MODERN WOMENS ASPIRATIONS IN SHASHI DESHPANDE THE DARK HOLDS NO TERRORS

Shashi Deshpande in her novel has presented a realistic picture of the modern educated, intelligent middle class woman in the novel. The New Woman is neither fully traditional nor fully modern. A new paradigms related to a womans life came into existence i.e. tradition and modernity, economic dependence, self-assertion, aspiration and independent in life in her novel.The New Woman in Deshpandes novel gets all types of rights in their life hence they struggle a lot to get free from the traditional world andin quest for her own identity. The present paper is an attempt to analyze Shashi Deshpandes novel The Dark Holds No Terrors.The Methodology followed in the analysis is of comparative and contrast.Sarita is the main protagonist of the novel, who is modern emancipated middle-class educated woman in the novel. She plays different roles to achieve her goals and aspirations in her life through facing various traumas in the novel.An attempt has been made to highlight Deshpandes story The Dark Holds No Terror that allocates the educated women in all possible ways.

Stereotypes in Attributions About Women’s Gender-Based Mistreatment

Using an intersectional framework, we assessed how gender stereotypes applied to women with different race and class identities who experienced gender-based mistreatment. Thematic content analysis of 238 responses to a woman in a vignette, who varied in terms of race and class, revealed three themes: action or inaction, living conditions, and education. Sexual assault drew significantly more comments about the woman’s actions and inaction than sexual harassment, as did a middle-class versus a working-class woman. Conversely, living conditions surfaced more for the working-class woman. Finally, education came up most in sexual harassment accounts. Qualitative features of the responses are also discussed.

A GUEST + A HOST = A GHOST. DRAMAS OF HOSPITALITY IN REBECCA WEST’S THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER

First published in 1918, Rebecca West’s debut novel The Return of the Soldier focuses on a common trope in Great War Literature: the traumas of war and the difficulties of returning veterans to fit back in with everyday life. The story of the shell-shocked soldier Chris Baldry, who suddenly finds himself in a world which has aged 15 years beyond his memory, may be read as the unfolding of a multi-layered drama of hospitality, in which the host-guest continuum is constantly renegotiated. Chris’s memory erasure does not only turn him into a foreigner who does not recognize his wife or remember his dead son, but also forces his family members to question the role they have been playing in Chris’s life. His family equilibrium is shattered as his wife suddenly becomes a stranger to him, while his long-lost love, a working-class woman well below Chris’s social standards, become more important to him than anyone else. An analysis of the modernist techniques and stylistic features of the novel will allow me to address the concept of hospitality in relation to trauma and disease. The paper will show that The Return of the Soldier may be read not only as a critique of war, but also as a multi-perspective narrative on the precariousness of host-guest relationships. It will be argued that the “question-of-the-foreigner”, which Derrida addressed in his seminal essay Of Hospitality (2003) acquires new meanings when disease suddenly transforms a loved one into an “other” with whom communication seems to be interrupted. Hospitality may thus be regarded an unstable concept, in which identity and alterity are constantly renegotiated.

Breaking the Rules: Zodwa Wabantu and Postfeminism in South Africa

Zodwa Wabantu, a South African celebrity recently made popular by the <em>Daily Sun</em>, a local tabloid newspaper, is notorious as an older working-class woman who fearlessly challenges social norms of feminine respectability and beauty. Her assertion of sexual autonomy and her forays into self-surveillance and body-modification, mediated by the <em>Daily Sun</em> and other tabloid and social media platforms, could be read as a local iteration of a global postfeminist subjectivity. However, the widespread social opprobrium she faces must be accounted for: Using Connell’s model of the gender order together with a coloniality frame, I argue that northern critiques of postfeminism omit to consider the forms of patriarchy established by colonialism in southern locales such as South Africa. The local patriarchal gender order, made visible within the tabloid reportage, provides the context within which the meaning of Zodwa Wabanu’s contemporary postfeminist identity is constructed. I examine a range of Zodwa Wabantu’s (self)representations in <em>Daily Sun</em> and other digital media in the light of this context, and conclude that a close examination of the local gender order assists in understanding the limits of postfeminism’s hegemony.

Femmes Fortes

Today French women are more likely to be in salaried employment than their male counterparts, albeit being overrepresented in low-paid, part-time jobs. This chapter argues that one of the most striking cultural manifestations of these shifts in the relationship between sex and employment has been the emergence of the highly ambiguous figure of the femme forte, the strong working woman. Recent novels and films by Éric Reinhardt, Laurent Quintreau, Philippe Vasset, Alain Corneau, Natalie Kuperman, and Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar offer examples of one iteration of the femme forte – the calculating, manipulative, ruthless senior female executive whose pursuit of her career goals requires she abjure all her maternal instincts to become a particular kind of femme fatale, an updated version of Lady Macbeth or the Marquise de Meurteuil. The films, novels, and reportage of Medhi Charef, Florence Aubenas, François Bon, and Robert Guédiguian, meanwhile, offer a different, apparently more flattering iteration of the femme forte – the middle-aged working class woman who, in the face of the loss of stable male industrial employment, bravely struggles to keep family and community together, personifying an embattled tradition of working class struggle. The chapter analyses the ideological implications of these contrasting representations of the femme forte.

The Precarious Working Life of Muriel Heagney, Labour Activist

Muriel Heagney’s activism for equal pay for the sexes has been well documented. Heagney (1885–1974) is an important actor in the key works on the history of the struggle for equal pay and improved opportunities and conditions for women workers in Australia. But what about her own pay and conditions, during her more than 50 years as a labour activist? As an unmarried, working-class woman, how did she support herself and her activism? This article reconstructs Heagney’s working life across the first half of the twentieth century, seeking to explain its significant opportunities and major constraints. It finds two influences on Heagney’s unstable working life: her reluctance to compromise and resistance to factional allegiance, and the impact of the system she worked to overturn, in which as a woman she was paid less than a man for the same or similar work and struggled to secure long-term employment. Sustained by an authentic commitment to securing equal pay, Heagney weathered long periods of uncertain prospects and financial insecurity, experiences that resonate strongly with those of the so-called gigariat today.

La espiritualidad de la madre de familia: Mónica «mater», imagen de la Iglesia

The article presents the figure of Monica, mother of Augustine, highlighting her spirituality as a Christian mother, underlining especially three elements. First, the fact that Monica is a middle-class woman, in relationship to women of high social rank, of whom we know the stories, told by Gregory of Nissa, Gregory of Nazianzus or Jerome. Later, the article points out how Monica is the image of the Church, and not just a domestic example of a Christian mother. Finally, the article shows that Monica, as “mother”, plays a role in the society, not only with respect to her children, but also expresses the identity of the mother. In Monica, the woman as “mother” is “subject” of rights, is “uxor” according to Roman law.

Nawal Al-Sa’dawi Dalam Tradisi Feminisme Barat

Tulisan ini bertujuan melacak keterpengaruhan fiksi-fiksi Sa’da>wi> dengan pemikiran feminisme Barat. Kajian ini sangat menarik karena resepsi karya-karyanya yang tidak banyak diterima di tempat kelahirannya, namun populer serta diminati di luar negaranya. Ada dua pertanyaan yang dikaji: pertama, bagaimana tema yang ditampilkan Sa’da>wi> dalam karya-karya fiksinya; kedua, bagaimana relasi keterpengaruhan Sa’da>wi> dengan pemikiran feminis Barat. Adapun tulisan ini menggunakan pendekatan Muqa>ranah dengan metode deskriptif analitik. Tiga karya fiksi yang menjadi sumber primer di antaranya: “Adab am Qillah Adab” (2000), “Suqu>t}u al-Ima>m” (1987), serta “Imra’ah ‘Inda Nuqt}ah al-S{ifr” (1982). Selanjutnya aliran feminis marxis-sosialis menjadi hipogram dalam tulisan ini. Tulisan ini menghasilkan dua hal: pertama, narasi-narasi fiksi-fiksi Sa’dawi merepresentasikan aliran feminis marxist-sosialis; kedua, keterkaitannya dengan aliran ini dengan melihat Sa’da>wi> sebagai perempuan kelas terdidik yang dapat memperoleh akses informasi lebih luas, aktivitas politiknya, serta motivasi kepenulisannya. This article aims to explain influenced Sa’da>wi> fiction with western feminism. This research very interisting because of the receptions of her works are rejected in her country but became popular accepted outside her country. Two questions in this study: first, how Sa’da>wi> shows the theme in her fictional works; second, how does the relation of Sa’da>wi>’s influence with Western feminist thought\. This research uses Muqa>ranah approach with descriptive analytic method. Three works of fiction are the primary source: “Adab am Qillah Adab” (2000), “Suqu>t}u al-Ima>m” (1987) and “Imra’ah ‘Inda Nuqt}ah al-S{ifr” (1982). Further Marxist-socialist feminist flow becomes a hypogram in this paper. This reserch result in two discovering: first, the narratives of Sa’da>wi>’s fictions represent marxist-sosialist feminist stream; second, its association with this flow by seeing Sa’da>wi> as an educated class woman which can gain wider access to information, political activity and writing motivation.