Incorporating recent theories of feminism and diaspora, Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities returns the Société des Femmes Artists Modernes, known as FAM, to its proper place in the history of modern art. Paula Birnbaum's study explores how FAM artists including Suzanne Valadon, Marie Laurencin, and Tamara de Lempicka, approached the self-portrait, motherhood and the female nude, as well as their response to marginalization and the reactionary politics of 1930s France.
This book explores the complex and enigmatic motif of hair in the work of five contemporary women artists, Chrystl Rijkeboer, Alice Maher, Annegret Soltau, Kathy Prendergast and Ellen Gallagher, from the late 1970s to the present. It investigates why hair is such a productive and resonant site of meaning, how it is suggestive of, and responds to, serial strategies, and why it appears to be of particular significance to women who are artists. It explores the implications of hair as an embodied material, its role as a haptic metaphor of the life cycle, and what might be seen as a darker, more liminal side of hair as a site of excess and body waste, and its ability to represent trauma and ‘wounding’. It also discusses some of the divergent histories of hair as a rich marker of identity in cultural discourses of beauty, myth and femininity, and as a symbol of status and power. Informed by a range of theoretical approaches, this book draws on Julia Kristeva’s theorizations of the abject, Hélène Cixous’s notion of écriture feminine, and a Deleuzian consideration of difference.
In this first book-length study in English devoted exclusively to Haitian women's literature, Myriam Chancy finds that Haitian women have their own history, traditions, and stories to tell, tales that they are unwilling to suppress or subordinate to narratives of national autonomy. Issues of race, class, color, caste, nationality, and sexuality are all central to their fiction--as is an urgent sense of the historical place of women between the two U.S. occupations of the country. Their novels interrogate women's social and political stance in Haiti from an explicitly female point of view, forcefully responding to overt sexual and political violence within the nation's ambivalent political climate.
Mandelker's revisionist analysis begins with the contention that Anna Karenina rejects the textual conventions of realism and the stereo-typical representation of women, especially in Victorian English fiction. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy uses the theme of art and visual representation to articulate an aesthetics freed from gender bias and class discrimination.
Eve Was Framed offers an impassioned, personal critique of the British legal system. Helena Kennedy focuses on the treatment of women in our courts - at the prejudices of judges, the misconceptions of jurors, the labyrinths of court procedures and the influence of the media. But the inequities she uncovers could apply equally to any disadvantaged group - to those whose cases are subtly affected by race, class poverty or politics, or who are burdened, even before they appear in court, by misleading stereotypes.
One of America's leading interpreters of the Chicana experience dismantles the discourses that "frame" women who rebel against patriarchal strictures as "bad women" and offers empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.
Although women and girls participate in sport in greater numbers than ever before, research shows there has been no significant increase in women leading sport organizations. This book takes an international, evidence-based perspective in examining women in sport leadership and offers future directions for improving gender equity. With contributions from leading international sport scholars and practitioners, it explores the opportunities and challenges women face while exercising leadership in sport organizations and evaluates leadership development practices. While positional leadership is crucial, this book argues that some women may choose to exercise leadership in non-positional ways, challenging readers to consider their personal values and passions. The chapters not only discuss key topics such as gender bias, intersectionality, quotas, networking, mentoring and sponsoring, but also present a variety of strategies to develop and support the next generation of women leaders in sport. A new model of how to achieve gender equity in sport leadership is also introduced. Women in Sport Leadership: Research and Practice for Change is important reading for all students, scholars, leaders, administrators, and coaches with an interest in sport business, policy and management, as well as women’s sport and gender studies.
What elements of American political and rhetorical culture block the imagining—and thus, the electing—of a woman as president? Examining both major-party and third-party campaigns by women, including the 2008 campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, the authors of Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture identify the factors that limit electoral possibilities for women. Pundits have been predicting women’s political ascendency for years. And yet, although the 2008 presidential campaign featured Hillary Clinton as an early frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination and Sarah Palin as the first female Republican vice-presidential nominee, no woman has yet held either of the top two offices. The reasons for this are complex and varied, but the authors assert that the question certainly encompasses more than the shortcomings of women candidates or the demands of the particular political moment. Instead, the authors identify a pernicious backlash against women presidential candidates—one that is expressed in both political and popular culture. In Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture, Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson provide a discussion of US presidentiality as a unique rhetorical role. Within that framework, they review women’s historical and contemporary presidential bids, placing special emphasis on the 2008 campaign. They also consider how presidentiality is framed in candidate oratory, campaign journalism, film and television, digital media, and political parody.
"The book asks important questions about the seemingly taken for granted quality of feminist perspectives on gender and work, about the ways in which both the codes of law and those of genre "frame" the female lawyer, and about the persistence of anxious constructions of successful women." —Cineaste "This book shows how the professional woman of popular film has so often been given a half measure of authority and agency in narratives which, though they may register patriarchal crisis, are also deeply dedicated to patriarchal restoration. Lucia convincingly illustrates how the female lawyer's status as a figure with access to the public sphere and to the law most often necessitates that she herself will be interrogated and put on trial." —Diane Negra, University of East Anglia, author of Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom As real women increasingly entered the professions from the 1970s onward, their cinematic counterparts followed suit. Women lawyers, in particular, were the protagonists of many Hollywood films of the Reagan-Bush era, serving as a kind of shorthand reference any time a script needed a powerful career woman. Yet a close viewing of these films reveals contradictions and anxieties that belie the films' apparent acceptance of women's professional roles. In film after film, the woman lawyer herself effectively ends up "on trial" for violating norms of femininity and patriarchal authority. In this book, Cynthia Lucia offers a sustained analysis of women lawyer films as a genre and as a site where other genres including film noir, maternal melodrama, thrillers, action romance, and romantic comedy intersect. She traces Hollywood representations of female lawyers through close readings of films from the 1949 Adam's Rib through films of the 1980s and 1990s, including Jagged Edge, The Accused, and The Client, among others. She also examines several key male lawyer films and two independent films, Lizzie Borden's Love Crimes and Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions. Lucia convincingly demonstrates that making movies about women lawyers and the law provides unusually fertile ground for exploring patriarchy in crisis. This, she argues, is the cultural stimulus that prompts filmmakers to create stories about powerful women that simultaneously question and undermine women's right to wield authority.
With contributions of scholars from Europe and North America, this book covers the representation of women in word and image in the context of changing frames of mentalities in two distinct periods - the Enlightenment and postmodernism. Subjects and artists/authors covered include prostitution, English and French art (Hogarth, Reynolds, Beardsley, Greuze), postmodern feminist theatre, recent fiction by Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood and Spanish literature. Special chapters deal with the construction of women in recent popular animated cartoons and computer games.
