Fashion, Women and Power: The Politics of Dress

As never before, women are rightfully in positions of political power, and into the maelstrom of mass media challenges to their fashions and their right to govern. An examination of the fraught narratives surrounding the clothing of women in leadership in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India and Indonesia.

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the wedding rituals and dynasties in Russia. It describes and analyzes the themes explored by Russian polymath and “father of Russian science” Mikhail Lomonosov — ritual, dynasty, religion, royal women, and power (and several more) — as they were expressed in royal weddings from the end of the fifteenth century through the first half of the eighteenth century. The chapter then argues that court politics in Muscovy was marriage politics, and the marriage of the ruler was the critical moment in every generation of the dynasty. Each time the ruler married, the political elite around him reshuffled, with new royal in-laws joining the ranks of the innermost circle of courtiers in the Kremlin. It also notes that royal weddings, like other court rituals, were manipulated by wedding choreographers and sometimes by rulers themselves to project a dynastic message. Finally, and most fundamentally, the chapter rests on a close reading of texts, most notably the rich corpus of Muscovite royal wedding documents. The creation of these texts were genuine events in the political and cultural life of the court, reflecting changes in ruling dynasties, religious attitudes, and political agendas.

Exploring the Portrayal of Female Voice in ‘Heer Ranjha’: A Gender-Based Study

The present study aims at explicating the theme of love in the folk tale Heer Ranjha through the discourse stylistics perspective. To do this, Fairclough (2015) model is employed with a focus on lexical choices. The metaphors used in the dialogues portraying the theme of love have been carefully selected, and further the linguistic pattern employed has been significantly discussed to highlight the embedded theme of love as a dominant human emotion in folk tales. The study also aims at providing a richer, more complex and enlightened canvas of feminist theory highlighting the role of women and power relations between the two sexes. The data comprises on twenty passages from the translation of ‘Heer Ranjha’ by Usborne (1973) where the translator claims to have translated the epilogue at full length while the rest of the poem has been condensed without omitting anything significantly important to the theme. The study throws light on the language of the folk tale, which reflects socio-cultural features such as the patriarchic family structure of the time through the language choices. The flute, a bamboo musical instrument, is a metaphor of love in a dream-like romantic sound. Finally, this paper helps to develop a better understanding of folktales in a particular socio-cultural background.

Contextualizing gender in XII century Byzantine discourse: Women and power in Ioannes Zonaras’ epitome historiarum

The paper investigates Ioannes Zonaras? Epitome Historiarum, a Byzantine XII century world chronicle for normative conceptions of gender in Byzantium. The article explores two gender-appropriate women?s roles in Byzantine society. It focuses on the behaviors, activities, and attributes attached to and prescribed for the widows and mothers to reiterate the patriarchal social structures. Also, this research intends to uncover the interplay between text and language through crucial gender signifiers, which influenced the balance of social and political power in the Medieval Roman Empire.

The Meaning of Imagined Pilgrimage

There is growing interest among historians of late medieval and early modern Europe in the concept of resistance for understanding women and power. Researchers are beginning to look beyond religious women’s overt and well-documented forms of opposition to reform efforts that increasingly restricted their physical enclosure; they contend that these women also resisted through more subtle cultural means, such as the devotional practice of imagined pilgrimage. Yet recent studies — including one by this author — have argued unconvincingly that late medieval Dominican nuns in southwest Germany who took mental journeys to Jerusalem or Rome thereby resisted their enclosure. This article uses an approach created by the anthropologist Sherry Ortner to check and correct this resistance model. It shows that the interpretation of what imagined pilgrimage meant to and for these late medieval women is most likely an effect of scholars’ present biases, both intellectual and sociocultural.

Women and the Powers of Novel May by Sandi Firly of Michel Foucault Study

This research examines women and power using the theory of Michel Foucault. The object of study in this research is Novel May which contains a story about a dark incident that occurred in Banjarmasin City due to political unrest. The approach used is a historical and psychological approach that analyzes the history and psychology of society with a process of individual psychological analysis. The research method used in this research is descriptive analysis method with data analysis techniques, descriptive interpretive. The results of this study indicate that (1) May's life background is divided into three parts, namely: a) May's tortuous life struggle, b) May's tremendous mental stress due to the rioting, c) sexual harassment experienced by May. (2) May's character, namely: a) the subconscious, b) the unconscious, c) the conscious mind.

Women’s Diets and Standards of Beauty

Looking beyond gynaecological issues, how did standards of beauty affect dietary recommendations, what women ate, and how they presented themselves? Obesity, while viewed differently than it is today, was considered a factor in women’s fertility. It was also related the sin of gluttony and other sins which demonstrated a lack of self-mastery of bodily appetites. Examining conduct literature is one way to gain access to cultural expectations of the female body. Religious concerns about self-presentation could also manifest in what has been called “holy anorexia.” The anthropology of the body suggest that what women eat and how they look are deeply embedded social constructs which reveal culture attitudes towards gender difference, women, and power.