An Ode to Black British Girls

This article delves into Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum, examining how the cultural text builds upon Black feminist media discourse, and intimately grapples with the nuances of Black women’s sexuality while explicitly challenging misogynoir. This work illustrates how Coel is helping develop a Black British cultural aesthetic that centers Black women’s liberation, specifically from an African immigrant perspective, by using satire, all the beauty, pain, and struggles that come with #blackgirlmagic, eccentric adornments, and ‘awkward’ ostentatious characters that at times play into racist images and tropes of Black womanhood to expose the absurdity of life in an anti-Black, sexist, and xenophobic society. In sum, this article understands Coel’s work in Chewing Gum to be Black girl surrealism – the intersection of Afro-surrealism, British dark comedy, and Black feminism.

'Controlled by' and 'Controlling with' Sex: Comparing Portrayal of 'Nooran' and 'Haseena Begum' - Two Female Characters of Khushwant Singh's Modern Classic: Train to Pakistan

Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956), a quintessential post-colonial novel and a lucid modern classic - is based on the societal conditions and upheavals of during and post-liberation Pak - Indo subcontinent in 1947. Having set the plot of his novel in a fictional Punjabi village 'Mano Majra' - located near to the India - Pakistan border, Singh attempted to analyze how human relationships change in a tormented - apocalyptic society. However, this paper aims at studying how in an overtly masculine society as portrayed in the novel, amidst the fright of religious persecution, sexualized violence, the fallaciousness of mob rule, and formation of new identities via displacement - two of the novel's main female characters - Nooran, who is sexually subjugated within the text, and Haseena Begum, who uses her bodily charm to meet her days ends, stand out differently due to the disparity in their social orientations, and life choices. To explore the posed query, this paper will use Virginia Woolf's ideas from -"Professions for Women" (1942) an article apparently archaic today, but the ideas posited in it were very much contemporary to the novel's setting, as well as Julia Kristeva's apparently contemporary ideas in - "Woman Can Never Be Defined" (1974), where these critics talked about women's sexuality, their professions, their privileged relationship with father/paternal figure of their family, and how all these lead them to abidance towards prejudiced masculine norms set by the society.

From hooking up to staying in? Women negotiating appropriate sexuality in nightlife with age

While much research has explored contemporary constructions of young women’s sexuality, few studies have been sensitive to how age influences women’s sexuality in the context of mainstream nightlife. Drawing on sexual scripting theory, I investigate how 19 Norwegian women (ages 27–34 years) draw on and negotiate cultural scripts when making sense of their nightlife experiences with age. I found that nightlife was an increasingly difficult space to occupy, and that participating could cause tension with the women’s understandings of themselves, their behaviours and their desires in nightlife. While age-related scripts allowed the participants to criticise gender inequality in sexual interaction in nightlife, they simultaneously obscured how gender inequality in nightlife persisted in new forms with age.

Crimes and Punishments of Imperial Women

Discussion of Domitia Longina, who survived allegations of adultery, Domitian’s divorce and (re)marriage, and his assassination, opens this chapter on imperial women and Roman law. Moving from Ulpian’s statement about legal rights and privileges of emperors and the Augusta, it covers norms and regulations for imperial women’s sexuality, particularly marriage and divorce, as well as crimes and punishments of imperial women, including the adultery cases and sentences of Julia the Elder in 2 BCE and Julia the Younger in 8 CE that Tacitus obliquely ties to treason. Reviewing finally imperial women’s fates at the deaths of their husband or other relative as emperor, the chapter concludes that inclusion in the imperial family brought women greater liability, but no immunity or impunity.

Girl Wonder: Nathalia Crane, Poetic Prodigy of the 1920s

Largely forgotten today, from approximately the late 1910s through the 1930s, at least a dozen young girls brought out numerous books in the US. But there was one girl who was particularly talented and successful: Nathalia Crane, who published her first collection of poetry when she was just eleven years old in 1924. This article analyzes both her work and her reception from her first success through the subsequent controversy over her authorship instigated by a local Brooklyn newspaper. In the process, the article demonstrates the complicated connections between perceptions of girlhood and women's sexuality as they relate to political agency in the early twentieth-century United States.

Tolkien and Rape

J. R. R. Tolkien’s representation of women in his fiction has generated a number of controversies since its original publication. This essay examines two major issues: an evasiveness in Tolkien’s treatment of sexual violence against women that is not disconnected from a gendered terror that underlies several moments in his works and functions to link women’s sexuality and desiring with death. Specifically, we read the author’s depiction of Shelob and her appetitive, arachnoid monstrosity as at once displacing sexual violence onto the monstrous feminine and evoking a revulsion at the aging female body. We next explore the consequences of the author’s depictions of women and his handling of sexual violence in close connection with his own 1939 public performance of Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, a comic narrative turning on two rapes that Tolkien nevertheless conceals in a comparable fashion to his elision of sexual violence in Middle-earth.

A Qualitative Exploration of Jezebel Stereotype Endorsement and Sexual Behaviors Among Black College Women

Researchers suggest that the Jezebel stereotype exerts a significant influence on Black women’s sexual decision making. The current qualitative study drew upon narrative data from individual, semistructured interviews with 50 Black women (ages 18-24 years) to explore how the Jezebel stereotype influenced their sexual beliefs and behaviors. Using consensual qualitative research methods, the following four themes emerged from the data: (a) how the Jezebel plays a role in their sexual exploration, (b) how the Jezebel contributes to sexual violence against Black women, (c) how the Jezebel is a hypersexual media representation of Black women’s sexuality, and (d) how the Jezebel is a negative sexual stereotype within family contexts. Our findings contextualize the enduring role of the Jezebel stereotype as a sexual script for Black women, as we found that many participants chose to adapt their clothing choices or sexual behaviors in light of their awareness and endorsement of the stereotype. The authors discuss the implications of study findings for Black women and girls’ sexual socialization and deconstructing deficit-based ideologies of Black women’s sexuality.