Image and Word in Postmodern Poetry: Friederike Mayröcker’s BROTWOLKE

This article explores the interplay of visual arts and poetic images in postmodern poetry, focusing on the case of Friederike Mayröcker’s poem BROTWOLKE, nach Karla Woisnitza (1996) [BREADCLOUD, after Karla Woisnitza]. The article shows that BROTWOLKE belongs to a group of texts whose titles indicate an ekphrasis or an intermedial quality, but whose specific point of reference is absent. Rather than referencing to a specific painting, the poem thus showcases different aspects of the visual. Offering a close reading of the poem, the article explores Mayröcker’s special technique of image-writing and its dynamic effect on the reader. The article argues that the poem both “shows the word” and “writes the image.” It is shown that Mayröcker’s stream-of-consciousness is a process that refers to the act of writing in the first place and then to an inventory of texts and images that float the text as a stream of sense-data.

A Tale of Two Trans Men: Transmasculine Identity and Trauma in Two Fairy-Tale Retellings

Transgender identities in fairy tale retellings are rare, but can reveal much about gender fluidity. Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Boy, Snow, Bird conflates transgender identities with mirrored falsehoods and fairy-tale spells, pathologizing a trauma victim who turns out to also become an abuser, while Gabriel Vidrine’s novella “A Pair of Raven Wings” depicts a queer transgender man with dignity, making it clear that the trauma he suffers is at the hands of bigots rather than being an invention of a sick mind or the cause of his transition. Pairing these fairy-tale retellings illuminates the topic of gender fluidity in fairy tales by demonstrating that gender is indeed fluid, but that representations of gender fluidity due to trauma are misguided at best and harmful at worst, while those representations that assert the dignity of transgender people, even as they face trauma at the hands of bigoted people, are another stellar example of the genre’s potential to represent people who are culturally marginalized, connecting identity to power in a classic magical fairy-tale move.

The Queer Glow up of Hero-Sword Legacies in She-Ra, Korra, and Sailor Moon

The narratives within Sailor Moon Crystal, The Legend of Korra, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power enlist gender fluid and queer protagonists to spearhead rebellions against the heteronormative domains of colonizers, imperialists, zealots, and hypercapitalistic military–industrial complexes. Magic is commodified by each villain; used to crown their exaggerated conquistador reputations and power their nuclear weapons. To defeat them and the toxic sociopolitical narratives and power paradigms they have spawned, Sailor Moon, Korra, Adora, and others must confront how these ideologies have stunted their power, corrupted their ethical systems, and distorted their understanding of their identities. By achieving self-actualization/self-acceptance and collaborating with their allies to do the same, they co-create new endings for themselves and reclaim a broader spectrum of gender and sexuality. Within the liminal moments of these reflective identity battles, protagonists and their allies enter a magical communal space, a social network for a Jungian collective unconscious. Here, they exchange their evolving powers, ideologies, and emotionally charged memories (her stories) and collaborate to liberate their communities. These champions, ambassadors of their (our) collective unconscious, urge us to commune within the liminal spaces of our social networks to self-actualize and collectively unearth a neohuman identity and system of governance.

Alberto Blest Gana: Four Chronicles and a Novel

Four chronicles written by Alberto Blest Gana between April and May 1862 in the newspaper La voz de Chile, months before the publication of his novel Mariluán, shed light on the close relationship between his production as chronicler and writer. Among the various faits divers discussed in the columns, the issue of a Mapuche delegation’s arrival in Santiago to hold a parlamento with the government about border disputes arises. The oscillating attitude of the chronicler in the face of otherness and his prejudiced comments, which are at the same time full of doubts and perplexities, serve as an incentive for his composing a utopian fiction. This article aims to examine the connections in the relationship between Blest Gana chronicler and novelist to expand the reading possibilities of Mariluán.

A “Fabulous Monster” and a “Wonderful Boy:” Gender and the Elusive Victorian Child in the Alice Books and Peter Pan

Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” and J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” are highly critiqued and explored works of British children literature. Both queer and hermeneutic readings allow approaches that intrinsically question gender dichotomies, providing tools to pick out underlying themes. Thus, focusing on the concepts of the “child hero” and the “genderless child” of Carroll’s and Barrie’s respective Victorian and Edwardian backgrounds, spatial – the dream worlds of the Wonder- and the Looking-Glass land, the colonized Island of Neverland – as well as temporal aspects – the linear, episodic quest of Alice, the immortal, cyclical existence of Peter – point to the subversive elements of play, memory, and narration in the texts. While Alice is bridging dream and reality in an oscillating, paradoxical act of self-aware transformation, Peter is otherworldly and inhuman himself, actively rejecting heteronormative standards and demands. Both are trespassers and assume roles, and confuse, adapt, and bend supposedly fixed rules. Their transgressions are subdued in the pretended ahistoricity of children’s storytelling, referring to the responsibility of adaptions to further expand the hermeneutical circle.

Gender, Class, and Human/Non-Human Fluidity in Théodore and Hippolyte Cogniards’ féerie, The White Cat

The Frères Cogniard produced immensely popular vaudeville féeries in the nineteenth century and among them most popular was The White Cat (1852), which grafts two tales together by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy: “The White Cat” and “Belle-Belle, or the chevalier Fortuné.” The féerie foregrounds gender, class, human/thing, and species fluidity, which undermines hierarchies supported by dichotomies that in very similar ways privilege men over women, the upperclass over lowerclass, persons over things, and human animals over non-human animals. The essay traces these different forms of fluidity, examining the role of marvelous in general and metamorphosis in particular in problematizing normative structures of identity and revealing their arbitrary nature.

Double Trouble: Gender Fluid Heroism in American Children’s Television

Gender fluidity makes only rare appearances on North American television, and remains almost completely absent from programming for children. In contrast, transgender characters are making inroads into mainstream North American TV for adults. Still, media depictions of transgender people in the late 1990s and early 2000s have largely shown them as aberrations, having illegible and/or unstable identities, joining mainstream Euro North American society which tends to medicalize and pathologize transgender identities. Thus, too often the representation provided serves only to reinforce binaries by making the character exceptional and noting their unconventionality, or to highlight gender fluidity as a problem. Examining the animated streaming TV series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018–2020), we use scholarship on gender fluidity to critique the show’s representations of genders in addition to and beyond male and female. Looking at She-Ra through this lens, the show challenges assumptions about princesses, villains, helpers, and heroes. Ultimately transgressing traditional categories, the princesses and their allies, in their own distinct embodiments and self-presentations, use their differing magical and other skills to fight enemies in the Evil Horde to protect their planet, Etheria.

God, Man, and Nature: Life for Reason and the Reason Behind the Universe – A Panentheistic Approach to Life of Pi

This article intends to lay out a comparative study of Karma philosophy and literature scrutinizing Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi through a panentheistic approach. Because Karma is one of the predominant philosophies in the novel and permeates the general atmosphere, this article intends to scrutinize Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi through a panentheistic approach. Although karma is a very complex issue, since anyone committing evil acts can claim to be a mere agent of karma delivering punishment to others for sins they committed in their past lives, it is true that according to karma, our actions have consequences which affect the entirety of our lives, and this can also be seen as free will. Yet while this approach tends to focus on the action and reaction mechanisms of life, the flow of life in the universe should still be carefully contemplated, since if we believe the first story, Pi’s survival not only depends on his choices, but also on the opportunities that the universe offers him. In that sense, if we are to accept God as the soul of the universe, then the universal spirit must be omnipresent and omnipotent while also capable of transforming into anything in terms of s panentheistic approach. Thus God, being greater than the universe, is the ultimate force that balances everything, and is also the biggest karma controller. For this reason, this article analyzes Life of Pi from both inductive and deductive slants to demonstrate that all roads lead to God, the omniscient.

Ah!Nana’s Fairytale Punk-Comics: From the Comtesse de Ségur’s “Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon” to Nicole Claveloux’s “Histoire de Blondasse, de Belle-Biche et Gros Chachat”

During its brief existence from 1976 to 1978 the French underground feminist magazine Ah!Nana represented a powerful medium to discuss various topics related to women, sexuality, and discrimination. One of its main goals was to challenge traditional (literary) female role models, including housewives, submissive mothers, and “damsels in distress.” Through the adaptation of fairy tales, a genre particularly suited through its imaginative worlds to challenge preconceptions and norms, Ah!Nana deconstructed and questioned binary gender roles and heteronormativity. This article analyzes cartoon artist Nicole Claveloux’s queer adaptation of the nineteenth-century fairy tale “Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon” (Blondine, the Good Doe, and the Gallant Cat) by the Comtesse de Ségur. Claveloux addresses her queer parody to an adult audience, and conveys a new perspective on gender, sexuality, and humanness that is in line with Ah!Nana’s promotion of second-wave feminist standpoints and punk culture. She advocates the exploration of new sexual pleasures, and the disruption of bourgeoisie values, including binary gender roles.