Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster

Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster PDF Author: Elizabeth D. Macaluso
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030304760
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
This book views late Victorian femininity, the New Woman, and gender through literary representations of the figure of the monster, an appendage to the New Woman. The monster, an aberrant occurrence, performs Brecht’s “alienation effect,” making strange the world that she inhabits, thereby drawing veiled conclusions about the New Woman and gender at the end of the fin-de-siècle. The monster reveals that New Women loved one another complexly, not just as “friend” or “lover,” but both “friend” and “lover.” The monster, like the fin-de-siècle British populace, mocked the New Woman’s modernity. She was paradoxically viewed as a threat to society and as a role model for women to follow. The tragic suicides of “monstrous” New Women of color suggest that many fin-de-siècle authors, especially female authors, thought that these women should be included in society, not banished to its limits. This book, the first on the relationship between the figure of the monster and the New Woman, argues that there is hidden complexity to the New Woman. Her sexuality was complicated and could move between categories of sexuality and friendship for late Victorian women, and the way that the fin-de-siècle populace viewed her was just as multifarious. Further, the narratives of her tragedies ironically became narratives that advocated for her survival.

Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster

Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster PDF Author: Elizabeth D. Macaluso
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030304760
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book views late Victorian femininity, the New Woman, and gender through literary representations of the figure of the monster, an appendage to the New Woman. The monster, an aberrant occurrence, performs Brecht’s “alienation effect,” making strange the world that she inhabits, thereby drawing veiled conclusions about the New Woman and gender at the end of the fin-de-siècle. The monster reveals that New Women loved one another complexly, not just as “friend” or “lover,” but both “friend” and “lover.” The monster, like the fin-de-siècle British populace, mocked the New Woman’s modernity. She was paradoxically viewed as a threat to society and as a role model for women to follow. The tragic suicides of “monstrous” New Women of color suggest that many fin-de-siècle authors, especially female authors, thought that these women should be included in society, not banished to its limits. This book, the first on the relationship between the figure of the monster and the New Woman, argues that there is hidden complexity to the New Woman. Her sexuality was complicated and could move between categories of sexuality and friendship for late Victorian women, and the way that the fin-de-siècle populace viewed her was just as multifarious. Further, the narratives of her tragedies ironically became narratives that advocated for her survival.

Women and Other Monsters

Women and Other Monsters PDF Author: Jess Zimmerman
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807054933
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
A fresh cultural analysis of female monsters from Greek mythology, and an invitation for all women to reclaim these stories as inspiration for a more wild, more “monstrous” version of feminism The folklore that has shaped our dominant culture teems with frightening female creatures. In our language, in our stories (many written by men), we underline the idea that women who step out of bounds—who are angry or greedy or ambitious, who are overtly sexual or not sexy enough—aren’t just outside the norm. They’re unnatural. Monstrous. But maybe, the traits we’ve been told make us dangerous and undesirable are actually our greatest strengths. Through fresh analysis of 11 female monsters, including Medusa, the Harpies, the Furies, and the Sphinx, Jess Zimmerman takes us on an illuminating feminist journey through mythology. She guides women (and others) to reexamine their relationships with traits like hunger, anger, ugliness, and ambition, teaching readers to embrace a new image of the female hero: one that looks a lot like a monster, with the agency and power to match. Often, women try to avoid the feeling of monstrousness, of being grotesquely alien, by tamping down those qualities that we’re told fall outside the bounds of natural femininity. But monsters also get to do what other female characters—damsels, love interests, and even most heroines—do not. Monsters get to be complete, unrestrained, and larger than life. Today, women are becoming increasingly aware of the ways rules and socially constructed expectations have diminished us. After seeing where compliance gets us—harassed, shut out, and ruled by predators—women have never been more ready to become repellent, fearsome, and ravenous.

Monstrous Women in Comics

Monstrous Women in Comics PDF Author: Samantha Langsdale
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496827643
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, Jeannie Ludlow, Marcela Murillo, Sho Ogawa, Pauline J. Reynolds, Stefanie Snider, J. Richard Stevens, Justin Wigard, Daniel F. Yezbick, and Jing Zhang Monsters seem to be everywhere these days, in popular shows on television, in award-winning novels, and again and again in Hollywood blockbusters. They are figures that lurk in the margins and so, by contrast, help to illuminate the center—the embodiment of abnormality that summons the definition of normalcy by virtue of everything they are not. Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody’s edited volume explores the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability. To analyze monstrous women is not only to examine comics, but also to witness how those constructions correspond to women’s real material experiences. Each section takes a critical look at the cultural context surrounding varied monstrous voices: embodiment, maternity, childhood, power, and performance. Featured are essays on such comics as Faith, Monstress, Bitch Planet, and Batgirl and such characters as Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman. This volume probes into the patriarchal contexts wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject, such that women frequently become monsters.

Unbecoming Female Monsters

Unbecoming Female Monsters PDF Author: Cristina Santos
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 149852964X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Unbecoming Female Monsters: Witches, Vampires, and Virgins is a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary work that traces the construct of female monsters as an embodiment of socio-cultural fears of female sexuality and reproductive powers. This book examines the female sexual maturation cycle and the various archetypes of female monsters associated with each stage of sexual development as seen in literature, art, film, television, and popular culture. Recommended for scholars of Latin American studies, literature, cultural studies, women and gender studies, popular culture, and film studies.

Into the Deep

Into the Deep PDF Author: Abigail Favale
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1642293105
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Into the Deep traces one woman's spiritual odyssey from birthright evangelicalism through postmodern feminism and, ultimately, into the Roman Catholic Church. As a college student, Abigail Favale experienced a feminist awakening that reshaped her life and faith. A decade later, on the verge of atheism, she found herself entering the oldest male-helmed institution on the planet--the last place she expected to be. With humor and insight, Favale describes her gradual exodus from Christian orthodoxy and surprising swerve into Catholicism. She writes candidly about grappling with wounds from her past, Catholic sexual morality, the male priesthood, and an interfaith marriage. Her vivid prose brings to life the wrenching tumult of conversion--a conversion that began after she entered the Church and began to pry open its mysteries. There she discovered the startling beauty of a sacramental cosmos, a vision of reality that upended her notions of gender, sexuality, identity, and authority. This is a thoroughly 21st century conversion, a compelling account of recovering an ancient faith after a decade of doubt.

The "new Woman" Revised

The Author: Ellen Wiley Todd
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520074712
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
In the years between the world wars, Manhattan's Fourteenth Street-Union Square district became a center for commercial, cultural, and political activities, and hence a sensitive barometer of the dramatic social changes of the period. It was here that four urban realist painters--Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and Isabel Bishop--placed their images of modern "new women." Bargain stores, cheap movie theaters, pinball arcades, and radical political organizations were the backdrop for the women shoppers, office and store workers, and consumers of mass culture portrayed by these artists. Ellen Wiley Todd deftly interprets the painters' complex images as they were refracted through the gender ideology of the period. This is a work of skillful interdisciplinary scholarship, combining recent insights from feminist art history, gender studies, and social and cultural theory. Drawing on a range of visual and verbal representations as well as biographical and critical texts, Todd balances the historical context surrounding the painters with nuanced analyses of how each artist's image of womanhood contributed to the continual redefining of the "new woman's" relationships to men, family, work, feminism, and sexuality.

Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature

Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature PDF Author: Dana Oswald
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843842327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
A gendered reading of monster and the monstrous body in medieval literature. Monsters abound in Old and Middle English literature, from Grendel and his mother in Beowulf to those found in medieval romances such as Sir Gowther. Through a close examination of the way in which their bodies are sexed and gendered, and drawing from postmodern theories of gender, identity, and subjectivity, this book interrogates medieval notions of the body and the boundaries of human identity. Case studies of Wonders of the East, Beowulf, Mandeville's Travels, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Sir Gowther reveal a shift in attitudes toward the gendered and sexed body, and thus toward identity, between the two periods: while Old English authors and artists respond to the threat of the gendered, monstrous form by erasing it, Middle English writers allow transgressive and monstrous bodies to transform and therefore integrate into society. This metamorphosis enables redemption for some monsters, while other monstrous bodies become dangerously flexible and invisible, threatening the communities they infiltrate. These changing cultural reactions to monstrous bodies demonstrate the precarious relationship between body and identity in medieval literature. DANA M. OSWALD is Assistant Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Parkside.

The Monstrous-Feminine

The Monstrous-Feminine PDF Author: Barbara Creed
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136750754
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualised only as victim. In The Monstrous-Feminine Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body.With close reference to a number of classic horror films including the Alien trilogy, T

Mothers, Monsters, Whores

Mothers, Monsters, Whores PDF Author: Laura Sjoberg
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848137370
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
A woman did that? The general reaction to women's political violence is still one of shock and incomprehension. Mothers, Monsters, Whores provides an empirical study of women's violence in global politics. The book looks at military women who engage in torture; the Chechen 'Black Widows'; Middle Eastern suicide bombers; and the women who directed and participated in genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. Sjoberg & Gentry analyse the biological, psychological and sexualized stereotypes through which these women are conventionally depicted, arguing that these are rooted in assumptions about what is 'appropriate' female behaviour. What these stereotypes have in common is that they all perceive women as having no agency in any sphere of life, from everyday choices to global political events. This book is a major feminist re-evaluation of women's motivations and actions as perpetrators of political violence.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

Gender, Technology and the New Woman PDF Author: Lena WA¥nggren
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474416284
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siecle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the 'crisis in gender' or 'sexual anarchy' of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. As this monograph demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in this technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.