Femine Body in the Mass Culture of Iran: between Nudity and Marginalization

The author analyses the problems of visualisation and marginalisation of female corporeality in developments of Iranian political and cultural identity from the early modernisation project of the 19th century and the radical modernisation of the 1920s – 1970s to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which changed significantly the vectors and trajectories of the visualisation of the female body in public spaces and the discourse of Iranian culture. The author believes that Iran / Persia in the 19th century belonged to the number of Muslim countries that were under stable European influences. Russia and Great Britain became the main sources of cultural changes. Cultural exchange with these countries stimulated changes in Persian identity. The author analyses the features of corporeality in the visual art of Iran from the Qajars to the Islamic revolution and its mutations during the process of radical Islamisation of the social life inspired by it. The author believes that the early modern project of the Qajars was the first attempt to visualise female corporeality and map in the centre of cultural coordinates which in fact simulated European discourse. The identity project of the Pahlavi period became an attempt to transform and adopt Western concepts to the Iranian national canon. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 marginalised the visual and visible forms of female corporeality, presented earlier in public and cultural spaces. The project of Islamisation inspired subordination of the female body, marginalising attempts to visualise in ways Western intellectuals did it. Modern feminine corporeality in Iranian culture develops as a dichotomy of official religious identity and its secular alternative, represented by the “high” cultural segments of the consumer society. The author analyses how and why Western strategies of visualisation of female corporeality coexist with its religious rejection. It is assumed that the Iranian mass culture assimilated Western practices of visualising femininity, although the official cultural discourse continues to reproduce the canon of the body imagined as predominantly religious construct.

Female Corporeality and the Sublimation of Pain: A Study of The Pakistani Bride by Bapsi Sidhwa

This study explores in detail the crisis of female corporeality and how the self sublimates the resultant pain into psychological empowerment. Pakistani women have long been viewed as having no space for themselves. They could not master their choices or muster up courage to fight for the fulfillment of their desires. Similarly, the female characters in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel The Pakistani Bride (1990) appear to be oppressed and marginalized entities, dependent on men for their socio-economic needs. Yet, this research argues that their corporeal pain transforms into a psycho-emotional haven providing them a space of their own to think and make their own decisions. This specific strand has been a neglected area of research in the Sub-continental context. The research design used in this study is qualitative while the textual analysis is used as a method to analyze the data. The research pursues feminist literary standpoint theory posited by bell hooks (2004) in the postcolonial feminist context, while the Foucauldian (1979) concept of “Panopticism” (p. 195) and “Docile Body” (p. 135) are threaded to highlight the concept of complete physical and mental surveillance of the autonomous body/person in order to investigate the shift of gender/power roles from male hegemony to female empowerment.

THE QUESTION OF FEMALE BODY IN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY IN THE LATE 20TH CENTURY

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of female body in the foreign theory of architecture in the 1980‑s–90‑s. The works of D. Agrest, E. Grosz, D. Bloomer and D. Fausch are examined in the present paper. There are two perspectives on the problem of female corporeality: poststructuralist and phenomenological. Jennifer Bloomer and Diane Agrest adopt a poststructuralist critical strategy in which the notion of the feminine is considered as the “Other” of the logocentric architectural discourse. Elisabeth Gross notes that women have always been displaced from the realm of architecture. This is indicated not only by the absence of female architects, but also by the fact that the inherent attributes of female corporeality have been completely disregarded. Diane Agrest suggests that these attributes were appropriated by male architects. The phenomenological perspective on the female corporeality is reflected in Deborah Fausch's concept of “feminist architecture”. “Feminist architecture” brings back the value of concrete, sensual bodily experience in the perception of architecture. The subject's perceptual experience through the body allows the semantic dimension to unfold in the building.

“Motherhood Is Beautiful”: Maternalism in the West German New Women's Movement between Eroticization and Ecological Protest

This article traces changing conceptions of maternalism in the West German New Women's Movement from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. I argue that there were two moments in which the concept of motherhood was heatedly discussed and transformed. First, from the mid-1970s onward and within the broader cultural currents of “New Inwardness” (Neue Innerlichkeit) and “New Sensuality” (Neue Sinnlichkeit)—both of which permeated the New Left—motherhood became sensualized, eroticized, and sexualized. Second, these trends were intensified and at the same time drawn into new directions after the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe. For while the focus on female corporeality was consolidated, a growing ecofeminist strand successfully reimagined motherhood as tightly bound to nature and life itself. Serving also as a means to deal with the Nazi past, this late 1980s conception of motherhood was marked by a more pessimistic, even apocalyptic outlook.

This Land Was Made for … : (Re)Appearing Black/Brown Female Corporeality, Life, and Death

Lands and bodies are often conceptualized as exhaustible objects and property within settler-colonial and neoliberal ideologies. These conceptualizations lead to underdevelopment of understandings of lands and bodies that fall outside of these ascriptions, and also attempt to actively obscure the pervasive ways in which settler colonialism violently reinscribes itself on the North American landscape through the murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women's bodies. In this article, I will argue that the continual murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women in North America facilitate the successful functioning of ongoing settler-colonial systems and projects. This violence creates and reinforces the functionality of Black/Brown bodies as the territory upon which settler identity and futurity gains traction, indeed, requires.

Ecofeminist discourse and fluid lyrical sexualities

The traditional reading of Julia de Burgos’s (1914–1953) poem “Río Grande de Loíza” positions the river as a male lover. An ecofeminist reading yields a very different reading and raises other questions about the gendered and sexual message circulating within the poem. In my reading, the river becomes a fluid, lyrical mirror reflecting the poet’s quest for transnational and transsexual freedom unbound by female corporeality. Burgos invokes the river as a non-human Other interlocutor in order to deconstruct both the geographic and political boundaries imposed by US colonial hegemony and the sexual ones foisted by patriarchal-oriented Puerto Rican nationalists who viewed sexuality as heteronormative. By the 1930s, landscapes had been appropriated as symbols of the fatherland and a distinct Puerto Rican identity. Burgos’s language establishes instead a fluvial proto-feminist discourse of empowerment by imagining multiple sites of corporeal pleasure that transcend national barriers and offers alternative poetic fluid sexualities.