Mujer que sabe viajar: autorrepresentación y subjetividad femenina en Cartas a Ricardo, de Rosario Castellanos

This paper reflects on the relationship between the female traveling experience and the epistolary genre through a reading of Rosario Castellanos’s Cartas a Ricardo as travel literature. The aim is to analyse the hybrid nature of the letter as a genre that allows the exploration of ideas and confessing or revealing affects during particular processes of constructing female subjectivities. Different than conventional travel chronicles, it is argued that the travel accounts transmitted through the female epistolary genre can throw light on physical and emotional displacement, but also on the intellectual and creative work of women in (self)censored or repressed environments. It is concluded that for Castellanos both traveling and writing are conscious acts of intellectual and gender freedom.

“Cherchez la fiction”: Stories of Self-Realization in Anne Garréta’s Pas un jour and Leïla Slimani’s Sexe et mensonges

Faced with the hermetic interiority of post-structuralist narratives, twenty-first-century French literature tends to turn outwards and explore sociohistorical realities as a fertile source of fiction. In this article, I compare two contemporary writers rarely paired together—Anne Garréta and Leïla Slimani—to consider the enduring importance of discursive paradigms in realizing a sense of self. Although Garréta’s mechanised autobiographical aesthetic in Pas un Jour seems to jar with Slimani’s ethnographic journalism in Sexe et mensonges, I argue that both use heuristic narratives to conduct a survey of female desire whose reality is only legible in literature. Intersecting with narrative theories formulated by Barthes, Jameson and Cixous, this article argues that Slimani and Garréta perform their lived sexual experience through a carefully manufactured textual machine that grants them freedom. Only through the straitjacket of a fictional system can the reader glean the reality of female subjectivities so long obscured by myth.

Informal Adult Learning: Advertisements in Women’s Magazines in Turkey

This study examines the visual and verbal content of advertisements in women’s magazines published between 1980 and 1990 in Turkey. Based on content analysis, we established the categories of products and services, age, body parts, women’s roles, clothes, and locations. We determined the five most frequent words employed in all grammatical or lexical forms: beautiful (güzel), to live (yaşamak), new (yeni), skin (cilt), and young (genç). By examining the data through informal learning, the study looks at how consumer-oriented values were taught informally to women readers during a period when Turkey underwent integration with the neoliberal global economy. We argue that the advertisements in women’s magazines were effective both in terms of disseminating the dominant values of the era and in causing women to informally internalize the consumer-oriented values required for the development of the desired female subjectivities of an emerging neoliberal society.

Mutating Goddesses

It is an enduring contradiction that Hindus revere their goddesses but their society is dominated by Brahmanical patriarchy. Although we assume that the worship of goddesses implies the celebration of so-called female power, we overlook how the development of such practices of devotion occurred within a highly patriarchal society that subjugated women in everyday life. Addressing this oversight, Mutating Goddesses traces the shifting fortunes of four goddesses—Manasā, Caṇḍī, Ṣaṣṭhī, and Lakṣmī—and their mutation within the goddess-invested tradition of Bengal’s Hinduism. It uses the vibrant laukika archive comprising religious practices and beliefs that, unlike the ṣāstrik perspective, have not been affected by the emergence and consolidation of the male Brahman and the Sanskrit language. Using narratives such as kathās, laukika bratakathās, and maṅgalkābyas, Sengupta explores the period between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries and investigates the correlation of gender, caste, and class in the sanctioning of female subjectivities through goddess formation. Thus, she excavates the multiple and layered heritage of Bengal to illustrate how tradition is a result of strategic selection by those in power.

Female Sexuality, Desire and Writing as Reflected in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy

This study attempts to explore the heterogeneity of desires and sexualities as reflected in Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry. I show (a) how she simultaneously depicts both lesbian and heterosexual desires and (b) also addresses their problematic aspects. I argue that (c) female subjectivities are constructed both through wives’ monologues about their male partners as in heterosexual marriages and through men’s reflection upon women in male-voiced monologues as well. But I also (d) examine poems where the expression of desire in language and—not the sexed subjects—is her principal aim. Yet in the light of my previous exposition on female subjectivities, I refuse to reduce her various sexual positions to mere linguistic constructs. Finally I demonstrate (e) how her equal employment of ‘soft’ and ‘tough’ words veers from any systematic development of a pure ‘common’ female language.

Through the Gaps of My Fingers: Genre, Femininity, and Cringe Aesthetics in Dramedy Television

Concentrating on the series “Girls” (2012–2017), “Fleabag” (2016), and “Insecure” (2016–), this article examines the female-centered dramedy as a current genre of U.S.-American television culture with specific investments in gendered value hierarchies. The article explores the format’s dominant narrative and aesthetic practices with specific focus on prestige dramedy’s “cringe” aesthetics. Cringe is increasingly mobilized as a mode of political expression following the format’s privileging of female subjectivities. As such, cringe is tasked with negotiating the tensions between drama and comedy on one hand and intersectional relations of identity politics on the other. Character “complexity,” embedded in ideological themes around identity, modifies the “comedy” in cringe and becomes associated with the more prestigious dramatic mode, this way governing the texts’ appeal to cultural value. The article demonstrates the ways the female-centered cringe dramedy expresses its politicization and “complexity” via disturbing gendered expectations of mediated femininity, and specifically body and sexuality politics.

Female Agency and Documentary Strategies

This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and the Documentary Image, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in fron of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender. Female Agency and Documentary Strategies focuses on how self-portraiture and contemporary documentary manifestations such as blogging and the prevalent usage of social media shape and inform female subjectivities and claims to truth. The book examines the scope of authorship and agency open to women using these technologies as a form of activism, centring on notions of relationality, selfhood and subjectivity.