Resistance through Female Bonding in Tehmina Durrani's Blasphemy

The present research article analyses the suffering of women and their resistance against oppressive Islamic patriarchy through female bonding in Tehmina Durrani’s Blasphemy. In doing so, it offers the working definition of the term “feminism” as a tool of inquiry. It mainly focuses on the suffering of Heer, the protagonist of the novel, due to her loveless marriage with Pir Sain. It exposes the easy distortion of Islam by so-called hypocritical religious leaders like Pir Sain. The suffering of Heer and other female characters in the novel reveal the problems in the cultural and social setting of the Islamic culture and religion. Heer is repeatedly beaten, raped and humiliated by her abusive husband Pir. Pir forces her to live in the world that he has constructed for her. Her marriage with Pir utterly fails as it turns out to be a source of trouble and repression of her self-satisfaction. When she fails to tolerate severe torture and domestic violence, she decides to revolt against it. This paper concludes that Heer is able to resist sexual abuse and exploitation through female bonding. In doing so, she is able to assert her female selfhood.

An Intersection of Racism and Sexism in Toni Morrison’s Sula

This study analyzes female friendship in Sula and also focuses on the impact of race, class and gender on women’s relationships. The novel emphasizes how women face the challenges of patriarchal institutions and other attempts to subjugate through polygamy, constraints of tradition, caste prejudice and political instability. Thus, the chief aim of this study is to show how the black women are treated unfairly and suffer from male domination within their community also. The study portrays the healing powers of female bonding, which allows women to overcome prejudice and survival, to enjoy female empowerment, selfhood establishment and to extend female friendship into female solidarity that participates in nation building. However, another conclusion focuses on the patriarchy which constitutes a threat to female bonding and usually causes women’s estrangement.

A Study of Alienation in Toni Morrison’s Sula: Passive Patriarchy, Marriage and Female Friendship

This paper discusses the theme of alienation and female friendship in black women in Toni Morrison’s fiction. The female bonding is a possible way to deal with alienation which is caused by various factors as racial and social discriminations. This female bonding provides back women necessary support for mutual growth and assists them in combating various social pressures. However, it is argued here that this female friendship of black women in Morrison suffers from alienation in the long run. While foregrounding the healing power of female bonding which may allow women to survive under exploitation of various kinds, this paper brings for an argument that this female companionship nevertheless is corrupted by the power of explicit or implicit patriarchal forces working under the umbrella of social institutions of class and marriage. Hence the black women need to be on guard against all those forces which endanger the consistency of their mutual companionship.

Look at me while having sex! Eye-to-eye contact affects homosexual behaviour in bonobo females

In humans, eye-to-eye contact (EEC) or mutual gazing is a reflexive predisposition occurring in intimate contexts. We investigated the role of EEC during bonobo socio-sexual contacts. Females engage in homosexual ventro-ventral, genito-genital rubbing (VVGGR) during which they embrace each other while rubbing part of their vulvae and, sometimes, clitoris. VVGGR facilitates conflict resolution, anxiety reduction and social bonding. We found that EEC was negatively affected by female bonding: the more the eye contact, the weaker the social relationship. This suggests that EEC promotes an intimate contact between the more unfamiliar subjects. Moreover, VVGGRs were successfully prolonged in presence of at least one event of EEC compared to VVGGRs during which none of the partners looked towards the other or only one looked at the other’s face. EEC has been probably favoured by natural selection to enhance the cohesion between bonobo females, who can gain social power through socio-sexual contacts.

The Snow Queer? Female Characterization in Walt Disney’s Frozen

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale ‘The Snow Queen’ (1845) and its film adaptations have been examined from multiple perspectives by previous scholarly criticism. Recently, Gender and Queer theories have placed particular emphasis on the presence of non-normative romantic relationships between characters, namely, attraction between a young boy and an older woman (Kay and the Snow Queen), homoeroticism (Gerda and the Robber Girl), and even incestuous desire (Kay and Gerda), among others. In this paper, we will concentrate on how the original fairy-tale female characters and their interrelationships have been reworked in Walt Disney’s Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013), and we will analyse how the film’s representations of love, desire, and femininity simultaneously resemble and differ from its literary source. Firstly, we will explore how Andersen’s alluringly dangerous Snow Queen has been turned into a sympathetic character, Queen Elsa. Secondly, we argue that Gerda and Kay’s friendship has been transformed into sisterly love between the two female protagonists in the film, Elsa and Anna, whereas romantic heterosexual love, on the other hand, seems to have been relegated to a secondary narrative arc or done away with altogether, as the absence of a romantic partner for Elsa shows. Interestingly, having a Disney queen whose quest does not involve finding a husband has led some Frozen fans to speculate that Elsa could be the first lesbian Disney princess. Thus, we will also analyse Elsa’s character in connection with the different definitions of ‘queerness’. In light of all this, we discuss that Frozen is an example of the recent Disney trend to redefine true love and prioritize female bonding and empowerment. However, if we compare it to its literary precedent, the Disney adaptation seems to be less daring when it comes to portraying non-normative manifestations of love and femininity than Andersen’s original.

Female Assamese macaques bias their affiliation to paternal and maternal kin

ABSTRACTForming strong social bonds leads to higher reproductive success, increased longevity and/or increased infant survival in several mammal species. Given these adaptive benefits, understanding what determines partner preferences in social bonding is important. Maternal relatedness strongly predicts partner preference across many mammalian taxa. Although paternal and maternal kin share the same number of genes, and theoretically similar preferences would therefore be expected for paternal kin, the role of paternal relatedness has received relatively little attention. Here, we investigate the role of maternal and paternal relatedness for female bonding in Assamese macaques (Macaca assamensis), a species characterized by a relatively low male reproductive skew. We studied a wild population under natural conditions using extensive behavioural data and relatedness analyses based on pedigree reconstruction. We found stronger social bonds and more time spent grooming between maternal kin and paternal half-sisters compared to non-kin, with no preference of maternal over paternal kin. Paternally related and non-related dyads did not form stronger bonds when they had less close maternal kin available, however we would need a bigger sample size to confirm this. As expected given the low reproductive skew, bonds between paternal half-sisters closer in age were not stronger than between paternal half-sisters with larger age differences, suggesting that age similarity was not the mechanism by which paternally related individuals recognized each other. An alternative way through which paternal kin could get familiarized is mother- and/or father-mediated familiarity.

The underestimated power of woman In Susan Glaspell’s Trifle

This paper examines the theme of feminism through focusing on the female bonding as a means of gaining power .In this paper I’ll prove that the America dramatist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) makes a feminist leap as she portrays her female characters with an ample cunning to secretly and humbly triumph over male prejudice. She challenged those who believed that the United States offered freedom and equality by demonstrating that women were not treated equally since they were excluded from participating in the justice system except as defendants the underestimated power of woman in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916) which is written in the early twentieth century but it transcends time periods and cultures.