuss aspects of female authority and control in Tanning’s novel as dominant forms of female empowerment, present throughout her visual Surrealist oeuvre. I argue that examining these allegories reveals their role as connectors between the literary and the visual arts, between Dorothea Tanning’s fiction and her painting.

Eudocia’s Homeric Cento and the Woman Anointing Jesus

This chapter moves forward in time to look at the way precedents of women’s leadership could be used later, here in the work of the estranged wife of the emperor Theodosius II, Eudocia. In ‘Eudocia’s Homeric Cento and the Woman Anointing Jesus—An Example of Female Authority’, the author identifies how the woman of Bethany in the Gospel of Mark is praised in words taken from Achilles, a most prominent figure of manly honour in the Iliad. However, the honour for which she is praised remains within the boundaries of a proper, submissive woman. This duality corresponds to how Eudocia portrays herself in her preface to the Homeric Cento. On the one hand, she improved upon Patricius’ poem, presenting a better poem in style as well as content. She demonstrated her superiority. Her superiority was, however, coupled with restrictions implied in her being a woman. It seems, therefore, that Eudocia has inscribed her own dual authority of both superior and woman into her interpretation of the woman of Bethany.

Women’s travel writing in the cyber-world – ecofeminist and difference feminist approaches in travel blogs

This paper intends to track the development of traditional feminist ideas through the analysis of three contemporary travel blogs. These traditional feminist concepts are to be seen in the construction of a collective female identity that enables transnational and transgenerational solidarity: by receiving and transmitting inspiration, shelter and encouragement among female travellers, the narrators in the blogs create a system of female authority. Within this system, female role models as well as maternal figures become points of reference that help to revalue female attributes. This concept shows allusions to the theory of difference feminism as it is presented in the «symbolic order of the mother» by Luisa Muraro. A similar approach of revaluating femininity happens through the orientation towards ‘Mother Nature’. By staging women’s ability to give birth, cultural ecofeminists like Susan Griffin intend to affirm a close bond between women and nature. This representation of an emphasised femininity becomes a central marker in the narratives of the blogs. While this agenda might be designed to counter gendered spaces and the traditional alienation of women within travel discourse, it is problematised by exclusionary and essentialist definitions of femininity that harden engendered binaries like masculinity/femininity or nature/culture.

Women’s travel writing in the cyberworld – ecofeminist and difference feminist approaches in travel blogs

This paper intends to track the development of traditional feminist ideas through the analysis of three contemporary travel blogs. These traditional feminist concepts are to be seen in the construction of a collective female identity that enables transnational and transgenerational solidarity: by receiving and transmitting inspiration, shelter and encouragement among female travellers, the narrators in the blogs create a system of female authority. Within this system, female role models as well as maternal figures become points of reference that help to revalue female attributes. This concept shows allusions to the theory of difference feminism as it is presented in the «symbolic order of the mother» by Luisa Muraro. A similar approach of revaluating femininity happens through the orientation towards ‘Mother Nature’. By staging women’s ability to give birth, cultural ecofeminists like Susan Griffin intend to affirm a close bond between women and nature. This representation of an emphasised femininity becomes a central marker in the narratives of the blogs. While this agenda might be designed to counter gendered spaces and the traditional alienation of women within travel discourse, it is problematised by exclusionary and essentialist definitions of femininity that harden engendered binaries like masculinity/femininity or nature/culture.

Catherine of Siena

Chapter 4 examines theories of stigmatology that emerged during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The works of the Franciscan Bartolomeo of Pisa (d. 1401) and the Dominican Tommaso Caffarini (d. 1434) established categories of stigmatization that provide insight into the devotional, theological, philosophical, and cultural implications of the phenomenon and the place it held in late medieval religious life. In several theological and devotional circles stigmatization could be a diverse experience, far from being a unique miracle related to Francis of Assisi alone. Catherine of Siena emerges as the most charismatic stigmatic of the fourteenth century, whose invisible wounds became the insignia for Dominican reform and female authority. The fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were crucial moments in the history of stigmatology when a diversity of stigmatic realities was robustly defended and promoted.