The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

Author: Pamela B. June

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9781433110504

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The Fragmented Female Body and Identity explores the symbol of the wounded and scarred female body in selected postmodern, multiethnic American women's novels, namely Toni Morrison's Beloved, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Emma Pérez's Gulf Dreams, Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, and Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School and Empire of the Senseless. In each of these novels, disjointed, postmodern writing reflects the novel's focus on fragmented female bodies. The wounded and scarred body emerges from various, often intersecting, forms of oppression, including patriarchy, racism, and heteronormativity. This book emphasizes the different and nuanced forms of oppression each woman faces. However, while the fragmented body symbolizes oppression and pain, it also catalyzes resistance through recognition. When female characters recognize some element of a shared oppression, they form bonds with one another. These feminist unities, as a response to multiple forms of oppression, become viable means for resistance and healing.


Fragmentation and Redemption

Fragmentation and Redemption

Author: Caroline Walker Bynum

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13:

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Arguing that historians must write in a comic mode, aware of history's artifice, risks, and incompletion, Caroline Walker Bynum here examines diverse medieval texts to show how women were able to appropriate dominant social symbols in ways that allowed for the emergence of their own creative voices. By arguing for the positive importance attributed to the body, these essays give a new interpretation of gender in medieval texts and of the role of asceticism and mysticism in Christianity.


Resisting Bodies

Resisting Bodies

Author: Helga Druxes

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780814325346

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Helga Druxes' study of the female protagonists in novels by German writer Monika Maron, British writers Margaret Drabble and Jean Rhys, and French writer Marguerite Duras brings together the work of four prominent contemporary women authors. In discussing the position of women in urban spaces from the point of view of feminist and cultural theory, Druxes combines anthropology and recent literary theory within the framework of cultural studies. She addresses such concerns as the objectification/commodification of women in late capitalist society, the possibilities for resistant or subversive female agency under these conditions, and the role of specifically urban arrangements of space in both effecting this objectification and creating the sites where it might be resisted or disrupted by women. Resisting Bodies is an important contribution to literary criticism and feminist theory.


Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]

Author: Linda De Roche

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-06-04

Total Pages: 2067

ISBN-13:

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This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.


Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women's Fiction

Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women's Fiction

Author: Abigail Rine

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-08-01

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1472514521

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Drawing on the provocative recent work of feminist theorist Luce Irigaray, Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women's Fiction illuminates the vital and subversive role of literature in rewriting notions of the sacred. Abigail Rine demonstrates through careful readings how a range of contemporary women writers - from Margaret Atwood to Michèle Roberts and Alice Walker – think beyond traditional religious discourse and masculine models of subjectivity towards a new model of the sacred: one that seeks to reconcile the schism between the human and the divine, between the body and the word. Along the way, the book argues that literature is the ideal space for rethinking religion, precisely because it is a realm that cultivates imagination, mystery and incarnation.


The Female Nude

The Female Nude

Author: Lynda Nead

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-01

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1040025072

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The history of Western art is saturated with images of the female body. Lynda Nead's The Female Nude was the first book to critically examine this phenomenon from a feminist perspective and ask: how and why did the female nude acquire this status? In a deft and engaging manner, Lynda Nead explores the ways in which acceptable and unacceptable images of the female body are produced, issues which have been reignited by current controversies around the patriarchy, objectification and pornography. Nead brilliantly illustrates the two opposing poles occupied by the female nude in the history of art; at one extreme the visual culmination of enlightenment aesthetics; at the other, spilling over into the degraded and the obscene. What both have in common, however, is the aim of containing the female body. Drawing on examples of art and artists from the classical period to the 1980s, The Female Nude paints a devastating picture of the depiction of the female body and remains as fresh and invigorating today as it was at the time of its first publication. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author.


Embodying Modernity

Embodying Modernity

Author: Daniel Silva

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2022-04-05

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0822988755

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Embodying Modernity examines the current boom of fitness culture in Brazil in the context of the white patriarchal notions of race, gender, and sexuality through which fitness practice, commodities, and cultural products traffic. The book traces the imperial meanings and orders of power conveyed through “fit” bodies and their different configurations of muscularity, beauty, strength, and health within mainstream visual media and national and global public spheres. Drawing from a wide range of Brazilian visual media sources including fitness magazines, television programs, film, and social media, Daniel F. Silva theorizes concepts and renderings of modern corporality, its racialized and gendered underpinnings, and its complex relationship to white patriarchal power and capital. This study works to define the ubiquitous parameters of fitness culture and argues that its growth is part of a longer collective nationalist project of modernity tied to whiteness, capitalist ideals, and historical exceptionalism.


The Tiny and the Fragmented

The Tiny and the Fragmented

Author: S. Rebecca Martin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 019061482X

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Miniature and fragmentary objects are both eye-catching and yet easily dismissed. Tiny scale entices users with visions of Lilliputian worlds. The ambiguity of fragments intrigues us, offering tactile reminders of reality's transience. Yet, the standard scholarly approach to such objects has been to see them as secondary, incomplete things, whose principal purpose was to refer to a complete and often life-size whole. The Tiny and the Fragmented offers a series of fresh perspectives on the familiar concepts of the tiny and the fragmented. Written by a prestigious group of internationally-acclaimed scholars, the volume presents a remarkable diversity of case studies that range from Neolithic Europe to pre-Colombian Honduras to the classical Mediterranean and ancient Near East. Each scholar takes a different approach to issues of miniaturization and fragmentation but is united in considering the little and broken things of the past as objects in their own right. Whether a life-size or whole thing is made in a scaled-down form, deliberately broken as part of its use, or only considered successful in the eyes of ancient users if it shows some signs of wear, it challenges our expectations of representation and wholeness, of what it means for a work of art to be "finished" and "affective." Overall, The Tiny and the Fragmented demands a reconsideration of the social and contextual nature of miniaturization, fragmentation, and incompleteness, making the case that it was because of, rather than in spite of, their small or partial state that these objects were valued parts of the personal and social worlds they inhabited.


Women in the Metropolis

Women in the Metropolis

Author: Katharina von Ankum

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-09-01

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 052091760X

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Bringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies.


The Routledge Queer Studies Reader

The Routledge Queer Studies Reader

Author: Donald E. Hall

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-06-04

Total Pages: 598

ISBN-13: 1135719446

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The Routledge Queer Studies Reader provides a comprehensive resource for students and scholars working in this vibrant and interdisciplinary field. The book traces the emergence and development of Queer Studies as a field of scholarship, presenting key critical essays alongside more recent criticism that explores new directions. The collection is edited by two of the leading scholars in the field and presents: individual introductory notes that situate each work within its historical, disciplinary and theoretical contexts essays grouped by key subject areas including Genealogies, Sex, Temporalities, Kinship, Affect, Bodies, and Borders writings by major figures including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David M. Halperin, José Esteban Muñoz, Elizabeth Grosz, David Eng, Judith Halberstam and Sara Ahmed. The Routledge Queer Studies Reader is a field-defining volume and presents an illuminating guide for established scholars and also those new to Queer Studies.