Masquerade and Femininity

Masquerade and Femininity PDF Author: Urszula Chowaniec
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144380679X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Masquerade and Femininity: Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers introduces the reader to the diversity of women’s writing in Poland and Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries in the light of the notion of masquerade. The present articles scrutinize particular works by women writers (Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaia, Irina Odoevtseva, Vera Pavlova, Narcyza Żmichowska, Maria Komornicka, Irena Krzywicka and others) and the strategies of masquerading female experience. Taken together, the articles draw attention to the feeling of an inexpressible gap between the living body (and its everyday life experience of pain and suffering or happiness and pleasure) and the culturally constructed, powerfully imposed code of expression that readily makes use of various masks, guises and acts of pretending, applied especially cleverly in literary works. The concept of masquerade illuminates the complexity of what we call “femininity” by combining two sides of the divide: the real feelings and the constructed expressions. This volume uses both feminist and non-feminist approaches to women’s writing and sheds new light on the themes of femininity, woman’s identity, experience, masks, body, gender relations, nature, culture and authorship. Masquerade and Femininity brings together East European literary studies and gender studies, offering a comparative perspective on literature, literary theory and cultural phenomena in Poland and Russia, and featuring a range of both eastern European and western scholars. In its pages, the reader is invited to move beyond Russian literature and language into a dialogic approach between Slavic literatures. This book will also contribute to filling the comparative gap which is still relatively unexplored not only with regard to the application of western scholarship to East European studies, but also with regard to the dialogue between Russian and Polish scholarship.

Masquerade and Femininity

Masquerade and Femininity PDF Author: Urszula Chowaniec
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144380679X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
Masquerade and Femininity: Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers introduces the reader to the diversity of women’s writing in Poland and Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries in the light of the notion of masquerade. The present articles scrutinize particular works by women writers (Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaia, Irina Odoevtseva, Vera Pavlova, Narcyza Żmichowska, Maria Komornicka, Irena Krzywicka and others) and the strategies of masquerading female experience. Taken together, the articles draw attention to the feeling of an inexpressible gap between the living body (and its everyday life experience of pain and suffering or happiness and pleasure) and the culturally constructed, powerfully imposed code of expression that readily makes use of various masks, guises and acts of pretending, applied especially cleverly in literary works. The concept of masquerade illuminates the complexity of what we call “femininity” by combining two sides of the divide: the real feelings and the constructed expressions. This volume uses both feminist and non-feminist approaches to women’s writing and sheds new light on the themes of femininity, woman’s identity, experience, masks, body, gender relations, nature, culture and authorship. Masquerade and Femininity brings together East European literary studies and gender studies, offering a comparative perspective on literature, literary theory and cultural phenomena in Poland and Russia, and featuring a range of both eastern European and western scholars. In its pages, the reader is invited to move beyond Russian literature and language into a dialogic approach between Slavic literatures. This book will also contribute to filling the comparative gap which is still relatively unexplored not only with regard to the application of western scholarship to East European studies, but also with regard to the dialogue between Russian and Polish scholarship.

Masquerade and Gender

Masquerade and Gender PDF Author: Catherine A. Craft-Fairchild
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271038209
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Terry Castle's recent study of masquerade follows Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque to conclude that, for women, masquerade offered exciting possibilities for social and sexual freedom. Castle's interpretation conforms to the fears expressed by male writers during the period—Addison, Steele, and Fielding all insisted that masquerade allowed women to usurp the privileges of men. Female authors, however, often mistrusted these claims, perceiving that masquerade's apparent freedoms were frequently nothing more than sophisticated forms of oppression. Catherine Craft-Fairchild's work provides a useful corrective to Castle's treatment of masquerade. She argues that, in fictions by Aphra Behn, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frances Burney, masquerade is double-sided. It is represented in some cases as a disempowering capitulation to patriarchal strictures that posit female subordination. Often within the same text, however, masquerade is also depicted as an empowering defiance of the dominant norms for female behavior. Heroines who attempt to separate themselves from the image of womanhood they consciously construct escape victimization. In both cases, masquerade is the condition of femininity: gender in the woman's novel is constructed rather than essential. Craft-Fairchild examines the guises in which womanhood appears, analyzing the ways in which women writers both construct and deconstruct eighteenth-century cultural conceptions of femininity. She offers a careful and engaging textual analysis of both canonical and noncanonical eighteenth-century texts, thereby setting lesser-read fictions into a critical dialogue with more widely known novels. Detailed readings are informed throughout by the ideas of current feminist theorists, including Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Mary Ann Doane, and Kaja Silverman. Instead of assuming that fictions about women were based on biological fact, Craft-Fairchild stresses the opposite: the domestic novel itself constructs the domestic woman.

Masquerade and Identities

Masquerade and Identities PDF Author: Efrat Tseëlon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134530714
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
No competition. This book has the advantage of combining diverse fields of knowledge, social theory, fashion theory, art, history, literature, performance and cultural studies. Range of markets for this book. It's topical - it relates to current debates on the politics of identity, the social construction of identity. Covers range of fascinating examples to illustrate the arguments: the film 'The Crying Game', lesbian fashion, fetish fashion, Jewish folk theatre, opera balls in 19th century France.

Female Sexuality

Female Sexuality PDF Author: Russell Grigg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429899440
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
"Undoubtedly, ‘Contributions to the Masculinity Complex in Women,’ is an underrated paper. This may be due to its not being published in English until 1924, well after Freud introduced the term ‘masculinity complex’ into his own writings. However, Van Ophuijsen’s paper was originally presented to the Dutch Psycho-Analytical Society much earlier, on 23rd June 1917. It was published in German the same year and in Dutch the following year. The term ‘masculinity complex’ is in fact van Ophugsen’s invention and Freud acknowledges his debt in his 1919 paper, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’. It is also in the present paper that various manifestations and possible consequences of penis envy are first clearly expressed, just as the libidinal investment in the ‘virile’ erogenous zone is linked to the attachment to the mother. This last point is particularly important, and Freud will later appeal to it in explaining the phallicism of the little girl. The material van Ophuijsen draws on derives from five case studies of obsessional women. One of the cases, who is here simply referred to as H., is subsequently discussed by Jeanne Lampl de Groot in her 1928 paper, ‘Evolution of the Oedipus Complex in Women’, a discussion Freud alludes to in his ‘Female Sexuality’ of 1931. The analysand was referred to Lampl de Groot because of difficulties encountered in the transference to a male analyst. It is also worth noting that van Ophuijsen takes her to be an obsessional, while Lampl de Groot diagnoses hysteria. Van Ophuijsen’s starting point concerns one aspect of the theory of penis envy; namely, that it derives from the sense a woman has of having been injured in infancy through no fault of her own and hence she will blame her mother for having brought her into this world as a woman instead of a man. This matches some character types encountered in analysis, van Ophuijsen conjectures. He also points out that this turning against the mother is, as with the castration complex, founded on a belief in the possibility of possessing the penis. The difference between the castration and masculinity complexes is that the sense of guilt attached to the former is absent from the masculinity complex, in which, on the other hand, what predominate are the sense of having been wronged and accompanying bitterness and reproaches. Moreover, the term is intended to connote the presence of a form of rivalry with men rather than the presence of any overt masculine characteristics. Finally, one should note the connection between the masculinity complex and the urethral erotism which van Ophuijsen explains in terms of a regression to the auto-erotic stage later tackled by other analysts such as Karen Homey."

The Aftermath of Feminism

The Aftermath of Feminism PDF Author: Angela McRobbie
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446200345
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
In this trenchant inquiry into the state of feminism, Angela McRobbie breaks open the politics of sexual equality and ′affirmative feminism′ and sets down a new theory of gender power. Challenging the most basic assumptions of the ′end′ of feminism, this book argues that invidious forms of gender re-stabilisation are being re-established. Consumer and popular culture encroach on the terrain of so-called female freedom, appearing supportive of female success, yet tying women into new post-feminist neurotic dependencies. With a scathing critique of ′women′s empowerment′, McRobbie has developed a distinctive feminist analysis that she uses to examine socio-cultural phenomena embedded in contemporary women′s lives: from fashion photography and the television ′make-over′ genre to eating disorders, body anxiety and ′illegible rage′. A turning point in feminist theory, The Aftermath of Feminism will set a new agenda for gender studies and cultural studies.

The Masculine Masquerade

The Masculine Masquerade PDF Author: Andrew Perchuk
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262161541
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
The Masculine Masquerade explores often-ignored issues of masculinity in the visual arts as well as models and concepts of masculinity in literature, film, and the mass media. Drawing on the work of feminist and gay studies and the work being done in areas of psychology, sociology, and gender studies, the essays analyze the conventional and limited definition of masculinity as a social and cultural construct. They seek to expand that definition to include multiple masculinities and factors such as race, class, ethnicity, and object choice. Helaine Posner, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center, examines masculinity in the contemporary visual arts, including the works of Matthew Barney, Mary Kelly, Lyle Ashton Harris, Clegg & Guttmann, Keith Piper, and Donald Moffett. Andrew Perchuk, independent curator and critic, focuses on the art of the immediate postwar period to investigate T. J. Clark's notion that the terminology surrounding the New York School was expressed in the language of sexual difference, with severe consequences for artists whose work could not be inserted into this narrative. Steven Cohan, Associate Professor of English, Syracuse University, looks at postwar film in The Spy in the Gray Flannel Suit:Gender Performance and the Representation of Masculinity in North by Northwest. Harry Brod, Department of Philosophy, University of Delaware, traces the history of masculinity as masquerade, from classic conceptions of masquerade as distinctly feminine to contemporary theories of gender as performative. bell hooks, Professor of English, City College, investigates the historical definition of black male sex roles and the commodification of blackness through close readings of the films of Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee, among others. Simon Watney, writer, activist, and critic, considers the current and changing impact of AIDS on the gay male community in "Lifelike": Imagining the Bodies of People with AIDS. Finally, Glenn Ligon employs stereotypic images of black men constructed for white pleasure, drawn from 1970s pornographic magazines, and explores the possibility of recovering and transforming these images into non-racist expressions of pleasure and desire. Distributed for the MIT List Visual Arts Center

Feminizing the Fetish

Feminizing the Fetish PDF Author: Emily Apter
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501722697
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Emily Apter offers a fresh account of the complex relationship between representation and sexual obsession in turn-of-the-century French culture, and in particular the theme of "female fetishism" in the context of the feminine culture of mourning, collecting, and dressing.

Speaking through the Mask

Speaking through the Mask PDF Author: Norma Claire Moruzzi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501732005
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Hannah Arendt was famously resistant to both psychoanalysis and feminism. Nonetheless, psychoanalytic feminist theory can offer a new interpretive strategy for deconstructing her equally famous opposition between the social and the political. Supplementing critical readings of Arendt's most significant texts (including The Human Condition, On Revolution, Rahel Varnhagen, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and The Life of the Mind) with the insights of contemporary psychoanalytic, feminist, and social theorists, Norma Claire Moruzzi reconstitutes the relationship in Arendt's texts between constructed social identity and political agency. Moruzzi uses Julia Kristeva's writings on abjection to clarify the textual dynamic in Arendt's work that constructs the social as a natural threat; Joan Riviere's and Mary Ann Doane's work on feminine masquerade amplify the theoretical possibilities implicit in Arendt's own discussion of the public, political mask. In a bold interdisciplinary synthesis, Moruzzi develops the social applications of a concept (the mask) Arendt had described as limited to the strictly political realm: a new conception of (political) agency as (social) masquerade, traced through the marginal but emblematic textual figures who themselves enact the politics of social identity.

Smart Girls

Smart Girls PDF Author: Shauna Pomerantz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520284151
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Are girls taking over the world? It would appear so, based on magazine covers, news headlines, and popular books touting girls’ academic success. Girls are said to outperform boys in high school exams, university entrance and graduation rates, and professional certification. As a result, many in Western society assume that girls no longer need support. But in spite of the messages of post-feminism and neoliberal individualism that tell girls they can have it all, the reality is far more complicated. Smart Girls investigates how academically successful girls deal with stress, the “supergirl” drive for perfection, race and class issues, and the sexism that is still present in schools. Describing girls’ varied everyday experiences, including negotiations of traditional gender norms, Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby show how teachers, administrators, parents, and media commentators can help smart girls thrive while working toward straight As and a bright future.

Romance and Reality

Romance and Reality PDF Author: Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description