Discourse analysis of conception of masculinity among Chinese male sexual abuse survivors

This study aims to explore the conception of masculinity in organizing the help-seeking behavior of Chinese males in Hong Kong. Twelve informants, who had experienced being abused in various relationships, participated in the in-depth interviews. Discourse analysis drawn from the analytical process per James Paul Gee is applied to examine the data. Six discourse positions are highlighted, including placating masculinity, counter-masculinity, fragmented identity, masculinity through sex, identity through gender, and finally, non-normative sexual identity. The complicity of the concept of masculinity in Chinese culture and implications for social workers are further discussed.

"Smuggling in Accidental Poetry": Cognitive and Stylistic Strategies of a Stammering Teen in David Mitchell's Black Swan Green

In this article, Constance Robert-Murail will explore the poetic »accidents« at work in two extracts of Black Swan Green (2006) by David Mitchell. The novel tells the trials and musings of Jason Taylor, a thoughtful 13-year-old growing up in a backwater town full of strange neighbours and middle-school bullies. Throughout the year 1982, the reader witnesses Jason mediating between the various personae of his fragmented identity: Unborn Twin, his faint-hearted alter ego; Eliot Bolivar, the nom-de-plume he uses to write poems for the local parish newspaper; and, most importantly, Hangman, a malignant personification of his stammer. According to Garan Holcombe, David Mitchell's own experience of stammering has provided the novelist with a particular »sensitivity toward the formal necessity of coherence and structure« (Holcombe, 2013). The extract I have decided to focus on dramatises the onset of Jason's speech impediment and acts as a »high emotional intensity passage« (Toolan, 2012) within the structure of the coming-of-age narrative. A close stylistic reading of this particular text highlights the juxtaposition of Jason's pathological speechlessness and his bustling, bubbling inner monologue. This opposition elicits a physical reaction within the reader, caught between frustration and delectation. I would argue that the multimodal nature of the extract generates what Pierre-Louis Patoine has called a »somesthetic« effect on the reader (Patoine, 2016). Stuttering, according to Professor Mark Onslow, is »an idiosyncratic disorder.« (Onslow, 2017). Word avoidance has led Jason to create his own grammar and lexicon: his youthful voice and palliative strategies allow Mitchell to smuggle in moments of »accidental« poetry. The cognitive exploration of Jason's stammer stands both at the core of the reader's response and at the centre of Mitchell's powerful poetics-and it is, last but not least, devastatingly funny.

Identity as a construct: reading blackness in Eugene O’neill’s the emperor jones.

This paper aims to explore how racialized identities are typified as a modernist construct in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920). To this end, the notion of whiteness is identified as a mediated construct and contextualized in the proliferation of American minstrel shows. This popular entertainment projected to white audiences the racial means of differentiation from black caricatures and clichés at the time of segregation. The echoes of minstrel shows and modernists’ instrumentalization of 1920s primitivism serve to initially address the characterization of blackness in Brutus Jones’ identity. Assessed through this in-between construction of symbolic borderlands in which the protagonist is both colonizer and colonized, his blackness becomes a metaphorical mask of otherness while his whiteness shapes the colonial performance of material whiteness. Although he envisions the white ideal in his systematic practices in the Caribbean island, his fragmented identity and his hybridity subject him to a primeval racialized past, to primitivism and atavism.

Through Madness and Back Again

This article traces my struggles with psychosis, arrest, psychiatric institutionalization, and recovery. Mobilizing a cathartic approach to autoethnography, I reveal my resistances, resiliencies, oppressions, nightmares, and recovery processes in the mental health system as I became entangled in another, darker reality and tried desperately to escape it. This work is a contribution to the emerging field of Mad Studies that seeks to privilege lived experiences with madness and the mental health system as a way of knowing. I found that doing an autoethnography of the mind helps recover the pieces of a fragmented identity and heals some of the visceral horrors that haunts us through and beyond experiences with mental illness.

I Don’t Know how to Talk about These Wor(l)ds, but I Do Walk, I Shoot, and I Write: Autoethnographic Written and Visual Cures for a Fragmented Identity

In this article, I examine how my unprogrammatized and spontaneous informal fieldwork in Athens, undertaken in a rather unconsciously autoethnographic vein, has helped me while on the process of investigating my personal identity. My temporary change of academic direction and my delving into the ocean of fieldwork have shaped and answered my endless quest for important answers about a researcher’s own self. Through the use of written text, photography and other visual indexes, “thin” and “thick” description, I argue that autoethnography as a method could be a healing process, providing therapy for a researcher’s “fragmented” heart and identity.

The Split Identity in Brain Friel’s Play PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! )

Colonized people suffer due to cultural struggle and identity loss. Brian Friel (1929–2015) dealt with the consequences of British colonisation of Ireland. This paper explores the fragmented identity in Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come!. It depicts the contradicting feelings of a young man who decides to leave his country. Still, he is unable to overcome his emotional loyalty to his past. Friel divides the protagonist into two characters played by two actors on the stage. The memories in the play form an integral part of identity being live images that satisfy inner needs. The characters’ inner conflicts and personal dilemma reflect general social problems.

Mothers and Daughters in Conflict in the Motherland, Edna O'Brien's The Light of Evening

The Light of Evening explores the difficult relationship between two Irish mothers and their daughters: Dilly Macready and Eleanora, a writer whose life shares many common features with that of Edna O’Brien’s, on the one hand, and young Dilly’s previous relationship with her own mother, Bridget, on the other hand. Both relationships are depicted through a succession of daily letters, usually not sent. These conflictive bonds resemble those of Irish people with their motherland throughout the twentieth century.This tension emerges, in all cases, when expected roles assigned to women by a patriarchal culture clash with the desire of emancipation and selfdevelopment. The purpose of this article is to explore mother-daughter representations in O’Brien’s novel in order to analyse the author’s own conflictive relationship with Ireland in her early development as a creative writer. Immigration, tradition, memory and fragmented identity, all constituitive elements of Irish history, are present in this paper.Keywords: Mothers; conflict; exile; tradition; motherland.