On Dictionaries and Gender Representations

Placed at the interface between metalexicography and gender studies, this short article discusses issues concerning gender representations in present-day dictionaries. Evoking recent controversies regarding the representation of gender-related terms such as “cisgender” or “woman” in The Oxford English Dictionary, the essay goes on to discuss the prescriptive/descriptive opposition concerning lexicographical representations, taking its cue from previous approaches, which suggest re-envisaging the prescriptive/descriptive dyad as a continuum (Straaijer, 2009; Wilton 2014), or replacing this traditional binary model with a nonbinary approach (Nossem, 2018; Turton, 2020).

Reproductive Racism in Danielle Evans’s “Harvest:” Black, Chicana, and White Motherhoods in the Context of Reproductive Rights Discourses

The paper explores the short story “Harvest” (2010) by African American writer Danielle Evans and traces the figurations of the racialized aspects of gender in “Harvest” within the theoretical frameworks of Black and Chicana feminisms, motherhood studies, and intersectionality. After situating the Black and Chicana characters’ anxieties around egg donation in the historical context of reproductive rights, economics, and the politicization of Black and Chicana women’s bodies, I discuss how the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and class impact the racialized gender identity of especially the Black protagonist and to a smaller extent that of her Chicana and white friends as well. I argue that the current practices of egg donation depicted in the story are imbricated in the wider system of racial capitalism that values women’s childbearing capacities differentially in terms of their race.

“Are You a Bad Boy?”: Variations of the American Adam in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet

This paper mobilises R. W. B. Lewis’ myth of the American Adam, articulated in 1955, to examine David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet’s formulaic use of this masculinity archetype. Lewis’ ideal type of innocent masculinity is replicated by Blue Velvet’s protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who must navigate the stereotyped conventions of good and evil against the backdrop of the idealised US suburb. Beyond the generalised assessment of David Lynch as the quintessential eccentric, this article brings to the fore the ways in which his work can be analysed as formulaic, paying special attention to the interaction between masculinity, spatiality, and dominant national mythology.

Nan King’s Orientation in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet: A Journey of Gender and Sexual Self-Discovery Following “The Slantwise Direction of Queer Desire”

In Tipping the Velvet (1998), Sarah Waters explores the notion of “gender performativity” as studied by Judith Butler (1990, 1993). Its protagonist, Nancy Astley, becomes aware of her sexuality and comes up with doubts about her gender as responding to the stable label society has put on her. This naïve girl moves from performing gender on stage to cross-dressing off-stage amid the crowds of London, not following, as Sarah Ahmed (2006) puts it, “the straight line” (p. 70). The aim of this paper is to explain how this straightness – both in terms of direction and heterosexuality – is the term Nancy, later on renamed Nan King, does not feel comfortable with. Throughout the novel, Nan’s discovery of a whole world of sexual and identity possibilities leads her to look for her own orientation, as her position in relation to the rest of “objects” around her is a queer one.

Performing Patriarchy in Much Ado About Nothing

This article aims to restore the pairing of Claudio and Hero to prominence. The positioning of Hero by Claudio and the play’s other powerful men is central to the plotline, especially in terms of the “nothing” of Hero’s supposed sexual incontinence, as well as being dramatically pivotal to the play’s meanings and structure. The fact that the scene is absent from the play underscores the crucial symbolic importance of the role of Hero to the patriarchal system, drawing attention to the ways in which her function needs to be noted and understood. The analysis undertaken here therefore redresses the balance, since the pairing of Beatrice and Benedick seems so much more alive to modern sensibilities. This article argues that the reason for this lies in their seeming attractiveness as characters who are more easily recuperated to a historically later form of patriarchy from Shakespeare’s period, one that resonates powerfully with the rise of individualism to elevate them over Hero and Claudio.

Speaking with the Dead: The Sick Chick and the Psychic Crypt in Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

This paper explores Gail Honeyman’s 2017 novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine from the perspective of Abraham and Torok’s concept of the psychic crypt. On one level the protagonist Eleanor, a thirty-year-old urban single woman searching for love, resembles a chick-lit heroine; however, Eleanor is deeply lonely, apparently autistic, suicidal and a survivor of childhood abuse and trauma. The paper argues that Eleanor’s difficulties can be understood as the consequences of encryptment which, in Abraham and Torok’s terms, is a disease of mourning where the dead loved one is incorporated rather than introjected into the psyche.

Murderous Masculinities the Early Republic of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland

This essay examines Charles Brockden Brown’s first novel, Wieland (1798), particularly as it engages and critiques gender and nationalism in the fictive treatment of familicidal murders that took place in the eighteenth century. More broadly, Brown’s novel highlights the competing realities facing men and women in the early republic, as they navigated the shifting landscape of political and religious ideology in the turbulence of post-Revolutionary America. A close examination of Wieland offers a revealing glimpse into the tensions between patriarchy and femininity, republicanism and religion, and competing masculinities in the newly born republic that was limitlessly optimistic even as it was beset by national and familial violence.

The Role of Gender in the History of the Professional Development of South African Nursing and Nursing Organisations

Historically, female nurse leaders endeavoured to make nursing a profession by establishing nursing organisations that could act as agents of change. They were hampered by sociocultural notions of gender: men dominating society, politics, and the economy. Nurses therefore needed positive working relationships with male leaders. In South Africa, such gender dynamics led to the South African Nursing Association (SANA), being influenced by a political system, that is, apartheid, which had dire consequences for the profession. This article illustrates that historically the emerging nursing profession was intimately connected with a changing society: female nurses strove for economic and professional independence but were confined by a male-dominated (medical) society. South African female nurse leaders never openly challenged the political status quo. It is recommended that current South African nursing organisations advocate for gender equality and clarify how they can foster a health-care environment in which gender diversity is the norm.