Female Authenticity in the Holy Woman by Qaisra Shahraz

The purpose of this study is to discover a new identity for women. This study aims to examine a specific text permeated by a consciousness of the general cultural suppression and exploitation in societies and cultures where patriarchy subordinates' women prescribing images and roles for them and the consequent resistance and regeneration on the part of women. The researcher selected Qaisra Shahraz's The Holy Woman, which shows the subjugation of women in twenty-first-century Pakistan. This qualitative study makes an analysis of the female protagonist in the light of existentialism's concept of authenticity and records how she resists, fights, and challenges exploitation and social prescription of her identity with the result that she re-emerges spiritually and establishes her existential rights as a free and independent human being. As exemplified through this text, the resistance and mobilization against these dominant patriarchal ideologies endow the female protagonist with regeneration and spiritual uplift. Through the discussion of the exploited but spiritually heightened character, the study concludes with a new image and identity for women, exploring possibilities to break away from social prescription.

Indigenous Studies: Australia

Contemporary Indigenous Australian literature draws on tens of thousands of years of sustained cultural continuity and diversity, while bearing witness to the destructive impacts of colonization and assimilation, and imagining new horizons of restoration, healing, and sovereign expression. The late 18th-century arrival of the English language amid complex Indigenous societies presented Indigenous peoples with a set of unfamiliar literary, linguistic, and rhetorical conditions and forms, the sudden appearance of Western literary modernity forever changing Indigenous modes of expression. This “intercultural entanglement” of Indigenous Australian literature is central to an appreciation of its achievements, from its earliest appearances in letters, petitions, and chronicles aimed at negotiating with or at times subversively mimicking modes of colonial authority, to its growing confidence and autonomy in the 20th century as Indigenous Australians fought back again colonization, asserted civil and land rights, and began the long process of cultural restoration and healing, through to the sovereign expressions of Aboriginal consciousness today. Across various modern literary genres, from mythological narratives to political manifestos, in poetry, plays, short stories, and novels, Indigenous Australian authors have borne witness to tragic and humiliating histories of violence, incarceration, and cultural suppression and fragmentation, but have also assertively developed new and at times revolutionary reimaginings of Western literary modes and styles. Realist testimonial narratives and lyrics in prose and poetry are today complemented by assured works of the imagination in which genre and mode are transformed in the recovery of blood memory, country, and language. The literature of Indigenous Australia continues to make a profound contribution to the literature of the world.

Coda

This brief coda takes up the value of sympathy in the context of resistance. Inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft's agitated reaction to Blackstone, the coda rereads agitation as a trigger for sympathetic review in light of a recent Texas case in which an agitated defendant undermined the court's “decorum.” Wollstonecraft was quieted by an early death and the cultural suppression of her work; the Texas defendant discussed in this coda was silenced by the administration of seizure-inducing electric shocks amounting to torture. Both Wollstonecraft and the Texas defendant, the hapless Terry Lee Morris, offered threats to form, to the formal trappings of justice, to its harmonic balance, or to what is termed “decorum” in the Texas case. Thus, their agitation can be reinterpreted in light of recent work on “excessive subjectivity.” Read at a slant, decorum seems just another name for harmonic justice, agitation another word for resistance.

Myths of Sexual Economics Theory

The authors of sexual economics theory (Baumeister & Twenge, 2002; Baumeister & Vohs, 2004) argue that sex is a female commodity that women exchange for men’s resources; therefore, women (not men) are responsible for the cultural suppression of sexuality, ostensibly to preserve the value of sex. In this article, I describe the central tenets of sexual economics theory and summarize a growing body of research contradicting them. I also explain the negative implications of the claims of sexual economics theory for gender equality and heterosexual relationships. Researchers, clinicians, and educators engaged in understanding human sexuality may use the arguments provided in this article to counteract gender myths. This article also serves as a case study of how feminist scholars can employ empirical evidence to weaken a popularized, patriarchal theory.

Imvuselelo: Embers of liberation in South Africa post-1994

The unprecedented cultural consciousness after decades of black cultural suppression in the South African public life since the 1990s summons us to the need to harness African ecclesiopolitical symbols in public life. This task is executed at a time when the notions of inter alia, spirituality and Imvuselelo are at the heart of the combustion chambers of our public and political life. Imvuselelo is a thermometer of decolonialist rebellion – the militant spirituality linked with Tiyo Soga – and is a self-combustion escape route in instances of black African epistemicide and violence. The heuristic device of iziko (fireplace) is employed to illuminate and locate the reestablishment and anamnestic praxis of protological life-giving foundations of spirituality in the African universe in our interpretation of Imvuselelo. The notion of imvuselelo is illuminated through iziko to debunk the incompatibilities, disharmonies, incongruences and conflagrations of virtual spirituality in its capture and domestication of the resources of the downtrodden.

Shame transfigured: Slut-shaming from Rome to cyberspace

Slut-shaming, the public exposure and shaming of individuals for their (perceived or actual) sexual behavior, is rife on the Internet; it primarily affects women, and it too often has tragic outcomes. Slut-shaming is not new, but a form of cultural suppression of female sexuality that has been practiced since antiquity. In this paper, I historicize this phenomenon, by comparing and contrasting cases of slut-shaming from the Roman Republic with recent cases on the Internet, and I maintain that the focus of this slut-shaming, namely sexual virtue, has remained the same over time, but that the unregulated nature of the Internet has increased its scope and impact. A central contention of this paper is that women have been complicit in this slut-shaming; they have shamed other women for their sexual behavior, and have done so because it conferred social benefits on them. We will see that men and women have used the Internet to perpetuate and maintain the cultural suppression of female sexuality, and expose women to increased scrutiny over their sexual behavior.

Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions

A heterosexual community can be analyzed as a marketplace in which men seek to acquire sex from women by offering other resources in exchange. Societies will therefore define gender roles as if women are sellers and men buyers of sex. Societies will endow female sexuality, but not male sexuality, with value (as in virginity, fidelity, chastity). The sexual activities of different couples are loosely interrelated by a marketplace, instead of being fully separate or private, and each couple's decisions may be influenced by market conditions. Economic principles suggest that the price of sex will depend on supply and demand, competition among sellers, variations in product, collusion among sellers, and other factors. Research findings show gender asymmetries (reflecting the complementary economic roles) in prostitution, courtship, infidelity and divorce, female competition, the sexual revolution and changing norms, unequal status between partners, cultural suppression of female sexulity, abusive relationships, rape, and sexual attitudes.

Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality

Four theories about cultural suppression of female sexuality are evaluated. Data are reviewed on cross-cultural differences in power and sex ratios, reactions to the sexual revolution, direct restraining influences on adolescent and adult female sexuality, double standard patterns of sexual morality, female genital surgery, legal and religious restrictions on sex, prostitution and pornography, and sexual deception. The view that men suppress female sexuality received hardly any support and is flatly contradicted by some findings. Instead, the evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle each other's sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage.

Culture of fear and silence

This selection of examples of cultural suppression was compiled from various sources.